Photoshop is the go-to image editing and manipulation software used by almost everyone in the industry. Photoshop excels in working with raster (bitmap) graphics and is capable of producing highly detailed compositions. While originally intended to be a photo manipulation program, Photoshop has been taken up by digital painters and design professionals in both the classroom and workplace.

InDesign does page layouts. It allows you to produce and preview documents for magazines, both in print and online across mobile and desktop platforms. It offers more precision with typography than Photoshop, but less in the graphics department. InDesign is made for publishing. Ideally, projects rendered are newspapers, posters, and other marketing material.

Illustrator is the Photoshop of vector art, also known as resolution-independent graphics. By comparison, Photoshop is used to create raster art, also called bitmap graphics.

Illustrator is the Photoshop of vector art, also known as resolution-independent graphics. By comparison, Photoshop is used to create raster art, also called bitmap graphics.

Premiere Pro is used to edit and cut video tracks, and then export them in the desired format. The project panel allows you to grab individual clips and add them to a timeline to create a movie. Titles can be added, elements from the rest of the Adobe suite can be added, and color corrections can be applied. It wasn’t until recently that Premiere started to receive a lot of attention. It was with version CS5.5 that the Mercury Playback Engine was refined, which allowed faster performance that takes advantage of GPU-acceleration and multi-core processors.

Fireworks is a fascinating creature. Like Illustrator, it works primarily with vector graphics with some marginal bitmap editing available. But, Fireworks is oriented for web and mobile application development. Fireworks can make just about any graphics interactive, and it allows you to create both wireframes and object behaviors. With that said, it is geared more towards developers and less towards artists.