Photoshop is possibly the most versatile of them all, although it lacks some of Illustrator's specialized functions. One great thing about PS is that you can know only 1% of it and still be able to do quite a bit... And you'll keep learning new tricks and capabilities every day (I am, even after 15 years). It's also a great platform for bringing things together- a background photo that you've imported off a camera, with a 3D object created in a separate program, with a scan of a line drawing. The level of control possible is complete and total, down to the last pixel. You can also simply draw and paint in it.
The tablet, as RayTracer mentioned, is essential. The Wacom Bamboo is like $69 or something like that. I prefer the smaller tablets because I can navigate the screen corner to corner with one wrist movement.
If you want to do anything in 3D, zBrush is an amazing program with a very intuitive and versatile interface. You use a configurable airbrush to "paint" material on and off objects. It's great for figures, animals, organic stuff, as well as crazy geometric objects ;look at Art VanD'Lay's Ganesh in the front page collab thread:
Nexus frontpage graphic collaboration project - Music/Art/Literature - Welcome to the DMT-Nexus
3D studio Max seems to have its own unique set of tools: check out the Daedaloops snake animation in Art Bin: ttps://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=22752&p=10
There are some great and amazingly trippy fractal generators out there too... Great for backgrounds. Then in PS you can merge layers of backgrounds, create transparency effects, use blurs or distortions or other effects... It's limitless, and once you get the hang of the menus you'll find it easy to play around with all kinds of different options in shortish periods of time.
Don't be afraid to post stuff in progress and ask advice... There are a lot of veteran PS artists here, many of us Mac users.
