Erin: 'what photo shop or photo software do you recommend for regular people like me?'

Before I get to Erin's question I thought I would go over a before and after of her munchkin, Brody. When I was taking this image I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew I wanted the image to be focused on Brody and I wanted to get him blowing the 'wishes'. I wanted to capture them flying through the air. When I opened this image I was thrilled because not only was the depth of field and light quality exactly what I wanted, but I managed to capture two dandelion seeds floating through the air. I took the following steps to create the final image: First, I cropped the image, I really wanted the image to focus on Brody and those lips and the dandelion so I cropped out the distracting red stripes on his shirt. Then I adjusted the white balance, the original image was taken in the shadows and as a result it looks a little blue, so I warmed it up a bit. I then bumped up the contrast and adjusted the curves and levels. I really wanted his red lips and freckles to show and so I made those pop a little. I then cloned the dandelion seeds to create the trail. The whole image was sharpened and voila. I considered cleaning up his fingers, but then decided I wanted to keep them a bit dirty, it shows the kid in him.  

Now, to answer Erin's question... I really am not sure. The problem is that I jumped right into professional photography and had to learn the beast of a program that is Photoshop (I just got CS5 by the way and it is A-mazing). If you are looking for something free, I would recommend just using the tools available in flickr or picassa. I am sure they have gotten better, but they let you do things like crop, rotate, and maybe even enhance the images a bit. If you are a little more serious I would consider Adobe Lightroom. Not only is lightroom a great indexing tool, but it also allows you to do probably everything that you would want to do to your images.

I hope that helps!