Product Reviews

Digital cameras make photography easy. There are no more processing costs, and you have endless opportunities to take and retake photos. Best of all, though, is the opportunity it gives you to 'clean up' your snaps - removing red-eye from flash photos, for instance, and brightening colours. Most cameras come with basic software for doing this - but if you want really professional-looking results, it pays to go for software with a bit more polish.

Several packages are vying for your cash, including Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, which has now reached version 8. This isn't just a minor upgrade from the last edition: Paint Shop Pro is now more powerful and easier to use. But does it have the edge over its rivals?

An annoying aspect of previous versions was that some 'palettes' of tools or controls were not anchored on-screen, and got in the way of the image you were editing. In version 8, the Layers palette is kept out of the way at the right-hand edge of the screen, where it takes less space. Tool options now have a horizontal bar below the menus - where they should have been all along.

Other changes have been made to text handling, and the use of 'masks'. Masks work like masking

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tape when you're painting woodwork, by protecting the masked areas from any changes you make. Masks in previous version of Paint Shop Pro were much better than those offered by its rival, Photoshop Elements 2, but were still devilishly tricky to use. Now they appear separately on the layers palette, making them a lot easier to edit. Multi-layered montages are far easier to create and then tweak. The text box, however, no longer allows you to control the colour or fill of your text - these controls have moved elsewhere. Nor does it show a preview of the effects you apply to text. Photoshop Elements is still ahead in this respect.

Paint Shop Pro excels in features for photographers. To the existing auto-contrast adjustment, auto-saturation enhancement and other photo-fixing options, version 8 adds a new 'straighten' tool, an excellent tool for correcting perspective, and a filter to rectify lens distortion. This corrects the 'barrel' distortion produced by zoom lenses at the wide-angle setting. It's a feature every image-editing program really ought to have. Improved vector drawing and painting tools, background erasing and script recording - plus various other tweaks and additions - round off a very well-thought out upgrade.

So is it better than Photoshop Elements 2, our current Top 50 Best Buy? On paper, undoubtedly. In practice, Elements is still more approachable - and quicker at handling high-resolution images. That said, this program does so much more than Elements that you have to take it very seriously - and that lens distortion correction is simply a must-have. Photoshop Elements is easy to use but a bit underpowered in the long run. Ulead's PhotoImpact is exciting and innovative, but too confusing. Paint Shop Pro 8 really is the best all-rounder.