Expert: LizaL - 11/20/2006

Question
I am a Real Estate Agent and want to do a Newsletter, large 11x14 or 11x17 with graphics/home photos and mail merge. The each individual Home Owner's name printed across the top and maybe throughout the letter.  I have Microsoft Windows.  The Desktop Publishing is so expensive, I don't know if I'm ready for that! Please point me in the right direction if this is not where I need to be- there did not seem to be a question area for Desktop Publishing! Thank you-  

Answer
Hi Earlene,

You're right -- this isn't the "desktop publishing" area, but you know what? Desktop publishing is such an archaic term I'm surprised it's still being used, especially in this forum! So it's kind of misleading.

Anyway, to help answer your question, I can understand and sympathize with you about the prices for page layout (desktop publishing) software. But the bad part is, that really is what you need in order to do what you want to do.

Where Photoshop (or a similar photo editing software) comes into play is for retouching, cropping, and color correcting your photos. Then you'd use the page layout software to assemble your newsletter.

The workflow would be something like this:

1. In Photoshop, do all the work to the photos you need to do -- as mentioned above, do any sort of resizing, cropping, color correction, etc. Save the photos in a format compatible with your page layout software (like a .TIF file or a JPEG). You'd also save them as CMYK, as opposed to RGB format, which is only for Web images.

2. Once you've edited your photos, you'd open your page layout software (more on that in a moment). It's here that you would set up your headers (for the home owner's name) and the footers (if you had page numbers or a logo you wanted to repeat from page to page). It'd be wise to set up a template, and many layout programs allow you to do just this -- or set up "master pages," that let you repeat items from page to page.

You'd also use your page layout software for the text of your newsletter. Page layout software has a lot of good controls for editing and manipulating text.

3. You would import your photos -- and also any graphics you've created, in a drawing program -- into this layout. Then you'd save the whole document, from the page layout software program, once you've finished it.

So that's the typical workflow. As for software... well, I would always recommend Photoshop for photo editing, but if cash is tight, check out Photoshop Elements, a stripped-down and significantly less expensive version of Photoshop.
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/

For page layout software, my first suggestion is Adobe InDesign, but it's pretty expensive. So if I were you I'd consider Microsoft Publisher:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/publisher/default.aspx

It won't have as many features as InDesign, but it is cheaper.

Adobe makes InDesign, and the other leading standard software in the layout category is Quark. The Quark company makes this, but it's also expensive:
http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/

If you decide you want to go with something like InDesign or Quark, check out eBay. I would NOT advocate buying bootleg software -- DON'T do that! That can get you in a heap of trouble. But sometimes people sell unused, unregistered software that they've purchased and don't want or need, and you could find it there. Only buy from a place like eBay if the software has never been opened or used.

But I know people who successfully use Publisher, and that might work for you -- at a much cheaper cost, too!

Hope this helps --

Lisa

P.S. A final word to the wise: Don't EVER try to use Photoshp or a photo editing software for doing text, and especially large bodies of text. Photo editing software programs are geared specifically toward bitmap images, and not vector images and text.