DiapoSheet creates contact sheets of your images. It has a host of features for a new application (currently at v. 1.1) and does a very good job of providing the functions it intends to. It is relatively easy to manipulate, customize, and fine-tune to your needs. While a bit more pricey than one may wish, it is worth the money.

Imagine the power of Photoshop. Now imagine the power of Photoshop on your phone. Photoshop Touch has been on the iPad for some time, and that's all well and good if you're taking images on your iPad and/or you don't mind transferring images from your iPhone to the iPad, but the reality is that we are probably more likely to be taking images on the iPhone itself. If we need to do something to that image now before we send it out to all of our friends, we need to fix it on our iPhone. Well, now we can. With some exceptions with the profoundly bad Help for Photoshop Touch, Photoshop Touch works mostly amazingly well.

Acrobat XI has been released by Adobe, adding new capabilities and removing some strong features. Most significantly for Windows users, LiveCycle Designer has been completely dropped (it's still available but as a separate product) along with Acrobat Suites (unrelated to the Creative Suites). For everyone, there's been the removal of self-contained multimedia capabilities within Acrobat. Rather, Acrobat has shifted gears somewhat to focus on its core function: creating PDFs from more sources. It also adds better capabilities to export from Acrobat into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In addition, it is much easier to edit PDFs and to work with images within PDFs. And finally, after watching the Creative Suites provide workspaces for over 10 years, we now have workspaces within Acrobat, but alas, the interface...

Extensis released this new version of its font management program, Suitcase Fusion, some time ago, but I chose to hold off on releasing my review until all aspects of the application were up and running. Sadly for Extensis, a big part of this wait was for Adobe to make some bug repairs to Photoshop so that it, Illustrator and InDesign could take advantage of an interesting new feature in Suitcase 4. If you do a lot of font experimentation during the creative stage of your design work, the wait was worth it (but with caveats, as you will read).

With Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), it's a whole new ball game. It offers new algorithms to both interpret raw images and to process them, including the ability to work with 32-bit HDR images. ACR continues to amaze photographers who've learned that raw images will lead to significantly better results than letting the camera interpret what's been gathered. Bridge, however, has stalled. This incredibly useful application has barely had any adaptations or improvements beyond upgrading to 64 Bit. Regardless of what hasn't happened to Bridge for CS6, Adobe Camera Raw is reason enough to update your Photoshop.

This is Illustrator, the overhaul version. After 25 years (yup, it's been out that long now), Illustrator is having the first major internal overhaul since, well, ever. It's not that there haven't been internal updates, there have. But this release is now 64-bit native and is one of the applications from Adobe that is getting the Mercury update engine to better speed things up. By that, I mean that not only is AI getting access to as much memory as you've got (that's where the 64-bit comes in) but it is also accessing hardware acceleration via OpenCL. And while all that was being done, the AI team also completely rewrote the Live Trace feature (now called Image Trace) and introduces a new Pattern Maker that is as much fun to use as the results are to behold. So sit back and be ready to enjoy Illustrator CS6.

Photoshop didn't really have an update with the 5.5 build other than some bug fixing. That's why when some of the Adobe applications show CS5.5, PS showed CS5.1. That means that they've had a whole two years to develop CS6, and it shows. When CS5 showed up, the public was warned that a lot of developing time went into making PS 64 bit, not that the focus on 64 bit seemed to have slowed down their creativeness in that build. With CS6, we get some expanded filters, improved painting tools, enhanced content aware fill capabilities, a whole new way to deal with the distortion of wide angle lenses, and new video features that may make Premiere Pro look unnecessary for small projects.

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.