honestly I REALLY love Jasc's Paint Shop Pro (now owned by Corel)....its VERY intuitive and easy to use, and can do a lot of really powerfull stuff
its not as powerfull as photoshop is, but photoshop has a steep learning curve with it and is less intuitive to work around
for example, if you want to zoom in paint shop pro you just scroll to zoom in/out, it zooms to wherever your mouse is (huge plus!), and you can zoom in incriments of like 20% at a time....in photoshop you have to hit ctrl and plus to zoom in, and it zooms huge amounts unless you go over to type in a particular number........for me, that is enough of an annoyance to only use photoshop when needed (for more powerfull tools like its MASSIVE library of brushes), and paint shop pro the rest of the time
if your just learning, I'd recomend psp...its cheaper too