Welcome to the Forum.

I recently purchased the newest version of PS CS2 for $210 thanks to the student discount. There are lots of other editing programs available, but IMHO PS it the gold standard that all others are compared to. Take advantage of your student discount, and make the purchase. If you are getting paid to take photos, you could deduct the expense on your taxes too.

As far as editing goes, I don't edit too many of my pics. I use the Browser in PS to view all of my photos, then pick the ones I want to do something with from those. I shoot RAW (canon) and use PS to make my RAW conversions to TIFF's of JPG's depending on what I plan on doing with the images. I know nothing about Nikon, but I have heard people say good things about the Nikon software for converting RAW files. PS works just fine for me.

You may want to check out a program such as Noise Ninja of cleaning up the digital noise in your images. There are other programs available for this also, but Noise Ninja seems very popular. It's available as a stand alone program, or as a plug in for PS.

To find out what systems requirements you will need to run PS CS2, go to www.adobe.com It will tell you what you need there.

You can set up PS CS2 to make auto adjustments to your pics for things like exposure, contrast, saturation, etc... I turned all of them off except for contrast and saturation, because I didn't like the way the program changed the exposures that I set, but you can set it up to make the adjustments if you want.

Yes, there is a site where you can get all of these questions answered. It's this one.