Hi Doll,
When you say "quality prints"; I suppose you mean from your home Epson printer, and not from a professional offset printer, am I right there?
Well, any app that can use color management will do for you. What you, and all of us, must do, is see that the equipment can work together. Simply connecting wires isn't enough. Each hardware component has its specific way of interpreting data: the scanner/digital camera as well as the monitor as well as the printer. Like people exchange cards, the software that comes with hardware has profiles. These profiles tell the other apps/software how these specific data have to be interpreted. For example: the written word "tomato" can be pronounced in different ways, so, because apps need everything to be very clear, say, the (American)scanner has to say to your (British)graphics software that when it says "tomato" (Am. pronounciation) it has to be interpreted as "tomato" (British pronounciation).
The most essential element that is closest to the roots is your monitor, or better: what you see on it. This is decided by your operating system and your graphics cards properties and software (drivers). So first see that you have installed the most recent drivers (can be found on the website of your graphics card manufacturer or, most probably, at either nvidia or ati websites).
Then launch the website that is indicated on the start page of
photoshopgurus (not the forum, but the main site.) and try as good as possible to get ther results they want you to get. Yet know that daylight, artificial light, the colours on the wall or your t-shirt can influence what you see. It always stays a tad "personal interpretation". Perfection can only be approached by very expensive hardware calibration.
You do not need photoshop for this, although photoshop has its own app to do this.
Now your monitor's brightness, contrast and colours should be approximately correct.
Next step is touse your printer's profile (see manual) to make shure your printer is recognised as Epson XXX and not "a" printer. Perhaps you have to experiment a bit, but within limits, you should see on your print what you see on your monitor. This can never be identical though, as there are many more colours in the monitor's light colours (RGB) than there are in the printer's inks (CMYK), even if the printer has six colours to get a better quality.
I'm not acquainted with digital cameras, but I suggest you make a pic of some colour wig (can be bought at most photographers stores) or of many different coloured surfaces that you can compare with what you see on your monitor. Here's where you will have to adjust and evt make a profile yourself. (this would need a book as it's a bit complicated to explain here).
Yet: for most pics, it's the result that counts, and if your printed photograph looks ok, it is ok. Perfection is not possible.
You don't need to spend all the money on Photoshop. It is a very good app, and it has many options most people never ever use. Photoshop Elements seems to be ok, as is PaintShop Pro.
Corel Photopaint is ok too. If you're interested in doing computer graphics, and yyou don't want to spend too much money, then CorelDRAW essentials is very interesting: not expensive, and with nearly the complete CorelDRAW9 in it.
I have DRAW9, and Photoshop. I mostly work with the latter, yet some tools in Photopaint (mostly taken from CorelXara) are far more intuitive than Photoshop's, like the transparancy tool. (I'll post an image one day...)
Can you afford it without your money machine getting depressed, and you want to go further in the photography direction, then Photoshop is a good investment.
Last, but not least: your camera. 2400 doesn't say much. I suppose you mean the maximum size in pixels (picture elements). Important is that you can store raw data, or only jpg. JPG is always lossy. This means that normally your pic is chopped up like a grid, and of every element (pixel) of the grid the digital memory remembers the colours and the place. JPG assumes that these exact values may be averaged, so more of these pixels have the same value and may be remembered together. You loose information with this method, and this information can never be recuperated. BUT you can store more pics on the memory stick/drive.
So see whether your camera can store raw (complete filesize) data.
Photoshop 7 Book 
Linear Mode
