Hello gmhop27,
What do you mean by "photo editing"? If you actually mean the editing of images, organizing, labeling, ranking,etc. Then Adobe's Lightroom is the standard. If you mean by editing, adjusting the images, then PhotoShop is the best. These both are expensive software packages and not easily used right from the box. That's why if you go to the library or Amazon, you will find a ton of "How to" books listed.
A step down in both price and function is PhotoShop Elements 7. This is still a very powerful package and will generally do all the things the big one can for photographers and you can find it sometimes for $49!!! at Sam's or Costco. Go to Youtube and do a search on PhotoShop Elements and see all the free tutorials and also go to Adobe's web site and find their tutorials too.
It really depends on what you want to do with your images and how far you want to go. Let me know if this answers your question. Oh, Corel has a few software packages too, like "Paint", where you can take a digital image and transform it to a painting. Can do this in PhotoShop too, but it's a little more complicated,
Rich Franco