For everyday snapshots of your kids, your dog, and your road trip to see the world’s largest ball of twine, your Mac comes with iPhoto, a simple way to organize and edit your photos. But pro shutterbugs and photography enthusiasts need far more serious tools to manage ever-growing libraries of tens of thousands of images. Adobe’s latest iteration of Lightroom aims to answer that call with pro-level organization and photo management, as well as robust editing tools for perfecting your shots.

It’s summer, so that must mean heat, humidity--and, in 2010--time for a new update to the Adobe suite of apps, including the flagship of the fleet, Photoshop. The CS5 iteration is a significant step forward, for reasons big and small, and overall, it’s one of the strongest upgrades in the 20 years that Photoshop has graced hard drives around the world.

There was a time when Premiere was the editing application on the Mac. Then Final Cut Pro and iMovie appeared. That prompted Avid to create consumer and prosumer versions of its expensive pro products, and Premiere quietly disappeared from the Mac landscape. But Adobe brought its video editor back a few versions ago, and this latest version is ready to do battle with Final Cut Pro--but it’s also charging too hard into the prosumer market.