adobe photoshope elements???

[heidiann]

Can someone please explain to me what the difference is b/t
adobe photoshop elements, adobe photoshop and adobe photoshop album?
I am so clueless when it comes to stuff like this but would like a system that helps me edit pics and make announcements and cards and what not of all my digital pics I have on my computer. Or do you ladies have a different editing program ( is that what their called) that you use? I would like to take this up as a hobby and start working on my digital pics maybe do some special effects to them (if thats possible). I plan on doing more research on all of this but I thought you ladies could start to steer me in the right direction.
TIA for all your comments

Heidi
Mom to Jillian 10/20/05

[kellyotn]

Photoshop is the professional photo editing software. Its very pricey, and very hard to use. Its super powerful and awesome, but takes some time to learn even "easy" things. This is what the Pros use to erase flaws on magazine covers or edit entire people or items out of pictures. ;)

Photoshop Elements is also very powerful, but is more user friendly. It has a more intuitive user interface, so you can install it and start doing cool things immediately. Its pretty inexpensive and often comes with digital cameras, scanners, etc.

Photoshop Album is just that, a way to organize your digital pictures. You can download it free from their website. I've never messed with it as I use Picasa from Google and am madly in love with it. You can organize and tag photos with various categories. You can do basic fixes (crops, change to black & white or sepia, red eye, etc.) and its saves them within Picasa, but doesn't alter your original. Also has easy backups. Love it love it love it. Since I started using Picasa, I actually use it over Photoshop for editing quite a bit. Its just great.

[pixelprincess]

As PP stated Photoshop is the industry standard used by creative professionals and photographers. Photoshop has some features that Elements doesn't like CMYK and LAB color modes that are useful for printing. Not to get too technical...but our monitors are set up to RBG and the print outpur is CMKY. There are more tools, ability to record actions for batch processing, etc. Although as a hobbyist you should be fine with Photoshop Elements. It is also a fraction of the price of Photoshop.

You can use various apps for editing and basic photo correction.