I've been meaning to ask the same question, but I don't have Photoshop. A friend wanted a "greatest hits" album, and she wanted to do it inexpensively because it's mostly a not-to-be-sold promo.

I found a template through Microsoft Word, but it had a Christmas theme, so I had to alter the template radically. At least it gave me the general idea and the proper sizes.

I used Microsoft Office Photo Manager to crop a nice publicity photo to a square and change the color from grayscale to sepia. Then I pasted the photo onto the cover art box on the Word template. Then I put a frame around the cover photo, and added a text box for the title.

The template had vertical text boxes for the spine of the CD box, and text boxes on the back for song titles and credits. My friend had me add the times for each track because she said radio stations won't play cuts unless they can tell right off how long they are.

I burned the MS Word file onto a CD, and sent her off to Fedex/Kinko's or Staples to print the file on her choice of paper. My inkjet printer doesn't work well on glossy paper where there are large blocks of a color other than white. If you have cover art printed by a printing company, be sure it's a PDF file.

I have to say it worked pretty well. I did it all in MS Office Photo Manager and MS Word.

-Joe-