Hi, I use Corel Photo Paint 9. It is an older version of their software and I like it very much. The more I use it the more familiar things are. The problem I've found with photo editing software is that you really have to learn it. It isn't intuitive. My daughter is very good at playing with all the features then she shows me how to do things. I think if I were going to learn something from scratch though I'd use Adobe as that is the most widely used from what I can tell. When I get my new computer I'm going to learn both the newer Corel software as well as Adobe. They all do basic things like cropping, resizing, fixing contrast problems, color etc. but when you get into the more esoteric stuff like masking and editing only parts of a pic things get to be really fun. I'd recently taken some pictures of the Flume Gorge in Franconia Notch NH and it is next to impossible to get a shot of the Avalanche Falls in one picture. I created a new image page then cut and pasted three pictures into the new page then put one image on top of another, "erased" the upper image so that it melded into the lower image, cropped the very large image to even up the edges, combined all three images so that they were now embedded with each other and the background then resized it and saved as a JPG so I could post it on the net. So much fun!!!! Avlanche Falls
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This really is just too much fun!
Deanne

Deanne I had been using Adobe for general digital photo adjustments and like you am enjoying experimenting with layering techniques. I need to spend quite some time reading over the manual to be sure I'm going about things in an orderly fashion and not just selecting this and that to see what it does. It IS fun and I look forward to more pics on the forum to show us what everyone is up to at their computers.

Adobe Photoshop is industry standard for retouching and compositing, color correcting.
Yes it can get quite complex! Once you learn it, you can do almost anything! Especially if you have painting skills.

are there other photo programs that can do line drawings of photos like photoshop can do, but not quite so expensive.

I was thinking of doing pictures of houses on pottery and firing them. it would be so easy if you had a line drawing of someones house and traced it and then painted it with their colors. but 600.00 dollars is a lot of money for photo shop.

I think you can buy older versions of Photoshop for way less than $600. Six is actually my favorite but 5.5 is OK, too.

Cher

I prefer Corel to Photoshop. In Corel Draw you can change your photo to line drawings with a tracing feature. It's wonderful. You have to be very patient though - the more the details the more lines in the drawing.

Photoshop is awesome. I have used it for years on my mac's at home and at work.

Just thought I'd add my .02 - the Photoshop Elements (kind of Photoshop Lite) allows you to do nearly everything you can do in the bigger program - I had to use it briefly on another PC and was quite impressed. And you can get it at Costco for about........ I wanna say, maybe $50-75? Still not extremely intuitive for the unintiated, but it has some automatic stuff that makes it a lot easier to figure out what to do with the other options.

HTH!

(visiting from AZ forum!)