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

Advanced long document functionality and screen-based publishing via Flash contribute to another Quark-bashing.

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

With Web Standard/Premium, Design Premium AND Macromedia’s products now absorbed into CS3, choosing the right suite is EASY.

Photoshop moves beyond photo editing to conquer completely new territory.

Powerful new versions of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, and now Acrobat 8 Professional too.

Improved interface, object and layer handling, plus integrated 3D painting add greatly to power, usability and value

There is a growing demand for a decent all-in-one digital imaging pack that covers everything from organising your photographs to editing your videos and eventually burning them onto DVD. Ulead has attempted to provide it by bundling four of its core programs into a single package and there are few more comprehensive digital imaging suites than StudioQuartet. While the price tag is out of the range of many home users, the enthusiast will save up for it and provide themselves with everything they need to create multimedia projects.

In conjunction with several of their other top-of-the-line software application upgrades, discreet have released the long-awaited combustion 3. Unique in some of its features and price point, combustion seems to have been searching for its market-place slot. Sharing the code, tools and quality of its bigger siblings, flame, inferno and smoke, combustion has, in the last two years, pulled its price down from 10 thousand dollars to around two thousand.

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.)

Adobe Photoshop is so dominant when it comes to print and Web-based bitmap-editing that, in many ways, it has come to define the whole field...

TrueSpace has always led the pack in terms of features as far as Windows 3D animation packages under $2,000 are concerned. Recently, however, the market has become rather crowded, with a powerful upgrade to Ray Dream (reviewed issue 9, p100) and the cut-down version of LightWave 3D (Inspire 3D) both challenging it on features and price.