by Kirk » Mon Mar 06, 2006 10:18 pm
I've gotten to the point where I'm thinking about crafting my own page headers myself. I've farmed these out in the past to rent-a-coder.com, but I'm getting tired of fighting with designers who want to "***" things up to much (can I say that on this forum?) :0
Most of my page headers are just a couple of stock photographs comp'd together with a little text and a few gel buttons beneath (link for affiliate signup, faq, etc) - really simple stuff.
I'm good with raw HTML, but graphics are new territory. I'm sure I could learn this easily enough, but I'm having trouble narrowing the field of graphics programs. Here's the state of my research...
1) I've downloaded Xara extreme and spent a few days playing with it. Lots of video tutorials (which are very helpful) and seems to have a ton of features.
2) PaintShop Pro - downloaded the trial - seems simple to use, but not as simple as Xara, IMHO.
3) I have an old version of Photoshop on my old Mac G3. I know PS is powerful, but it just seems like a beast that is overkill for what I need. I called Adobe about an upgrade - I can do it, but it will still cost me 2x over PSP and Xara.
If anyone has been down this road, please jump in and give me your .02. My main considerations are ease of use, existing tutorials, prebuilt libraries. Also, if I could do ebook covers easily too - that would be the bomb!