I agree with Tucker on the superiority of PS. No software I have come by has ever managed to compete with PS. If I want to spend some time to enhance pictures for printing, I always use photoshop (I am so fortunate that I get it through the University, I have never tried lightroom or element, though). But as you suggest, the learning curve is quite steep. But when I went through two years of pictures to convert to .jpeg for on-screen viewing, DPP was the easiest to use. And as my experience with digital photography increased, the amount of post-processing decreased correspondingly.