I use photoshop CS.
It's good but i don't use it verry much.

most comercial products like photoshop or any othere's are pretty good and powerfull but if you like me that's cheap and not willing to play but yet powerfull products.

i stated using this free software called Photofiltre it was powerfull and had some realy good features best of all it's realy simple to use: HERE
but to me it lack some extra stuff so i started using GIMP for extra stuff but this one was not as easy to use as Photofiltre so i use both of them for cetain stuff: HERE

anothere pretty good one is Paint.net it's really good but you need the .NET framework for it: HERE

I use Paint.NET! It's awesome! And it's free too! I've gotten really good with it, I like to make sigs and userbars with it, I also use it to sprite and make backgrounds for my games. (The Cloud render tool is VERY useful!) By far my favorite image editing software.

although nothing beats Photoshop... but its a heavy software ment for professional editing.
for basic editing 'Paint.NET' is awesome... its has almost all de features and is freee.

you can download it from http://www.getpaint.net/download.html

If I would answer the question directly, Photoshop is obviously the best image editing software around.
I do not think theres a different answer to that question.

If you put the question a little different so it depends on personal experience, the answers could be different.

I stick with Photoshop.

For picture editing i use is paint and flash . i know they are little noobish softwares but with hard work you can achieve alot more then what you ll achieve with photoshop. As paint is a free ware also i think paint is quite good for the work. I usually make logos for my website or morph my photos with celebrity photos. Its so mych fun but needs alot of time also.

I like to prefer Adobe Photoshop CS2 it's very professional,i have used and it's very very good.