Paint Shop Pro Photo XI

Arguably, Paint Shop Pro is the closest competition to Adobe Photoshop, offering a great deal for its very reasonable price.

It is possibly too daunting for absolute beginners, but anyone with a passing acquaintance with image editors should pick it up fairly quickly.

You can move, dock and customise every palette and even save workspace arrangements for different tasks.

Paint Shop Pro has always had an extensive toolkit and this release is no exception, offering the obvious crop, scratch remover and red-eye correction tools alongside more impressive ones such as Photo Fix, which automatically optimises an image's colour balance, contrast, clarity, saturation and sharpness.

New features inlcude Smart Photo Fix which allows you to correct a number of settings simultaneously, including brightness, colour saturation and focus.

There are also some clever 'makeover' tools that allow you to improve portrait photography. The Blemish Fixer can remove skin imperfections such as wrinkles and moles, and there's a 'toothbrush' tool that can even whiten teeth.

These tools work well, but our favourite improvement is the redesigned Learning Centre. This is a panel that provides help with all the program's main tools.

However, rather than just providing simple hints and tips, the Learning Centre will actually select tools for you and display them on screen to get you started. This is a major step in the ease-of-use direction, which Corel will hope attracts a new audience.

Paint Shop Pro XI contains a number of new features, such as The Organizer, a new Color Changer tool, Time Machine (which enables you to turn your modern photos in to those taken in a previous era), Skin Smoothing and many new filter effects.