What software is the best for beginners?

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What software is the best for beginners?

Hi. I'm Mexican, Spanish Speaker.
I love digital scrapbooking and I just have begin creating designs. I work with Power Point, combining backgrounds, images and cliparts, but I would like to create new designs by myself.

What software is te best for beginners? I'll appreciate your comments and tips.

Blessings.

In my opinion, if you are thinking on designing, you should try photoshop elements.

I´ll move your topic to digital scrapbooking discussion, where you can get more advice smiley

I'd agree with Lorien about Photoshop Elements. It may still be a bit trickier than some software to learn initially, but the skills you learn will be much more useful since moving to Photoshop CS would feel more natural, if you wanted to.

I like Photoshop Elements.

But I think the most important part of using any software is having a plan for learning it. I signed up for a class, and I use tutorials, and I YouTube things when I get stuck. If you don't have the resources to help you learn, you will get frustrated (at least if you are me!). I started with Elements 2, and couldn't figure out how to use it, didn't find a lot of tutorials, and threw my hands up and quit. Now, years later, I've moved onto 10 and I wish I hadn't given up. But I have so much more (online) help now to learn.

I think if I had to do over again, I'd do photoshop too. I'm using a different program and I think as I'm progressing I just can't do what I want. When I first got my program I didn't even realize what was possible so I felt fine being contained. Now that I know that program learning another is a daunting task and the need doesn't seem to be there because I can just fall back to what is easy. Had I learned Photoshop right away, the learning curve wouldn't have seemed as daunting because I had to learn something anyway. Learning Photoshop seems quite doable but seems to take time. The cool thing is the amount of tutorials, both video and written, to help you learn.

I like PSP a lot - much more affordable than Photoshop. However, had I known then what I know now I would have gone with the more expensive Photoshop because there are a lot more tutorials & resources out there for it. It's hard to find people to help you with PSP - much easier to find a mentor or classes with Photoshop. Just my 2 cents... smiley

I would do Photoshop Elements simply because there are so many tutorials and resources out there to help you learn the program.

I use photoshop to do my layouts but I am actually quite curious the differences between Illustrator, Elements and Photoshop itself. Can anyone shed some light? ;X

Photoshop Elements is just a reduced version of Photoshop CS. Photoshop Elements has fewer features, but for digi scrapping it seems to work fine.

Illustrator is more of a drawing or illustrating program, not super useful with photos.

Illustrator is a vector-based program, great for designing logos and vector art.

Both Photoshops are pixel-based programs, great for photos.

One easy way to explain the difference from vector vs pixel - is that with vector you can enlarge something as big as you want and it won't pixelate because it is mathematically based. It is not made up of pixels.

However - there are some vector-based tools that you use in Photoshop and may not even realize it. For example - when you use the text tool in Photoshop, you can increase the size (as long as you haven't rastered the layer/changed it to pixels) and it still looks crisp, not pixelated. To see a comparison - raster the layer then increase the size and you'll see that it now has pixels and starts looking fuzzy.

I could go deeper into this - if there is an interest for more info.

Photoshop Elements has a bit of a steep learning curve, but if you stick with it, you will love it. There are tons of good tutorials on the web and right here on this site, so you can learn how to do anything for free! I'm thinking of getting Illustrator, I just downloaded a trial, but I'm already pretty handy with Photoshop, so I'm hoping they are not all that different.

I started out using PaintShop Pro for drawing (back when it was still owned by JASC and not Corel). I loved it, especially the tubes. I thought it offered more than Photoshop. Photoshop seemed very overwhelming.

Now I work solely in Photoshop CS for everything. I love it. It takes time to learn, but there are TONS of tutorials out there for pretty much everything. And once you get the hang of it, I think it offers WAY more than PSP. And in my humble opinion, it renders colours better. I think it also has more resources.

That being said, PSP is much more affordable than Photoshop CS, with Elements being somewhere in the middle (last time I checked). Back when I used PSP, Elements did not exist; there was just Photoshop 7. I think if Elements had existed then, I would have gone with it instead of PSP, just because I liked the power that's behind the Photoshop programs.

Agreed...Photoshop Elements would be my choice, too! I stayed with PE for a LONG time and it wasn't until I was getting a bunch of actions and doing more designing (than scrapping) that I moved on to PS! I didn't find Elements too hard to learn, once you can get your head around working in layers (like in paper scrapping)! But there are a lot more resources available to PS than PE. I actually started out with Ulead Photo Impact (no longer in production, I think) with almost NO resources!

This was a helpful thread. Thanks for starting it Monica. smiley