Photoshop continues to be the photo graphics editor standard against which other products are measured. Used by more graphics professionals than just about any other photo-editing and paint program, it's solid and brimming with features.

The new version, carrying the CS (Creative Suite) extension, includes a raft of new features for most types of user. Everybody should benefit from the improved file browser, which offers many of the features of photo album-style products, such as Adobe's own PhotoShop Album 2.0. As well as viewing thumbnails, you can preview at a variety of sizes before loading, and add information, such as copyright details and keywords for searching.

Several of the new features for photo artists suggest more mass-market products, too. There's now a simple way to match colours between photo-objects, while leaving their underlying textures unchanged. This kind of colour replacement first appeared as a red-eye tool in Photoshop Elements.

The colour histogram, useful for checking the colour make-up of an image, is now available as a real-time tool, which you can use to monitor changes. You can intelligently stitch pictures together, too, to create panoramas and dig detail out of the shadows with Shadow/Highlight correction.

Graphic designers will like this version of Photoshop CS for its introduction of text on a path, with which you can create and edit text running at angles and along curves. You can also work on images up to 300,000 pixels square, large enough for billboard design, and develop multiple versions of graphics using layers to hold the version differences.

Adobe includes ImageReady CS with Photoshop CS. This Web image designer and editor offers improved multiple selection controls, direct export to Macromedia Flash and more compact HTML code when you've finished.

Photoshop has advanced to a stage where one can do virtually anything with image files. The improvements in this version are mostly improvements to simplify the processes and I suppose to improve stability (which still needs a little work) and speed, which is spectacular.

The user interface has been much improved over the years and I believe a novice should be able to teach himself the basics of this programme by just playing around. It is that good, even though CS has more features than ever. There are a multitude of books available, though, which I would recommend even professional users to consider, as there are so many features available. As one reviewer wrote about a famous PC Game: "Easy to learn, hard to master".

The point is that Photoshop has been the leader for so long, it is the industry standard, and will be for a while, because no one else comes close. (I have always been a very loyal supporter of Corel products, especially of the WordPerfect series, but Photoshop puts Corel Photopaint to shame).

If you are a professional photographer or designer, you will know that this is an essential purchase. If you are a serious amateur looking for the very best image editing software available (regardless of price), this is the one to get, although Photoshop Elements 3.0 is also a very worthwhile purchase, as it contains many of the features in this package (but not the ones the more professional users would need).

For me, photo-editing has been transformed from the pain it once was to a very enjoyable part of my job, thanks to Photoshop.