Adobe Creative Suite 2 product reviews

As a complete package, this has basically everything you need to create any 2-dimensional artwork you could ever want. With Photoshop leading the way as the ultimate pixel-based image editing application, bundled with it's companion ImageReady sidekick handling the web-work and animation side of things, you can then incorporate vector artwork with Illustrator, and utilising Adobe's stunning mediacentre 'Bridge', you can then use your artwork to make documents in InDesign and then export them as either webpages using GoLive, or output them for print using Acrobat.

The only thing missing really, is the full-on multimedia presentation, which would require the use of either 'Premiere' if you need to assemble movie footage, or After Effects if you just want to build it up from 'flat' images, or your movie clips are all ready to run with. I would also suggest you look into a good audio suite, if you want to go that way... Adobe Audition for example.

I have long been a fan of Photoshop and about a year ago discovered the virtues of Acrobat when I started writing Photoshop tutorials. Utilising the Stock Photos as raw materials for these tutorials is great, as the variety allows me to test the effects on a number of content-types, ensuring that I don't stumble and say it will work, when it won't under certain circumstances.

Overall, I would have to say that for any serious graphic professional, this is the package to be looking at. Though I have heard some say that CS1 was better, I would have to disagree. I have found CS2 to be smoother, faster and more feature packed than the previous suite. With the addition of After Effects, I have everything I need to make the art and animations I dream up into realities. And if you consider the price of buying the applications individually, the smart buyer will grab the suite instead, saving hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.