Photoshop is extraordinarily powerful. If you need it, you need, and it will cost a pretty penny. You may find Photoshop Elements to be sufficient, at least in the interim.


I'd also suggest looking at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Apple Aperture, each in the $275-300 range. I use Lightroom and absolutely love it. It does my DNG conversions, my Color Checker profiling, my ranking/sorting, and excellent levels manipulation, along with cropping, dodging/burning, etc. I use Photoshop Elements on rare occasions to do panorama merges and HDRs, but otherwise I live in Lightroom.