New to Digital Scrapbooking

I'll paste the reply I left here:

The Adobe products also come with free trials if you want to give them a try. And Photoshop is now a monthly subscription, which is actually better for trying it out because you don't have to shell out the big $$$ at the beginning. You can try for a few months and see if you like it.

Any software that can handle layers will work for digital scrapbooking.

• GIMP is free, though it's fairly complex and the menu system is a little tricky; it's very powerful, able to do about 90% of what the most recent Photoshop can do. While it has its own file format, it can also open/save Photoshop's PSD format, which most layout templates are released in.
• Photoshop is the graphics industry standard, so you'll find lots of things to help make it super-easy to create layouts--like styles that let you create realistic shadows for many item types with a click, or turn a text layer to look like a chipboard cutout that matches the kit. It's currently on a subscription model, but you can sometimes still find old versions for sale outright; I've recently seen ads for the last version before it went subscription for $99.
• Photoshop Elements is the "lite" version of it, a little more limited, but it will do almost anything you'll want to do on a page, and can use the styles and brushes that its big brother does. It runs around $120 for the newest version.
• Paint Shop Pro is around the same cost as Elements and is on a level with GIMP for what it can do, and there are lots of things like shadows and tubes (brushes) available for it. Carole's site, Scrapbook Campus, is one of the best resources for PSP scrapbooking. Because Photoshop is the big dog in the industry, PSP can open Photoshop's PSD files and work with them.
• ArtRage is around $80 if there isn't a sale on, and while it's more geared to traditional art, it CAN handle building layouts on it; I particularly like it for art journal-style layouts. It can open and save PSDs, too.
• I've heard of people using the free Pixlr site online, too, though I haven't used it myself.
• Some people even scrap in Microsoft Word and/or PowerPoint; I can't imagine trying to do that myself, but if your layout is simple enough, it could probably work. I don't remember it being able to use PSDs, though.

As far as photo layouts, there are lots of free layout templates available here and all over the web. As long as they put a PSD in the pack, almost any of the major graphics programs can use those templates. Some designers specialize in templates, too, and give away freebies on a semi-regular basis; Fiddle-De-Dee and Miss Fish Templates are a couple of my favorites. There's also the "A Love for Layout Templates" blog train for even more templates, and the Freebies forum here has a bunch from PixelScrapper members (I know my thread has several).

I came into digital scrapbooking in a way similar to use, and I use inDesign. It's made for laying out books, so it has 2-page spread view by default, and though it's usually used for text-heavy layouts, it can easily handle tons of graphics. As a graphic designer, I had easy access to it anyway.