Photo editing: what to look for?

you’re probably gunna want to get aperture. it is also an apple program and is my absolute favorite!!! It is really easy to edit pictures with (contrast, colours e.t.c), and it is way cheaper than photoshop.

Photoshop is best. You could try GIMP too, It's basically photoshop.. only free.

LIGHTROOM!

For the money, light room is great. Takes all the photo editing features of photoshop and crams them down.

As far as what you should do, keep the editing as minimal as possible. You should strive to get the great picture straight out of the camera, and try to minimize the use of an editing program, other than for color correction and conversion from RAW to other formats. That's not to say you should look for a program that can only convert format and correct color. There is much debate as to how much editing is OK. My opinion is that editing should be limited to levels/curves, color balance, and maybe a little dodging/burning, but others will say otherwise.

Lightroom is awesome, you can download the Lightroom 3 Beta 2 here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/.
It is valid until the real version comes out, at which point the Beta will stop working, but if nothing else, you can see whether you like the program.

As others have said, using either Apple's Aperture or Adobe's Lightroom to organize/keyword/edit your shots is typically the best way to go. In my mind Aperture vs. Lightroom is the same argument as Nikon vs. Canon, both have their own pros and cons, but either way you go will be a good choice, if that makes sense?

Lightroom V2.0. So easy to work with and really keeps the quality of your pictures.

P.S. Depending on what you're shooting and what you intend to do with the shots afterward, shooting in RAW vs. JPEG is usually a smarter choice, as you have no loss in quality when you sit down to edit your RAW shots, vs. some minor degradation editing a JPEG file. The only caveat to shooting in RAW however, is that the files are much much larger than if you were to shoot JPEG's, therefore your memory card will fill up much quicker.

gimo is really relalllyyyyy good
 the problem is if you want to  ake like fake pictures of random things like pretending to be on the top of ak
gimp doesnt have good fixation and blending porperties and tools
photoshop is really good and its really easy to pirate too

i totally feel all you guys recommending me keeping the pictures untouched, for almost a half year thats what ive been doing, but as of late ive been pursuing a job at my local hill which would entail a lot of photography and i was just looking for quality way of really making the pictures the best they could be, but still keeping them original and real. getting into photography was daunting enough, so im just trying to look at all options/input here

an absolute FUCKTON of vignette.