What (cheap and easy) software do you recommend for beginners?
(ANYONE can chime in here with their advice. Thank you!)
There is only one way for the newbie to learn: Just get the proper software for it and experiment. push buttons, find out what they do. That's how I started. And I learned as I went along.
What (cheap and easy) software do you recommend for beginners?
I have Photoshop 5.0 and Paint Shop Pro 6.0 They are not cheap but they ARE easy. Photoshop costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 bucks. I bought my photoshop and paintshop off of a Yahoo auction for 30 bucks. (Backup copies) Plus, because they were back up copies, they didn't come with the instructions (You can buy books on the how to's of photoshop and paint shop pro).
The photoshop software came with only four lessons in PDF format on what one can do with the software, so using those few lessons, I taught myself how to use the photoshop. And what the lessons didn't tell me (which was alot), I had to discover on my own. I just didn't want to go through the added expense of books on photoshop or paintshop pro (there are many).
I myself prefer photoshop over paint shop pro. The photoshop can do much more than paintshop. Photoshop has many more tools and is quite easier to work with than paint shop.
However, the reason why I bought paintshop was for the animation software that came with it so that I can add animation to my images.