What is the best photo manipulating software program?

Answer 1

Photoshop is the absolute best, hands down, high end, photo editing software.
Forget Corel!

Answer 2

That will depend on your abilities and goals.

For my home pics, I love picture it (a predacessor of microsoft digitial image studio - think i got that name right) Both of those are great for collages and easy digital manipulation (trim off someones head and put it on a body builder for instance)

For some high power stuff perhaps corel $$$ which we have at work but is more cumbersome.