Buying Adobe CS4

regarding indesign: i was once all about indesign for making my notes as exam preparation, but then i gave LaTeX a closer look and for what i can say: it's like all the way to go. you can get it for free and there is tons of addons and literature on the web. once you get a hang of it you can make professional looking documents in no time. save the money for indesign on something better!

There's no way you can survive without Dreamweaver If you are going to work with websites, it's worthy every penny

As for an alternative for InDesign you can get Quark Xpress, but I have no idea on how costly it is and I wouldn't recommend any of them unless you are going to work with magazines, newspapers etc.. because they are very specific and costly software.

The good thing is that it's both a technical and design software. Writing HTML/CSS without it is extremely painful and slow. Trust me, even if you are only doing simple pages you are totally going to need DW and HTML as flash sites really suck.

Sure you can look for free alternatives but DW is definitely the top software when it comes to designing sites.

Dreamweavers like Microsoft Frontpage.

Except not shitty, conforms to web standards and is about a billion times better all round.

InDesign is primarily used for magazine/brochure production. Indeed, it's one of the industry standards in this respect, much like Photoshop is the industry standard for web design and texturing. Its direct and only real competitor is Quark. I'd say it has absolutely no relevance to web design at all.

If you're planning on going into web design, you'll really need to be able to write the HTML and CSS yourself. This is pretty much an industry standard skill now, and in fact employers will often want to see proficiency in Javascript and the ability to work around languages such as ASP.NET and PHP too. The convenience of Dreamweaver is nice, but for complex design it's not really very good (browser bugs will get ya).

The best way to learn to write HTML and CSS is to force yourself to use a text editor (even if it's a fancy one) and avoid the visual editors like Dreamweaver, which sacrifice control for ease of use — kind of like using an automatic seamless texture generator instead of editing it yourself. It's actually not very hard, but it can seem daunting at first. I've essentially taught someone to write good XHTML and CSS in a matter of weeks so it's not going to take years.

It's not clear what exactly you're doing at university, but as someone who's been a full-time web designer for two years I can say you don't really need much beyond Photoshop and Flash to do the job well. Dreamweaver is an excellent visual HTML editor, but practically all professional web companies have their (X)HTML written by hand nowadays. I do use Dreamweaver, but I only use the 'Code' part of it.

Quote from hessi

regarding indesign: i was once all about indesign for making my notes as exam preparation, but then i gave LaTeX a closer look and for what i can say: it's like all the way to go. you can get it for free and there is tons of addons and literature on the web. once you get a hang of it you can make professional looking documents in no time. save the money for indesign on something better!

I wish there was a voting function on Mapcore, because for mentioning LaTeX you deserve being upvoted! LaTeX simply does it right and if you happen to be a typography fetishist (like I am), there is imo nothing that comes close. :]

Lightroom is definitely geared towards photographers, and works best when you have lots of photos to process. If you have anything less than 'many', Photoshop is probably preferable. You don't really need the beginning-to-end flow that Lightroom offers.

Quote from Thrik

Lightroom is definitely geared towards photographers, and works best when you have lots of photos to process. If you have anything less than 'many', Photoshop is probably preferable. You don't really need the beginning-to-end flow that Lightroom offers.

I would personally pick DxO rather than Lightroom.

I'd go with Lightroom or an equivalent, then. That is a lot of photos!

I handle a reasonable amount, and it does get a little tiresome using Photoshop sometimes. It clearly just isn't designed for going through loads of images and tweaking their colour levels and whatnot, whereas Lightroom is directly designed for this. It can be made easier with Photoshop actions and bulk saves, but it's not the same.

I did use Lightroom briefly and was impressed by what I saw, anyway. It's easier to kind of 'get into' processing a fuckload of photos, if that makes sense.

Don't forget Adobe typically has 30-day trials for everything, so there's no reason to take anything from information alone. Give them a go!

I had a more or less related question, would anyone advice against buying second hand PS ? Saves quite a bit of money, but there is a catch perhaps? How does that work with the license.

I'm pretty sure that violates the licensing agreement. You may as well be pirating.

To give you an idea... At work we got audited by Autodesk and they threatened to fine us just because we were still using old version of their software. Evidentally, per the contract when we bought some new licenses we were supposed to have gotten rid of the older versions.

Commercial licenses are pretty strict, you can't resell them.

There are laws in the EU that allow you to resell your software license (given that you bought in the EU).