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I have Photoshop on my PC, but my PC has been cold in the grave for a while. I'm about to get a DSLR and am wondering what photo editing software I should get for my Mac.

Wes?

Mac Photoshop is good. You can download a copy of Photoshop cs off of limewire - or buy one if you dont like to keep money

Depends on what you want to do. For crazy editing and all that, Photoshop does it all. There's a legally free open source program called The GIMP that does a lot of what Photoshop does, but isn't quite as polished or "easy to use" (relatively speaking!)

But if the main thing you want to do is organize, crop, adjust color/exposure and all that, then Aperature (Apple - Mac only) and Lightroom (Adobe - PC/Mac) are amazing.

Because I "do it for money" I'm forced to "switch hit," so I use Lightroom, and that's what I'm more familiar with, but they're pretty similar. I think that Wes uses Aperture, so he can tell you about that. If your new camera does RAW, these apps make it really easy to work with that, and yes, it can be worth it to shoot in RAW if you want the best results! These apps give you convenient access to all the "raw" data before it's been processed and compressed by the camera's "semi-smart" processing.

The big thing with Aperture and Lightroom is that they organize the photos (and with digital photos, we all have thousands or tens of thousands of them!) When you import photos, you can tag the photos with keywords so you can find them later ("climbing", "outdoor", "Kentucky", "Red", "Trad", people's names, etc.) Some photographers will label photos with other characteristics like major colors - it's what ever you can think of. Mostly it's useful to find all the "climbing" photos or all the photos with some person in them. It's a pain to label the photos when you import them, but when you need to find something, it's worth it. From there, the apps have nice systems for whittling down a batch of photos from a shoot to pick out the best of the lot.

The other thing they do really well is "fine tuning" the images - cropping/rotating, redeye/dead pixel/dust spot removal, correcting exposure and color balance, sharpening, getting rid of grain/noise and such. Using Lightroom has made my photos look much, much better. Lightroom has tools for recovering blown out highlights and "fill lighting" very dark areas that are pretty amazing. (All this stuff will lead you to start learning about monitor quality and calibration - pretty soon you'll be lusting after $1,200 monitors ... some day, oh NEC 2690WUXI, you will be mine, and I will stare deeply into your extra dark blacks and be bathed in your ability to reproduce 92% of the Adobe RGB color space....)

They both also do a nice job of creating print pages like contact sheets and web galleries.

What they don't do is heavy duty editing like "rubber stamping" something/someone out of a photo, cutting/pasting parts of photos, applying wacky filters, working with layers/alpha channels or any of that Photoshop stuff. I still use Photoshop for those tasks, but probably 80% of my photo editing time is now on Lightroom.

Tom, thank you! That is just the kind of information I need. I installed Photoshop on my work laptop when my PC died, so I can use that for the rare requirement if I end up getting Lightroom, which I'm going to look into now.

I shoot a lot of HDR stuff so I like to use Photoshop and Photomatrix.

I count being a student at life as a good enough excuse to get the student versions of both. Still expensive, but tolerable.

pixlemator
imagewell

Aperture or lightroom

and

Pixlemator or photoshop elements

Get one from the first group first, learn to use it, then get one from the other group and learn to use it. Tom is right on about lightroom/aperture, they are great to have for digital photos. I use Aperture for sorting, organizing and basic corrections/full image adjustments, and photoshop to get creative, though with each release the lines blur a little bit more.

What dslr are you going to get?