To me editing or postprocessing is a must, but I used to develop my own pictures in the old film days, so the replacement of the wet darkroom for a digital one is only a logical step to me. I also never use JPEG, but RAW, so the postprocessing is inevitable, because the needed RAW to TIFF conversion(or JPEG if you want, but I've never used that option).
In fact, depending the RAW conversion program used, I postprocess the image twice, doing most of corrections in the RAW to TIFF stage, and only the final tweaks in PS. This is mostly true in the case of the Rebel RAW files when processed using C1Rebel, but until next year when C1Rebel will understand the S50 RAW format too, it's RAW converters are very limited in their functionality, so most of the processing must be done in the photoediting program.
In the photoediting programs area, I used to edit with Corel PhotoPaint 8. Probably is more cheap than photoshop, and still very powerful. I don't know how powerful is PS Elements, but it seems to be a good starting point. The more powerful alternative to use the S50 RAW format seems to be the Photoshop CS (aka PS8) because it supports the S50 format and can do some things not available in the Canon FVU or BreezeBrowser as exposure compensation. I've tried it and the corrections possible during the conversion are amazing. This combined with some of the new capabilities as the Shadow/Highlight filter makes the new PS a very powerful tool.
Probably the cheaper alternative is to wait until C1Rebel supports the S50 RAW format (īt cost less than $50) and do all the corrections in the conversion stage, or use some cheap photoediting program to do the final tweaks if needed, or use now the BreezeBrowser program (also less than $50) and use the somewhat limited postprocessing options included in that program.