Wonderful to hear you've recieved your new camera? How are you happy with it? I recommend you take the time and browse trough our articles and tutorials section where you will find a lot of great tutorials relating to photography.

Paint Shop Pro is a very good program, closely second to Photoshop. But it is the case that Photoshop is the industry standard and most studio workflows use it.

I also recommend checking out a photographer only application if you have time. There are a lot of those out now, such as Nikon Capture NX, AcdSee Pro, Apple Apetrure, Adobe Lightroom. These are optimized solely for photographer usage and might speed up things a lot.

And of course ... if you're shooting RAW, rawshooter essentials is much better than the default Nikon raw converter.

Looking forward to seeing your images here!

Yes this forums can be of great help for any person not just the beginner. I think that the more you learn and prepare yourself the more you will gain from the information and help of others. Reading the tutorials as mentioned before is a great start.