Photoshop moves beyond photo editing to conquer completely new territory.

With advanced packages such as the latest Photoshop (to be reviewed next month) Adobe is the leading software developer when it comes to traditional graphic design...

A new focus on animation, better video support and deeper integration, but not the core authoring package it once was.

New realism for bristled brushes and automatic painting that approaches manual quality give Painter X an edge.

The new interface plus PDF and AIR export sees Fireworks CS4 fully integrated into the Creative Suite.

Non-destructive image processing and creative filters feature in this comprehensive upgrade to the market leader.

Macromedia Flash (May 2002, page 60), Dreamweaver, Fireworks and FreeHand (Studio MX, November 2002, page 71), have all been given the MX treatment, and now it's Director's turn.

After the launch of the latest Acrobat a few months ago, everything went quiet on the Adobe front. It's now clear what the company was working on, with the simultaneous launch of each of its main creative design packages -- Photoshop/ImageReady, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive. (Please see individual reviews of all of these packages on this month's cover CD.)

Throughout its long and chequered career – first under MetaCreations, then Procreate and now Corel – Painter has always stood out as the artistic and creative computer application bar none. The reason is simple: Painter's unique range of natural media brushes.

A shift of focus to advanced CSS and JavaScript handling, but Dreamweaver is beginning to look old-fashioned

With its enhanced interface, support for transparency and new collaboration features, it’s the best release in years.

Still heavy going, but a raft of improvements means it’s the most comprehensive drawing package on the market.

Improved media handling, Flash video support and greater interactivity see Captivate extend into new areas of training.

Xenofex 2 is an updated range of Photoshop-compatible plug-ins from Alien Skin, the developer of Eye Candy 4000, one of the most popular filter collections and a personal favourite of ours. This was mainly down to its interface, which is thankfully shared by the new Xenofex collection.

What makes PDF (Portable Document Format) unique is that it can provide an exact electronic replica of any document from any application on all major platforms, including all text, graphics and fonts. It’s an amazingly flexible format with a myriad of uses ranging from electronic manuals and e-books, through secure document exchange and archiving, to multimedia presentation and high-end commercial print.

FrontPage used to pride itself on its almost code-free approach to Web design, but not any more. Top of the new coding features is the Split View, which combines layout and HTML views. There are also improved code formatting and Auto-complete features, providing a drop-down list of context-sensitive options as you type. Auto-complete also handles regularly reused code snippets and works with HTML, CSS, XSL, JavaScript, JScript, VBScript and ASP .NET, which are all directly editable.

QuarkXPress defines and dominates high-end publishing in much the same way as Adobe Photoshop does photo editing.

A period of transition as Adobe deals with its Macromedia inheritance and the changing nature of the web.

An excellent release that reworks Photoshop’s core colour-correction capabilities, making them even more powerful

A new interface, drawing engine and programming language, but surprisingly little new power.