No. 1 Photo Editor

Now Adobe Photoshop has never been for the flaky "I think I start doing photo editing!" kid. Photoshop is a serious program that can create some of the most beautiful pictures ever seen. Photoshop takes a good deal of learning. You can't learn all it's feature in a day or even a week. It takes time. CS2, short for Creative Suite 2 is just about the greatest software I've ever used in my life.

PS Filters
The PS (Photo Shop) filters are special pre-made effects you can apply if you don't have the time to make it yourself, or if you simply need a helping hand. Some of these filters are great like "Lens Flare" that creates a very realistic sun burst, or "Liquify" which allows you to warp the picture using brushes. The problem I have with most of the filters is that people use them for a good six minutes then say it took them four hours to complete. Use filters, but not as the basis for your pictures because they will look very unoriginal.

Best PS Filters
Liquify
Liquify is incredible. You can make some cool distortion effects that flow completely. It's better than Jasc Paint Shop 9.0's version called "Warp" but it's harder to access. The one cool thing about Liquify is you get some great options with your brushing.

Lens Flare
I have a love hate relationship with lens flare. Lens flare is good, but not on its own. You need to actually you it to your advantage other than just plopping it down onto a picture and calling it a day. That's not original because Adobe was the one who created the lens. Lens flare in team with liquify and the colorizing options can work to your advtange. Twist your lens flares, warp them, swirl, texturing them until you're happy. But nobody will be impressed that you can put a picture over another one. That's basic photo editing, unless you have using it for photo manipulation of two different mediums.

Wave
Now, wave is not original to Photoshop or to any other photo editing software but that doesn't make it any less good when combined with other things. Photoshop however let's you "Randomize" your wave, or make a triangular/squarish wave. Very, very useful.

Extrude
It's very cheap and basic on it's own but you can do so much more with it. It basically blows your picture it's squares or pyramids that look like an explosion.

Layers
Photoshop handles Layers better than it does any other photo editor I've ever used. When create anything that uses animation, or lighten options, you could have a lot of layers. Photoshop also has some very good layering light options like "Darken", "Lighten", and "Vivid Light". Those are just my favorites. Lighten uses opacity (transparency) settings and blends well with its other layers. Vivid Light does an extreme effect when it's makes the colors bright and backgrounds darker to make it really pop.

Text
The text has some awesome options but one major flaw. I love that they have some pre-made text swatches that add some cool effect to your words. You can also make your own awesome effect without having to rasterize (de-text) your words (go into the Blending Options mode). The major problem I have with text is that you can not merge text. Period. You can still flatten the image down but you can't merge two pieces of text with each other, as you can in Paint Shop 9.0 by Jasc.

Random Things I Love
You can save your images in lots of different formats at different qualities. I'll compare it to MP3s. You can save an MP3 at 128 KPBS or 192 KPBS etc., well in PS you can save your photos at JPEG Qualities 1-10 an so on. That gives you the option of poor, average, and excellent qualities depending on the space you have on your computer, or you're printer. There's over twenty different formats to choose from including the most popular PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, plus other lesser known photo formats like TIG. I'm sure you could some way to open any picture file with this software.

You can import photos straight from your scanner, digicam, or webcam. This is useful because my webcam's software takes a lot of space and this is just a lot easier than opening up the entire program. Also applies to the scanner especially if you own an HP scanner (you know how annoying your software is). I've never run my scanner's software and up until just know I didn't know the brand (HP Intelligence, I got the scanner [used] as a gift.)

Alternatives to PSCS2

Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8/9.0
This is considered the equivilant of Photo Shop. Paint Shop is a little easier to use, and you can create most of the same images as PS. PS just has more options but they are WORTH IT! Please note I own both Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9.0 and Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 2, plus have used JPSP 8.0.