I have both and PhotoShop 7.
I would recommend Picture It version 9 if this is the first photo editing
software you try. The manual is terrible (half of it is how to take pictures
rather than what you can do with the software) but when you edit a picture
with it, the on screen help is excellent.
For most tasks we want with digital photos, such as white balance, contrast,
red eye removal etc. and printing it is very good. But with such a terrible
manual there is a drawback if you have never used photo editing software
before, that is, what kind of fancy thing can you do with this software?
Forget about finding such things from reading the manual. Not there. You can
find it under Help etc. but it is not like reading about what the software
can do from a manual.
Elements takes a different approach. The manual is top notch. It explains
the fancy things that the software can do. But, it is a little bit more
difficult to learn the basics if you have not done photo editing before. It
has more features than Picture It for editing photos, but Picture It has all
kinds of stuff to play with photos not available with Elements.
The bottom line, you are looking at the two best photo editing software in
this price range (~50.00 with the usual mail-in rebate). You can't go wrong
with either one. If this is your first try, I would go with Picture
It(despite the terrible manual) because you can have a lot of fun adding all
kind of stuff to your pictures.
Photoshop Elements
