The CS5.5 Suites provide an opportunity for Adobe to keep some of their products current with the latest technology in the ever-sprinting technological race we live in. New features within Dreamweaver make it significantly easier to design for mobile, tablet, and monitor sized websites all at the same time, using the same content. It wasn't that long ago when "state of the art: websites had developers creating one website for desktops and a completely different site for phones. Now that tablets are becoming part of the digital landscape, developing is getting more complicated, but the updates to Dreamweaver significantly ease the burden. New features in InDesign make it much easier to export your interactive content for both tablets and for standard EPUB. And interactions between Premiere Pro and Media Encoder let you cue up multiple output to a variety of screen sizes. And while the encoding is taking place, you can continue working in Premiere Pro. These are a few of the examples that lead Adobe to provide a nick name for this round of Suites as the "CS5.5 & Any Screen."

Pairing the range of features and capabilities of any application down to a core feature set is a challenge. To make that application easier to use is a separate challenge in itself. Adobe does a great job in shrinking one of these two applications down to size so that the hobbyist can take advantage of what the parent applications have to offer. This release of Elements 9 brings two new applications to the Mac market: Premier (the video application) and Organizer (the content explorer application). Both of these two are not new and are both well seasoned applications. What's new is that they are now available for the Mac. I find Photoshop Elements both powerful and easy to use, Premier Elements is very powerful and a great step up from iMovie, but with a very steep learning curve. If you are used to using Bridge, Organizer is a bit frustrating, but it has a lot of to offer, just in different ways.

These two DVDs, available from Photoshop Café, both have great, insightful information for the beginner or advanced photographer. Both videos (by Tim Cooper) are presented with bullets, text and many sample images. Tim is excellent in that he talks to you as a friend, explaining the nuances of photography. His voice is direct and calm, and it sounds like he wants to help you become a better photographer, not show off what he knows. All in all, these are informative and a pleasure to work with.

MacDraft, at version v6, is still vibrant after 25 years providing the same level of powerful 2D CAD work for users around the world. New to version 6 are some user enhancements such as a Customizable Toolbar, New Layer's palette, and some image enhancement features when bringing a standard rasterized image into your CAD drawing. But perhaps my favorite improvement is customizable scaling: now, you can create any scale to set the image size to the size of your output.

Photomatix 4 continues its domination of the HDR Photography landscape with its new release of version 4. The big news is that hdrsoft has now provided an excellent mechanism to deal with objects that have moved during your multiple-image capture. In addition, Photomatix now displays a sample strip of thumbnails to let you quickly see and click to display your image in a variety of presets prvoided by Photomatix (you can also create your own). These presets let you easily view an image with either Image Fusion or Tone Mapping to help you determine which approach might give you a better look for your image.

Adobe Acrobat X is the biggest rewrite of the interface ever. Any time there is a new release of software, typically the primary focus that beckons new or return buyers are new and/or better features. There are, of course, new and/or better features in Acrobat X, but the biggest change from previous versions of this release is the interface. In many cases, having the various tools and processes located in this new interface makes the features easier to find and use. Laying all the tools right out in front of you in the tabbed interface makes discovery easier. However, finding what you want can be much more of a challenge. Additionally, some of those changes were done halfway, were poorly thought out, and, in some cases, are just plain nonsensical. Please understand that there is much to like with AX, but getting to what you like will take some work on your part.

Bokeh 2 provides a significant upgrade to an already good product. I was very impressed with the first release of Bokeh, and Alien Skin Software has made tremendous improvements on what they started out with. It was a surprise seeing many of my suggestions and wishes I gave in my review of the first release implemented in this new release. What made it even better was that their solutions were much better than what I had wished for. First and foremost is the new ability to combine multiple masks for fine-tuning the bokeh effect and more controls on that effect, all providing a significantly better result for the photographer.

InDesign (ID) is an application used to create books, magazines, newspapers, journals, posters, flyers, whatever. If you want to print it, ID is a great place to make it. For the most part, content created with ID was intended for print or PDF. But Adobe has created a whole new infrastructure within ID so that not only can one create standard documents for standard print jobs, but now one can easily create electronic documents meant for anything from ebooks to complex electronic publications with fully integrated Flash elements. Simply, what before would have required a seasoned Flash designer to create can now be created by you with no Flash coding. In addition to these new features, there are a host of other updates to the ID design dynamics that further enhance and improve the layout designs.

This new update for Lightroom 3 is rather unique in a very good way. Rather than building on its predecessors with a plethora of new features, this release has a plethora of significantly updated features. In fact, the only thing that's really new is a tethering feature, and a variation on new is the ability to upload to social media and image sites. This major "improvement" focus as opposed to major "new" focus is something I wish more applications would do; vastly improving already existing features to the point where they are as good as new features. In effect, this LR update is sort of like PS-CS5's JDI (Just Do It) plan, but on steroids.

Once you start "shooting raw," you'll never go back. And once you start working with ACR 6.1, you won't want to go back to earlier versions. Yes, it's that good. From Lens Profile Corrections to the new Noise elimination tools, to the enhanced Post Crop Vignetting and new Grain feature, this is a powerful update. ACR and Photoshop provide an image-working duo that creates a wealth of photo-manipulation, enhancement, and control. Even if you are using ACR on JPEG images, you will find increased functionality at the initial stages of image correction/enhancement that will carry through to the end of the process.

If you've used Photoshop for years, get ready for some changes as to how you do things. With this new release, there are small traps hidden within a common interface. While none of these traps are bad, in fact most are great, they still might trip you up. But by no means should you let them get in your way to one of the best updates to Photoshop in years. This stellar release has many new ground-breaking features as well as many JDI updates we've been asking for for years. For some, the JDI (Just Do It) enhancements might be enough by themselves to make you want to update.

Illustrator CS5 has some of the most amazing new features ever presented in an Illustrator release, but still has the same amazing limitations it's had for years. I suppose we users are used to the limitations, but at least we can enjoy the Beautiful Strokes, Bristle Brushes, Perspective Grids, Pixel Perfect drawings, and the impressive Shape Builder to name a few features that will keep us working better, faster, and more intelligently than before. In other words, CS5 is a worthy upgrade.