The student used Adobe Photoshop and InDesign to create elements for their music magazine. In Photoshop, they were able to edit images, cut out backgrounds, and create separate layers to easily edit elements. Photoshop also had effects like brush strokes and text formatting that enhanced the cover and contents pages. While InDesign allowed the student to create their DPS, it was more complicated than Photoshop due to separate boxes overlapping and lacked some of Photoshop's effects, so those elements had to be created separately in Photoshop first.