adobe

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium Student Edition [Mac]
$1,799.99
After getting away from Adobe products years ago when I switched over to Macs, I recently decided to invest in this product suite because I was still a student for a few more months and I wanted to have Photoshop and Dreamweaver for my photography business. Both products have performed above expectations and the extra programs thrown into this suite also have been used on a few occasions for various things such as resumes, photographic album design, and even logo editing. The price on this package can't be beat and if you ever suspect needing any of these tools, buying it while you are still a student will save you hundreds!

Adobe Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [OLD VERSION]
$149.99
My interest is in creating beautiful studio portraits, and then adding my client's favorite music, to create a "music video" on either a standard definition or Blu-ray DVD.

I work exclusively on a high-def Timeline, even when the goal is only a SD DVD.

The PRE7 and PSE7 bundle work seamlessly together on my system (Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, Q6600 CPU, 4GB RAM) and my results are breathtaking.

I downloaded the trial version of the 8 bundle, and I'm sticking with 7.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
$299.00
Had seen Light Room in action, but didn't realize it had both Win and Mac on the same disk. Since I have both machines it was a real pleasant surprise. A great program, better suited to many photo tasks than Photoshop.

Adobe Acrobat Professional 9
$449.00
Pros: "looks nice"

Cons: Does not export pdf to other formats without a lot of errors ( ie Word docs, text, RTF etc)

Summary: I have version 5 and I like it better. I don't know why there are so many errors going from PDF to other formats. It makes it useless. I am glad I tried the 30 day trial and advise anyone to try it fully to see if it meets your needs. Sorry but for me, I'll stay with verion 5 and not upgrade.