Mac or PC? Both do the job equally as well and unlike most sites I don't ignore the MAC
TO EXTRACT THE KITS
To get started in digital scrapbooking you will need an archiver to extract the element and paper kits. There are many available, some are commercial and some are freeware.
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On the PC, for simplicity, FreeZIP is very good, its VERY VERY EASY to use and its manual comes in a variety of languages, as its name suggests there is no cost involoved.
On the Mac I recommend Stuffit Expander as it is easy to use, stable and did I mention its also free! 
TO MAKE THE LAYOUTS
OK, so now you need a Graphics Program to allow you to create your wonderful layouts. Again there are commercial ones and also free ones, some are better than others and some are just downright expensive.
The things that you must have is a layers function as this allows you to place one object over /under another eg a frame over a photo and transparency, this allows whatever is underneath to be seen through the upper layer.
The commercial offerings that are most widely used are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Elements or Corel Paintshop Pro there is also Microsoft Digital Image Suite, it has some nice easy to use features that are great for editing photographs but is not really suited to digital scrapbooking as transparency settings are very awkward. This is also now discontinued.
The best free options are Gimp and Paint.Net both are very powerful and both have very similar features to their commercial counterparts. Gimp is available on Windows, Linux and MacOS, Paint.Net is Windows only. Paint.Net closely resembles Photoshop in looks and features but without the cost. Both have lots of free plugins available and both have great support forums.
Please Note: If using Paint.Net then you will want to install this plugin. Place the 'PhotoShop.dll' file that you download ( after extracting it from the zip as above) into the FileType directory of the Paint.Net directory, found in your program files directory, what a lot of directories there are!!!. The reason you need this is that once done Paint.Net software will be able to work with layered PSD files that Photoshop creates and you will find many of these along your digital scrapbooking journey. They are especially used for Quick Pages.
