I should be a spokesman for Adobe!

So last week I was sitting in an interview with a design firm that is looking to outsource some projects to local freelancers.  Of course the typical question of how familiar are you with Adobe Creative Suite question came up; having used Photoshop for over a decade now, and Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver and most of the rest of the creative suite for almost as long I'm extremely familiar with these programs.

I went into detail about how I tend to use Illustrator for most of my logo designs because most logos should be drawn in vector format.  I explained that I use Photoshop to add "flair" and "finish" qualities to images. InDesign is THE only page layout program to use anymore and DreamWeaver is my go to web layout program.

This company was using older versions of CS and asked me what I thought about them upgrading their software ... THIS IS A MUST ... I tell them.  Quickly I pulled over one of the laptops on the table and open Photoshop and began giving them a demonstration about the "new" features in each of these programs and how they will not only save time (i.e. money) but how their designs will benefit from the upgrades as well.  Although I'm still working off of CS3 mainly due to a slower 4th quarter I plan to upgrade my entire Adobe Creative Suite to CS4 asap!

Especially after seeing this sneak peak about CS5 on Nettuts+.

After that a photographer friend of mine sent me over a few images from a wedding that she had shot to get my opinion as to what to "DO" to the images to give them that "dreamy" wedding portrait feel.  I popped the images into Adobe Lightroom and sent them back to her.  She was like "OMG, how did you do that so quickly!"  Luckily, she is on a mac as well and I gave her a 45 minute tutorial about all the great features of Adobe Lightroom.  She said that she needed to get this program asap.  Lightroom is the program that I do most of the post production work in for j. mathew buter photography and really it is a simple easy to use tool ... for even those that don't understand Photoshop.

The husband of the photographer that I was talking to was asking me how much commission I make from pedaling Adobe products and I was like ... "Ummm ... none ... but I should!"