Introduction to Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop has many neat features that help with photo touchup and preservation. I recommend it to everyone, especially if you will be working with a large photo collection.
Photoshop is a bit pricey, about $650-$700. If that is totally out of your budget and you don't think that you will be doing that much with it, you might look into getting Adobe Photoshop Elements. I haven't tried this software, so I can't really recommend it, but I have heard from other people that it is pretty good. It's a simpler, not as professional version. Again, I'm not sure what features it has so you'll want to go to adobe.com and download a free trial version to see if it has the features that you'll need for photo touchup and restoration.
If you are in school, I would recommend you buy Photoshop and get your student discount. We bought the entire Adobe Creative Suite right before my husband graduated from college and got Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Bridge, InDesign and Flash for only $200. There was a deal going on at the time where if we bought CS2 in a month we could upgrade to CS3 for free, so we actually got CS2 and CS3 out of the deal. I'm sure you can find other deals out there for Photoshop.
If you're really into design and building websites and things, the Adobe Creative Suite is awesome. Illustrator is mainly for drawings, although I use it sometimes to design my websites. Dreamweaver is probably my second favorite program, next to Photoshop. It makes creating websites very easy, especially if you understand HTML and CSS a little. InDesign is for layouts, designing magazine covers and such. I haven't really used this one that much. Flash is for animation and putting animation on your websites and Adobe Bridge links them altogether.
The main Adobe Software you should look into getting, however, is Photoshop. It will help you through your photo restoration projects.
