Hey Kurt, congrats on the biz decision. "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro," courtesy of the late, sometimes great, and perpetually weird Hunter Thompson.
I honestly prefer Macintosh computers for this purpose, and PCs solely for web, general biz/word processing, and yes, gaming (I'm a bit of a geek in that manner). One Mac laptop, one Mac desktop.
Now, If you're shooting digitally, you really might consider a ultra-portable laptop for card dumping and immediate client viewing as the case might dictate. But I assume you're looking solely at an image processing work station. I dont use PCs for this purpose and so I wouldn't know the BEST answers for the best price of your question, but I would state first of all that whatever you've got, make sure you've got at least 1GB of fast RAM to start with. That is one thing you really can never have enough of, especially when it comes to image processing. Make sure you've got Firewire (IEEE 1394) ports built-in to begin with as well. Get yourself a Firewire card reader, they're less than $50. You might want to have a nice large capacity external hard drive. They're quite a bargain these days. And a tape drive for archiving long-term might be a good idea as well (with tapes stored ideally in a fire-proof safe off-location). This is all assuming that your primary shooting medium is digital. If film then I've got a slightly different set of recommendations, starting with an "A1" film scanner and top quality scanning software (VERY important).
In any case, start with Photoshop CS as that is really the version that "came of age" as far as photographic purposes go. Unfortunately I know of no really good color-correction plug-ins for CS and I knew of a great one for PS 6, but perhaps someone else knows one. The RAW converter that comes with CS is strong, and you're not going to find better unless you spend some considerably extra cash (around $500) for PhaseOne DSLR software, which I have not myself used, but everybody I know that uses it praises it to the teeth.
Also, you've picked up on something that many overlook, and I'll back up. Image browsing software is a highly overlooked and very important part of your work flow. Let's face it. Going professional, no matter what your specialty is, the chances are you are going to be spending a lot of time going over and choosing selects from a large number of images on a very frequent basis. Making that as quick and painless as possible really shouldn't be undervalued. However, every piece of software that I've used (and I've never gone very high-end with this as digital is still more of a sideline than main-event thing for me) leaves me extremely disappointed. So much easier to browse your chromes on a lightbox or contact sheet I'm afraid.
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