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The two products are Adobe Photoshop Elements v3 and Adobe Premiere Elements. Adobe are one of the few companies that still manage to maintain a reasonable price for there software with the likely street price for a full copy of either being around £500. Of course the 'Essential' units do only a proportion of what can be achieved with the full product. However it reminds me that 80% of people use 20% of the features of most packages so unless you use either product heavily you are likely to save a good amount of cash and still achieve your goal.

Adobe Photoshop Elements v3

This is now in it's third version and has attracted the sincerest form of flattery by other manufacturers of similar products - copying - as there are now a whole range of similar cut down products on the market.

See also: Graphic software

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Everything to do with a captured photographic image from storing to improving to displaying is covered by Photoshop Elements v3. 256MB of RAM is required to use this product and at least Windows XP (Home or Professional) with service pack 1 or later. As with most recent products burning to CD is supported as indeed is burning to DVD. A getting started guide is provided.

Other products from other manufacturers can do most if not all of what Photoshop Elements can do however it is unlikely that their major product can do the same things that Photoshop does so if there is any likelihood that you may progress to Photoshop and what it does it makes sense to start with Photoshop Elements so you get used to the way Adobe does things.

Adobe Premiere Elements

With Video work becoming almost as popular as people printing there own photographs with a printer it makes sense for a cut down version of what was a very specialised product when it was conceived. So although Premiere is only at v1.5 here is Premiere Elements.

In simple terms Premier Elements does for video what Photoshop Elememts does for still images. However working with video is a lot more involved, two examples of this are that a user guide is provide and there are far fewer competitors in the mainstream marketplace. Requirements are the same as Elements but to run both together will require 512MB of RAM and 2GB of hard disc space.

It is possible to transfer material from a DV camcorder to a  timeline in a single process. Trimming scenes or removing unwanted parts is another comparatively simple task. A lot of people spend hours on captions and titles this can be made a lot easier in Premiere Elements, making them track, spin, move and fly are all possible and dare I say fairly easy.

Finally and perhaps most important with video, burning to DVD is now something most people can do, as once you have filmed and edited your epic you certainly want to be able to show it to everyone else for years to come.

So this one box solution is about one tenth the price of the two full packages of course they cannot do everything the full products do but at one tenth the price you cannot expect them to. It is available from www.dabs.com for £95.17.