I use Photoshop Elements - it is a cheaper version of Photoshop and will still do basic photo editing as well as Digital Scrapbooking - I use it to make announcement cards, birthday invites and Christmas cards as well as it is all very similar so once you get the hang of it, it is very easy. Unless you want to merge two photos together or do complex editing, Photoshop Elements would be all you need to get started. It also requires a less advanced computer system than Photoshop and the upgrades are much cheaper.

I just search for free digital scrapbooking and download anything I like the look of. If you use Photoshop Elements, you can open the digital scrapbooking kits as PSD files and that makes them to much easier to edit because you can auto select whole sections and make them transparent if you need to.

You can download a 30 day free trial of Elements off the internet if you need to have a go. Don't be overwhelmed by it because it does take some getting used to but once you get the hang of it, you will be able to make up pages quite quickly. A double page for a photobook takes me about an hour now.

I upload my finished pages to whichever photobook site I want to order through (I do it when there are sales on - a few months ago Snapfish had a buy one get one free sale, at the moment Harvey Norman have 40% off their photobooks until 22nd August). I then just choose a whole page display and load the page as a photo into the photobooks that way. I haven't printed off single pages because I just want them in books so I don't need to. However, if I am making birthday invites etc, I will print them off as photos so I can get invitations for 12c each once they are finished and they look quite good. Family like them because they get a photo of the kids from year to year around their birthdays. I also do party thank-you cards with photos from the birthday party on them.

Another great program to try is Momento - if you google search Momento, you should find it. The software is free. The photobooks themselves cost a bit more but the quality is excellent and totally worth it. They have scrapbooking kits that you can download for free once you download the software. Their kits are lovely. You can also import elements of other kits and put them on the page - though you have to do it as JPEG file and the program recognises it as a photo. Momento is great software to start with if you have never scrapbooked digitially before. Many of the applications are very similar to Elements, but far more simple to use if you are just learning. Elements offers more flexibility later on once you get the hang of basic digi-scrap.

There is another thread in here with links to the two most recent books I have finished - I think it is called Baby Record Book or something. If you want to see what sorts of things I did using Elements, you can check that out. I have found templates on the internet that are compatible with PSD (Momento software has numerous templates attached to it as well - you just pick how many photos you want to place on a page and it gives you the options and away you go). Most of my work though is shameless plagerism - I look at pages that other people have created that I like and copy what they have done. Some of them are original work, but I run out of ideas pretty quickly. It is not too hard to recreate a look from online samples that you like.

I hope all that answers some of your questions