(popping over from THS)

"Photoshop" at $50 is either 1) an illegal copy; or 2) being sold at an "educational discount" to students and their teachers (not supposed to be sold to the general public at that price); or 3) really "Photoshop Elements", which is a good program in its own right and as much Photoshop as most people can justify using. The primary differences between Photoshop Elements and full-blown Photoshop are the price and Elements' inability to use PS plugins. This will not bother any casual user.

If you can visualize from a more abstract view, you might consider some of the other applications out there for 3-D gardening/landscaping (though some of the cheaper ones may be poorly-suited to Japanese Garden design), or looking for drawing software, which will allow you to create your own aerial views on a grid. Microsoft's Visio will do this; Corel Draw should do this, and there likely is shareware out there (don't have time to look right now) which also will let you plot out what you want to put where and move it around easily.

I agree with Steve. You may, perhaps, even be able to buy Photoshop LE which I think is even simpler than Photoshop Elements. My Photoshop LE came on the CD that accompanied my first digital camera!
Here's an example of using Photoshop LE to add some ferns to a picture.
Photoshop LE saved the picture as a PSD file - and then I used Irfanview (an excellent and free program) to convert it back to JPEG.
Click here for the pictures

I must admit I was very suspicious myself, but a google search threw up http://www.buysusa.com/ which showed Photoshop 7.0 Full version in the wrapper for $50

See what you guys think?

Herb, your simpler Photoshop LE sounds like it's enough for me
Tony

Here is a link that might be useful: Photoshop 7.0 link

The Photoshop 7.0 link offer sounds very attractive indeed, but I've never heard of 'buysusa' so I think it would be prudent to contact Adobe & get their assurance that it's all legitimate and that you really do get a real working version complete with the key for your $50. Who knows - maybe they're selling them off because the new Photoshop CS is the only one that the rich now want?

Tony, I should mention that while the Photoshop LE version will do the job that I illustrated, using it is less convenient than Photoshop 7.0. The latter is a lot more flexible - if you decide you've taken a wrong step, you can easily backtrack. With Photoshop LE on the other hand you have to start all over again......

Herb

Here is a discussion of buying at this site.

Here is a link that might be useful: discussion

Go to best buy and see what they have there. I think a saw a reasonably priced photoshop elements or something like that....