Everything I'm telling you about today was the result of a meeting around a month ago with Mike Lampietro of Adobe a demo and some slides, as and when the new versions are available which I am told is likely to be around the end of September I will try various things for myself in separate reviews.

For those who fall into the rather limited budget category and wish to stick with the kudos of an Adobe branded product then Adobe Photoshop Elements is the obvious route to take.  Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 is the first version of the product to be released since the launch of Windows Vista and comes with some additional features.

Several years ago, when I had fewer grey hairs and a slimmer waist line, two companies went head-to-head with products designed to create documents in digital format enabling them to be read by everybody in their original state.  The eventual winner was Adobe with its Acrobat product and PDF format while the WordPerfect offering disappeared into obscurity.

I found it took 10 minutes + a reboot to install of a reasonable fast XP system. It took 1040MB of space. Now the PC I put it on is around a year old and not my main work machine so I was more than a little surprised when I allowed it to create thumbnails of the images it found 19,000 items and took 23 minutes to do so. At that point it wanted to do the red eye correction and I then decided to opt out.

Like most Adobe products it is not an impulse buy, the price is such that even a product such as this - a powerful tool - prevents that. However I suspect will rapidly become an everyday tool for most professional photographers and also the keen amateur who works with RAW images. Adobe Lightroom This programme works with both RAW and Jpg images. Having worked with the image within Lightroom the changed image can be saved as Jpeg or TIFF.

As processing power increases and hard disk storage costs decrease so more and more people are becoming involved in the creation of home videos.  While the professional fraternity are able to afford the premium price of around £700 for a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro, for many this cost makes the product too expensive especially when you consider you could buy a new system for less.

Adobe PhotoShop is an excellent product with a range of features and a high performance level.  However this quality does come with a premium price tag that puts the software out of the range of many users.  This is not only my opinion but that of Adobe as well.  The result of this is that Adobe has developed PhotoShop Elements.

While I do not claim that Photoshop and are in any way the same product the more basic features are there, and if like with a word processor you are one of the 80% who use 20% of the features may fulfil your needs. Photoshop Elements Photoshop Elements As with a lot of recent software not only does it require Windows XP but will only work if you have (SP2) service pack 2 installed. The processor requirement is 1.3GHz or better.

If your job is photo editing then you almost certainly use PhotoShop however if your hobby is photo editing then the extra cost may not reachable. Certainly PhotoShop Elements is a step towards the main product. However the learning curve is not as steep and it can be described as the consumers PhotoShop.   Certainly the Organiser module works in such a way that others struggle to offer the same.

Around two years ago Adobe came to the conclusion that what was suitable for office applications would also be appropriate for graphics applications. As a result the company decided to integrate its various graphics titles into a single offering and so Creative Suite was born. Following the successful launch of the original offering, we now have Creative Suite version2 (CS2) which is available in Standard and Premium editions.

The two products are Adobe Photoshop Elements v3 and Adobe Premiere Elements. Adobe are one of the few companies that still manage to maintain a reasonable price for there software with the likely street price for a full copy of either being around £500. Of course the 'Essential' units do only a proportion of what can be achieved with the full product.