Elements is fine, you just can't easily do big shoots as it is more suited to do individual photomanipulation, whereas Lightroom and Aperture (on Mac) are designed for photographers and their workflow; it is designed to manipulate whole shoots with easy bulk Exif tagging, a must for good organisation of photos, easily overview shoots and select the best shots with rating and flagging, and automatic organisation of photos on import. They are also designed as non-destructive editing programs, in that the originals are untouched while a separate file keeps track of all changes done to it, which can be changed or undone at any time without degradation of quality. The editing controls are also specific to photographers, whereas the same controls are available in PS/PSE, but they are buried in submenues. Lightroom/Aperture are focused on the typical need of photographers, with all the more advanced photomanipulation tools and features like layers taken out.
To save money on a PC, you can download the free Windows Live Photo Gallery (
Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery ) which is a great tool which similarly makes it extremely easy to keyword tag photos and organise them. It is not Lightroom, but in combination with PSE, you can do a lot on a budget.
I've experimented with Gimp in the past, it's an interesting project, but it is a Unix-based project relying on the clunky and extremely slow GTK graphics library. I always find it amusing when advocates call it a "replacement". When they ditch GTK and make a native version outside Linux/Unix, it will be an interesting alternative. But PSE is much better despite its limitations, especially if you want to do any Raw shooting.
