.... But not dumbed-down. Without the ponderousness (and high prices!) of InDesign or Quark, or even Apple's Pages, Swift Publisher provides you with the tools you need to create professional-looking short documents from scratch - flyers, newsletters, brochures, letterheads, certificates, fax cover pages, booklets, business cards, CD/DVD art, address or shipping labels - virtually any type of document combining text and graphics

The biggest bargain in Mac graphics commercial software gets even better with a new user interface and a raft of new and expanded features

JPixelmator has released a new update to version 1.1.2.. This spectacular-looking new Mac-only PSE-challenger is maturing rapidly, but there's is still a way to go. Pixelmator vs. Photoshop Elements Revisited

If you don't care if your monitor is calibrated and/or you do not care if your photograph prints match what you see on your monitor, save your time and energy—stop reading this review. On the other hand, if you already do calibrate your monitor and/or have been thinking that calibration is a good idea, check out the Pantone® huey™PRO. The one feature that makes the hueyPRO stand out is that it changes your monitor brightness as the room's brightness conditions change.

Make your text projects pieces of professionsl-looking graphic art. This program's set of tools allows you to express your imagination, creativity, and sense of design freely, and have a lot of fun in the process

Photoshop is filled with redundant features. Amongst these, none of them have more redundancy than selection tools. I just made a mental count of about a dozen different ways to create a selection in Photoshop, and when it gets right down to it, that's not enough. That's why there are third-party solutions, and I have to admit that of all of the solutions I've seen, none creates as good of a selection as Fluid Mask 3. With great power comes great responsibility, however, and that means that Fluid Mask has a greater learning curve and is a bit more challenging to learn. But the results you achieve will be exactly what you wanted.

Is there room for another player in the mid-range OS X bitmap image. editor category? How does this new "simple and easy" image editor stack up against Photoshop Elements and Color It!?

The thrust the Dynamics Learning series is to not just tell you what various programs can do, but to give you projects that guide you through these capabilities. It's like taking a training seminar, only you're the only one there and you can take your lunch break whenever you want. The first book I've tried out in this series is Dynamic Learning: Photoshop CS3, which is a great place for me to start.

Adobe has done a fantastic job in creating a program that, from out of nowhere, was strong competition to a program that had already been out for a long time (cough Quark cough). With this new, fifth version, Adobe provides a more fleshed out program, rather than introducing some major new features. That's not to say the new features are small, but those Mac users who've been waiting for FrameMaker capabilities (after Adobe killed the Mac version in April 2004) within InDesign will have to continue to wait. There are Text Variables (new with ID-CS3, explained below) that are powerful, but right now, very limited. The good news is that there have been some great refinements and wonderful UI improvements across InDesign's features and abilities.

It's been about 20 years since Illustrator first appeared as a Postscript vector program. It still is a Postscript vector program, although it has gone through a "few changes" in those intervening years. Over that time, some of the updates have been shoulda-woulda-coulda, and some have had major and/or significant component updates. Adobe Illustrator CS3 (aka Illustrator 13) is one of the later, with some very important new components while also improving the general user interface of the basic program. This is a welcome release.

Is there room for more players in the mid-range OS X bitmap image. editor category? Checking out Pixelmator 1.0, a new Core Image-Based image editing program for OS X which is being promoted as an 'image editor for the rest of us,' and even more ambitiously as a potential "Photoshop-killer." As we discovered, those boasts are more than a bit extravagent at this point, but this application looks great and has plenty of potential. Updated with Pixelmator 1.0.1 release notes

A basic, (and free) more Mac-like the GIMP for the less-geekily-oriented, but it's no Photoshop (or GIMP) replacement for photo correction or advanced image editing