I’m not a professional, but have gotten a lot better over the years at editing personal photos. The best inexpensive software (the one I use most) is Photo Explosion (I think it’s made by Nova) I bought it at Staples a year or so ago for around $50. Easy to use. For the most part I just open the pic, open Adjust, Auto enhance or one of the other options inside that menu and get great results. If you don’t like what it did, click the undo (or backwards arrow) and try something else. It keeps letting you undo all the way back to the original if need. You see results instantly. In addition to that, the most important tool I looked for when buying (because I had it on Adobe PhotoDeluxe-free version years ago when I bought an HP ink cartridge) is the “clone” tool. You open it and choose clone. It opens up a miniature of your pic so you can scan in or out to choose an “eyedropper” or “paintbrush” of whatever color or area you need so you can transfer it to the actual pic. You can undo this all the way back too. It let’s you fill in foliage on trees. Take out a person in the pic you didn’t want, etc. Takes a little practice but you gotta love that undo button. 90 % of my pics can be fixed with just cropping, auto adjust/highlight/or adjust saturation buttons, and cloning.
In addition to my previous post. Photo Explosion might not do RAW. Maybe a newer version would??? But I do get better pics from my digital camera by saving as a bitmap instead of jpeg if you want great prints. Better detail, larger files. Email-just keep as jpeg-smaller files to send. But some other softwares might not recognize bitmaps either. My win 98 does, as well as my Vista and Win 7. Hp software, windows software, cannon software, etc.
Never used Elements, but I used to use its predecessor, PhotoDeluxe.
When I first downloaded GIMP, I couldn’t make sense out of it, and put it aside for a few months. Then I got a copy of this bookfrom the public library, and it made everything crystal clear. Now I use GIMP for everything. It’s very powerful, and easy to use (once you know what you’re doing). Its weakest point is in its CMYK conversion. If you’re designing web graphics, it’s fantastic. If you’re designing graphics for print publication, it may or may not do what you want, so do more research.