Publisher or Photoshop?

I love this thread!!! Tom is getting me a new laptop for my birthday so I am going to wait until then to try out the free trials of some of these programs ... but I want to customize photo books for each family with wedding photos ... so this sounds like a great place to start! I've looked at some of the photo book sites but they don't allow me the ability to do the things I want with designing it.

Keep the info coming!!!

Publisher vs. Photoshop? Photoshop, no contest! Or GIMP, as mentioned above. The menus can be daunting, but just search for tutorials for the things you need to do, and use the help menus, and you'll be fine.

(Also, for anyone who needs the functions of Microsoft Office but can't afford it, you know you can get similar functionality from the FREE and open-source OpenOffice.org. On Mac, you have to install another program called X11, and use ctrl instead of cmd key for shortcuts, but it's no big deal. Almost identical to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.--but it's an open-source project. And you can open MS Office documents in OpenOffice, or save OpenOffice docs in MS Office formats, PDFs, etc.)

Hi guys as graphic designer by profession, for basic page a layout and photos, I wouldn't suggest Photoshop. All the programs I use are super expensive but thats for my job. Photoshop is not a page layout program, for extensive text you'll need InDesign, Illustrator, Quark or Freehand-which no longer exists. If you do not want to spend the money you could use Word just depends on how good you are with it, I can't use Word for the life of me, but I have seen somethings created in it that amaze me!

Currently there are no trials from Adobe for CS3 and usually they are only 30 days which means if your not sure what you are doing its going to be a busy 30 days!!!!!

if you really want to purchase photoshop, they give students a discount. i think it costs ~$200 for a student vs. $600. i love photoshop. you can do a lot with it, photo editing, invites, flyers, welcome bag stuff, etc... from my personal experience, i would buy photoshop again...

Jason also brought up a good point, the programs are expensive and in the past people just shared serial numbers. The industry is making it harder and harder now to do that, some programs actually log into a home computer at the software company to check if you are the legal owner.