Photo image editor

I'm looking for a good pro-level photo editor. This is mainly for digital camera photos, but also for some scans. Graphic Converter is great for brightness/contrast/saturation, as well as cropping, rotation, and scaling. However, there's no ability to really retouch photos. I do most of the retouching - red eye, lighten/darken a specific area, smudge, etc - on the Canon software that came with my camera. Unfortunately, this software is very quirky and buggy and limits the viewing area. I'd also like to be able to take a photo that looks grainy/speckled (as often happens in low light) and fix this. The main target output is for prints, although I put some things on the web as well.

I've used Photoshop in the past (as in almost 10 years since I used it seriously) and found it to be rather slow and clunky, better for artsy type stuff like motion blurs and distortions. Perhaps it works better on photos now.

Any suggestions?

--D