How much do you want to spend?
Archulas
The top, and highly recommended, program is Photoshop CS3 but it sells for $624.99 even on Amazon! PaintShop Pro Photo X2 is considered by many to be pretty much equal and sells for $72.00 on Amazon (I've seen it cheaper elsewhere--around $50.00 sometimes).
There are tons of excellent books about Photoshop. Good information about PaintShop Pro is hard to find—there is a lot of information but it is mostly about older versions and few tell you how to do the basics.
Both programs can do incredible work; both programs are rather complex to use. There are other programs that are pretty good but I don't think any of them have all the features for advanced graphics that these do.
Of course if you are thinking about video and the like that is a whole different story.
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