Just how good is photoshop?

It is the industry standard for photographic manipulation - figure it out yourself.

It is a very powerful tool if used correctly. However, it can also be a bit confusing to use at first, due to the pages of options and tools available.

To try out a photoshop-ish program for free, download GIMP. GIMP is a full featured image editor, and is completely free to download and use. I use this quite frequently, and although I have gotten fairly comfortable with it, there is still plenty that I don't know how to do, so there is always room to grow.

http://www.gimp.org/

Hope this helps!

Lightroom is better for 90% of photographers, unless you need to deeply edit the content of your images- in which case, I'd rather just shoot correctly in the first place.

Extremely good relating to your case

It is the industry standard. So it must be pretty good.

In my opinion very good. And I'm not clicking on your link.

Over rated, over bloated, and certainly very over priced!

Use Gimp.