Photoshop Elements 2018 is a huge program with lots of great stuff for beginners who aren't in a hurry to get things done. And the same with PSP 2018 (which isn't quite that big). They both took around 5-15 minutes on my computer to load. I found Photoshop Elements 2018 to be the better of the two as far as the variety of editing that you can do, but after all my trials, I still found Lightroom and Photoshop to be the best (and on my computer, the fastest). Two drawbacks with Photoshop - it can be pretty complex to learn and is only available as the CC (Creative Cloud) for which you pay a monthly fee which includes Lightroom CC and a few others.
I'm not going to go over all of the features of the programs (too many) - just recommend them in order of my preference. The best thing is for you to download and try the trial versions which are the full versions but only are good for 30 days.
First on my list of recommendations is Lightroom, which you can still get with a perpetual license, although it is a bit tricky to find out where to get that as Adobe wants to sell the CC version by subscription (not a bad price at $9.99/month for Lightroom and Photoshop - if you are making money from photography - don't forget to add that cost in to your cost of doing business). My next choice would be to own Photoshop CS6, but you can no longer buy it from Adobe and not sure it works with Windows 10 (hopefully someone will come out with a similar program without a subscription). My next choices would be the other two - Elements and PSP respectively. ON1 Photo Raw 2018.1 may become the answer if they fix a few issues as it now is (some bugs and slow speed).
As mentioned previously, LightZone is free so no trial version is needed and it can do probably all you will need to do. It doesn't have some of the extras that the others have but is pretty easy to figure out.
There are other specialized software programs. Ones specifically for portraits, some for changing backgrounds in photos, others for HDR (High Dynamic Range, meaning extreme contrast), etc. For portraits, I'm using PortraitPro 17 (lets you change lighting, add make-up, change facial expressions and backgrounds, and more). For backgrounds, I've shot photos of walls, clouds, sunsets, etc. for the purpose of adding them to other photos, like this one of the clouds.
Here are several variations of a photo I shot a few days ago - the original with no editing, and then editing to change the backgrounds and one to totally change the makeup. First, I imported them into Lightroom to do some minor adjustments and to see which ones I either liked or didn't like as much. It turned out I liked the expression better on the one with the eyes closed, so moved the eyes from the first one to that one in Photoshop which can be seen in the third photo below.
Next, I went to PortraitPro 17 to make the lighting better - it was a bright sunny day outside and this was an unplanned shot, so had no reflectors or anything - just her, me, and the camera.
Next, I dropped out the fence background and experimented with several different ones.
For this final experiment below, I also used PortraitPro 17 to add some makeup to highlight her eyes and give a little more color to her face. Of course, when you start with a beautiful face it makes it so much easier to get a great result. I only shot two close-up images of her.
I've been experimenting with another photo editing software called Smart Photo Editor for changing backgrounds and more. I had gotten it mainly for swapping out the skies in some of my photos.
Don't forget that the first step is to get the correct lighting, focus, backgrounds, exposure, etc., in your camera. The more you get correct in camera, the less you'll need to do in all of these editing programs.
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