Is Photoshop Elements enough? Or do I need full Photoshop?

[swiss]

I have Photoshop Elements. I started going through some recommended tutorials from this forum. Lesson 1 - The Pen Tool

Oh. Apparently Photoshop Elements doesn't have the pen tool. Off to a great start...

Pen tool aside, before I get too far into Photoshop elements, is elements even the right software? Do I need Photoshop ______ (whatever full is called) to take advantage of this software in the context of map making?

[ChickPea]

It's possible you may not be able to complete a particular tutorial without Photoshop, but there's no reason why you can't make great maps without it. I don't have any experience with PS Elements, so I'm not sure just how limited it is in comparison. It might be aimed at minor photo edits, rather than art/drawing creation. I don't think it's all that widely used by our members. I suspect most people who don't have PS use Gimp instead.

Photoshop isn't a necessity for mapmaking, though. Ilanthar makes amazing maps using (I believe) a pretty old version of Paint Shop Pro. Many, many others use Gimp, and lately Krita, both of which are free software. I've been dabbling with Affinity Designer lately, which is very reasonably priced. If you've got the funds, then for sure PS is the most fully featured pro-level software out there. But you gotta pay every month...

[arsheesh]

For about half of my map-making career I got by with just GIMP and Inkscape. However once I purchased a tablet I needed a paint tool (in its current version GIMP does not support tablets), and so I used Photoshop Elements 10. It was somewhat limited, even by comparison to GIMP, but I managed to make due with these three programs until a couple of years ago when I began using Krita. Krita is an excellent paint program. It lacks many of the tools that Photoshop has but GIMP has many of these so I find that between these various programs I don't really need to use expensive proprietary programs such as Photoshop CS. Then again, I'm more of a hobbyist with semi-professional aspirations. Someone who earns their daily bread through their artwork may well find a program like Photoshop CS an indispensable part of their workflow.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Mouse]

In addition to what Arsheesh has just said, you can open a GIMP file in Krita, but Krita converts the text to ordinary layers, so you can't edit the labels once they've been opened and saved in Krita. There is another way to move a file backwards and forwards between GIMP and Krita, and that is by saving it as a photoshop file - which both of the free apps can open. However, I've never tried it that way, so I don't know if you still get the text conversion problem or not.

The text conversion is really only a minor point in the bigger scheme of things.

Both these free apps have ink tools, and Krita in particular has the most excellent brush editor I've ever seen in a free app. It can't handle files as large as GIMP can, but drawing in Krita is a lot smoother and more professional looking than in GIMP (speaking on the experience of just 3 days since I first started using Krita)