Q I need to edit some logo graphics for use in documents, and am also a keen amateur photographer. Would Adobe Photoshop Elements be an ideal app to support both?

A You need to think carefully how those logos will be designed. Most design work like that is carried out using vector graphics tools, as they are resolution independent, and allow you to create faired curves using splines and Béziers, and so on. In such apps, the elements within your design are separate objects, which can be resized and manipulated.

In constrast, photographic images are just a very large array of pixels, and image editors like Adobe Photoshop and its Elements version work primarily on those pixels, not vector graphic objects.

The distinction has become a bit more blurred: Elements will, for example, open Adobe Illustrator documents, and PDFs, but it does not provide the tools which you really need for design work using vector graphics.

You would be best with one app intended for vector graphic design work, such as Affinity Designer (£39.99), and one for photographic images, such as Affinity Photo (£29.99), both from the Mac App Store. You will then have the right tools for the two quite different jobs.

There are two articles here about using Affinity Photo: the first tackles basic development from RAW camera files to JPEG output, the second simple correction of distortion and cropping. Vector graphics are detailed here.

Updated from the original, which was first published in MacUser volume 27 issue 13, 2011.