Roy Pertchik
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DPP is free. It comes with your camera. It does RAW processing and basic photo editing (trim, rename, resize, output in a useful format) As a RAW processor, the most important function for a serious photographer, it's very elegant and streamlined. It's so streamlined, in an abstract way, it's a little hard to use because you have to think in a pure way to work the controls. It's a very, very good piece of software.
At $200-$300, Lightroom 2 is what i recommend you buy. It does a great job keeping track of all your photos, RAW processing, and then outputting for various uses. To keep track of your photose, it creats an indexing system, and creates library groups and sub goroups, and lets you attach names, and descriptions, and tags of all sorts for sorting via subject, location, date, camera type, etc. etc. As a RAW processor, it's much friendlier than DPP, offering many sliders and interface features to do things that are really tricky with the simpler DPP. It also lets you spot out blemishes, trim, rotate, and do other things for formatting that are beyond DPP. It also creates web presentations like slid shows, with blends, or tiles that flip and so forth to reveal your photos, and the out put can be put in many formats for web, in html, or in a small size for e-mail, etc. etc. etc., all while keeping these various versions organized in the library.
At $700 or so, if I recall correctly, Photoshop CS4 offers it's own RAW processor, which I think is not as feature rich as Lightroom, and it has some organization tools, but again, not as extensive as Lightroom. Where CS4 shines is in sophisticated image manipulation. Its the tool for creatin spectacular images from your photos, allowing all sorts of layering techniques, stretching, clipping, rotating, drawing, airbrush blending of one image into another, simulated painting and drawing filters, wrapping photos around 3D objects, etc., etc. etc.... The earlier versions (CS2, CS3) are also very powerful in this realm, and may be had for less money, but at the risk of loosing support from Adobe, in time.
I recommend you try DPP for a taste, but expect to get Lightroom2. In time you may want CS4. I use DPP and Lightroom and an old version of CS(1), which does what I need with layers and assembling graphics and drawing and filtering... I'll update to CS4 eventually, but Lightroom is really the home base.
IMHO, forget Elements. It's an entry level of CS. And you don't get the great RAW processing or librarying of Lightroom either, so what's the point? Well, I guess an argument could be mabe for getting Lightroom and Elements... I admit, I don't know what features are disabled in elements. I suspect if you have Lightroom, and you feel a desire to go into further image manipulation, you'll want the full CS4.
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