What program do you recommend to start?

[mdetloff]

Hi,
My DH and I were wondering what everyone is using to make all these cool designs with. Are there any that are affordable? He is a high tech junkie and was trying to convince me that we needed the Adobe Photoshop CS4 that was over $600! I was thinking more along the lines of the Photoshop Elements. We would also like to use it to just edit our own photos. Thanks for any help. Hopefully, you all won't tell me DH is right!

 

[RustManFan]

I love Photoshop Elements 7! Have been DISigning with it since October 2007 and have found it easy to learn. Many online tutorials available as well as the elementsvillage.com forum where any questions you can think of will be answered. Incredible amount of free "stuff" available online to supplement the brushes, layer styles, patterns, etc. that come with it. And additional fonts that you download for free are readily available for use too!

I thought of getting full blown Photoshop but it simply isn't necessary to do my DISigns!


And I do use it with great success to enhance/clean up the scans of my old slides and to do any tweaks necessary for my photos...

 

[racreel]

You could also check out Paint Shop Pro Photo x2, it's what I use. You can download the trial and try it out for 30 days.

 

[dizneechic]

I have a few different editing programs (photoshop- several versions, lightroom 2, paint shop pro x2, many versions of jasc paint shop - older version of PSPX2 ) so will share some thoughts.

I find PSP (older and newer) a LOT more user friendly than Adobe products, meaning if you are starting from ground zero in learning a program the Adobe line up will be somewhat overwhelming. If you are willing to take some time though and learn to use the software, the Adobe line up can do much more than PSP and overall is a better product with greater flexibility. If you think you can open the program and do what you want within the first 2 minutes, the Adobe line up will frustrate you and PSP would be what I recommend.

IF I were starting over years ago I would have just stuck with photoshop (or elements) from day 1 and taken the time to grow with the program. Instead since I was the novice user and only wanted to do a few things so I learned on Jasc, and converted to Corel (PSPX2) and have followed that program. We've owned most of the photoshop versions along the way as well, but I only resort to that when my simpler program can't do what I need it to. If I was starting today I would also probably start with Elements instead of investing in the full blown version of Photoshop. Elements can do almost everything you would need and it's a great (and affordable) introduction to the Adobe lineup.

**We own lightroom although I rarely use it. I am a hobbyist photographer so use that mainly for batch processing images when I don't want to deal with photoshop.

 

[Dom13]

I use PSE 6. I came at PSE from a Micrographx program (no longer made). PSE does have a LOT of flexibility. The price for that flexibility is a high learning curve. There is much support on the web for PSE, possibly more that the others. If you think you're going to really get in to designing and photo editing then I'd spend the time to learn PSE. If you only want to make a few shirts, etc. for an upcoming trip one of the simpler programs may be a better fit.

Most of the programs have a trial version. Download 1 at a time and try it. You'll quickly realize which one's right for you.