This is a semi-rant here. I have installed the free trial of Adobe Photoshop twice on one computer, then wouldn't work again for another download after the expiration, so I did it on another computer with a new username and email. It expired so I went on one more computer with a new username and email, but after that, there were no more computers I could use. We have 3 laptops. 2 are my mother's and one is mine. So all in all, I've had it 4 months. Now, keep in mind, I don't use it professionally, just to make small signatures and goof around with it. The only thing I care about is extracting. I tried Gimp and it is dreadful. I cannot get it to even do a presentable job. Every crest and detail is complete CRAP. Photoshop Elements looks exactly like Gimp, so I do not think that is what I'd invest money into.

So I just want to know, how did you people with Photoshop acquire it? I doubt you paid the upright ridiculous price of $700+.

I have Photoshop Elements myself. It's a few years old at this point and cost fifty bucks. It doesn't do the world's greatest job of selecting crests but it's not that bad either. You can see examples of how well it selects in my signature and in the banner.

They say that the newest version of Elements does a great job of extracting messy hair, which seems to be the standard used to judge a program's ability to select things like crests: http://www.tipsquirrel.com/selecting-ha ... ements-11/ The online descriptions I've read of how you do it with full-price photoshop were very complicated, and this is probably the exact same process. The link has a video showing how it's done.

I tried Gimp once and it drove me crazy, mostly because it's so different from Photoshop. But Elements should be basically the same as full-price Photoshop, minus a few of the most extremely advanced functions that non-professionals usually don't need. You could always try downloading a trial version of Elements to see how you like it. It's technically not the same program as full-price Photoshop so hopefully they'll let you do it.

Is that how much you paid Stephanie?!

Version 12 is eighty bucks on Amazon and I'm starting to think I might get it. I have version 8 and it does pretty much everything I want EXCEPT it's not great at selecting crests. But I do a lot of crest selecting so it might be worthwhile to upgrade. I need to look into it and see what else it does that's different from mine.

Absolutely not. That is ridiculous. I used the free trial version a few times.

You know, I think I might go and get 12. Seems interesting.

I had a free trial of Adobe elements 12, I really liked it though I never took classes so I taught it to myself.

I never actually made a signature because I have no clue what file to save it as, lol

Signature photos can be saved as a jpg or some other picture-file format. You create them as a psd but save them as something else to get a smaller file size.