photoshop vs Nikon software suite

If anyone has opinions... I have one of those :)

I haven't used the Nikon suite.  I've used the full version of Photoshop, and lately have really gotten hooked using Photoshop Elements and Premiere (for video editing).  I love Elements.  It does all the things I like, it takes practice to work on certain features, but I find it to be, an amazing program.  The Help file is actually, helpful.  If you can sort of guess at what the feature name is, and most are pretty intuitive, or describe its function, you can find it easily, and see how to do XYZ.

I'm not a professional photographer.  I basically started taking pictures when I was given the camera.  I stuck with it when someone showed me the awesome things Photoshop can do.  My favorite thing to do:  There is a selection tool, I think its called Magic Marker or Magic Selection Tool.  You mark the item you are interested in, in Red, and the background in blue.  For the most part, it works great.  Sometimes you need to go and do some manual adjustments afterwards to clean things up, which is also not hard to do.  Once you've got the foreground and background highlighted/separated, you can do all number of things to the pictures.  My favorite effect is to keep the kids in the picture in color, and change the background to black and white (grayscale).  (See the picture.  Its not my picture.  But its the same thing done with flowers instead of kids)  You can also do something I love called the Halo effect.  You take the highlighted subject and specify a certain number of extra pixels to be added to the highlighted shape, then you perform the cut, paste it into a blank sheet, and it gives a soft glow around the person (with varying colors depending on what the background shot was)  I like the effect.

One of the parents at the school was even able to take 2 pictures (taken about 1.5 seconds apart), take the image of one kid who was not smiling in the first picture, and replace it with him smiling from the second picture.  The final picture, combined picture, was flawless.  We looked it over and over, up and down, and could not see any breaks, marks, discontinuities, nothing.  I was amazed.  One of the teachers said "This is terrible.  My eyes were the last thing I could trust".  lol.  We just laughed and laughed.

Anyhow, for about $100 bucks, its a great program.  Took me about 5 days, 4 hours a day to become proficient with it.