Picture compositing

Outside of Dreamweaver, I'm new to most Adobe products. I've been currenty using Fireworks for design and graphic layout. I'm using Fireworks now to composite still pictures but the workflow is a bit clunky. Can anyone suggest a program that I can use to layout different photographs on one page. For exampe, I want to create pages with two photorgrahps each but with a color background. Any suggestions for the best tool?

Thanks.