Product Reviews

Kitting out your PC with all the software required to make it useful can be expensive. The cheapest version of Microsoft Office costs around £300. A good photo editor will set you back around £70, while anti-virus and other vital security software can cost £30-50. Before you know it, you've spent more on software than it cost you to buy the PC. It's barmy - or so Woolworths seems to think. The venerable vendor of unnecessary plastic objects has brought out a range of own-brand software, including such essentials as an office suite and an anti-virus program. No title costs more than £25,

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and most are much cheaper. We filled our basket and tried them all.

The two leading photo editors for home users, Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Paint Shop Pro, both cost around £70. When you consider that they each contain lots of advanced functions you may not use, that's quite a lot.

Woolworths Photo Editor only costs £10, and it's surprising how many decent features it contains. You get all the artistic filters and effects you'd expect (yes, you can make your photo look like a charcoal drawing if you really want to). It allows you to crop and resize, and as well as pretend tools like brightness and contrast you get proper ones like curves and gamma. Drawing with the Bézier pen, fiddly at the best of times, is trickier than ever, but if you just want to touch up photos, you won't need to do that.

Where Photo Editor does fall short is in the assistance it offers. Hand-holding is at a minimum: apart from the standard Help function, you're left to get on with it. We can see this causing some frustration among users who'd appreciate the market leaders' step-by-steps and video tutorials. Otherwise, though, this is a good package for the price.