Photoshop CS3 is Adobe's flagship image editing software.
It's one of those pieces of 'equipment' which is a must have for any graphic designer, photographer or illustrator.

Basically Photoshop has such depth, that it can grow with you as a creative professional. On a weekly basis I find new features hidden away in the menu system, most of which I don't yet understand (and i've been using Photoshop for around 8 years).

As an overview, Photoshop can be used to:

-Retouch, edit and generally manipulate photos
-Create layouts for documents (although Adobe's sister product 'InDesign' is better suited for that)
-Create original artwork, with a wide vartiety of tools available
-Create basic animation

So all in all, a pretty versatile piece of equipment.

The Photoshop franchise is around 20 years old, and as such has had plenty of time to perfect itself as a product. It's one of those pieces of software where you don't necessarily have to own the newest version , as even Photoshop 6 has the majority of the necessary features - and that's eight years old!

Last years 'CS3' is the tenth version of the program and adds a few new features to the design package. It's also a lot larger in size than its predecessors, taking up to 1.5 Gigabytes of disk space.

New features of the CS3 version include:

-An updated user interface - especially in the form of a new dock palette design - this really helps conserve space on a small screen.

-The improvement to the 'Photomerge' feature, which allows you to join multiple images together. Now working even more effectively, this will be a huge boost for photographers.

-The new 'Auto-Align Layers' command, which helps line up selected layers, offering the ability to easily move and resize them as needed.

Plus many more subtle changes and improvements of a more minor nature.

The product costs around £850 - yep £850 - luckily, work provides me with a copy, so I don't have to shell out myself. If you want to upgrade from a previous version, it will still cost around £300.

If you're working for a company and therefore don't have to pay for this product personally, I would recommend the upgrade - as there are a few features which will make photo and document editing easier - however, I wouldn't recommend paying the full price for this software just for these minor upgrades.

That's not to say Photoshop isn't excellent - because it is. It's just you can do almost everything in the previous four versions.