Money is not really a problem. Photoshop seems to require a lot of CPU and hard disk space. Is Aperture good at basic photo editing?
Even if money is
really not a problem and you're willing to dish out $1000 to get PS CS3 Extended just to do basic editing, PS and Aperture are probably
still both overboard.
PS is a good choice for you if you wish to do professional level work and you're doing really heavy editing and post-processing (i.e. particularly if your work is really more mixed-media than photography -- where you're doing a lot more than sharpening and boosting colors on your photos -- or perhaps if you work in glamour and so need to do a lot of airbrushing and things like that). Aperture (or Adobe's erm... what's it called? Light Room?) is primarily a good option for you if have a very high throughput -- if you're processing hundreds at least or thousands of photos per
week.
PS Elements is outstanding -- besides being a lot less expensive than PS/CS, it is also somewhat more compact and focused on your typical tasks. It's really quite powerful. If you go to forums like FredMiranda, it's used quite routinely by very good amateur photographers.
I personally don't care for GIMP, although I use it in Ubuntu. It's good but I find the learning curve too steep and it's less built around the photography process model, to me, than other options.
Another native piece of software is Pixelmator -- I think it has potential, and you might try a trial of it, but as of the last time I tried it, it wasn't really
ready.
So my advice would be, unless you literally have tens of thousands of dollars of immediately disposable income and you just don't care (or you are doing professional / high volume work), get PSE, and if you really need to spend the rest of the money, spend it on lenses instead of spending it on PS/CS.
