VERDICT A rethought interface, new auto painting capabilities and excellent price make Painter Essentials a real creative star.
Corel’s flagship Painter application is unmatched for its ability to mimic traditional artistic media such as watercolours and oil paints – but no-one could claim that it makes the process simple. This is where the cut-down Painter Essentials comes in, promising to make the core of this creative power accessible to everyone.

VERDICT: Plenty of core new power for the digital camera user – but Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is still playing catch-up.

Over its long history Paint Shop Pro has built up a great deal of bitmap editing power, but it has also come to seem dated and increasingly out of tune with the times...

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VERDICT: A new interface, smart albums, guided editing and photo merging but comparatively little to boost core efficiency.

Organizing and enhancing thousands of digital photographs is a time-consuming task and the digital camera owner needs dedicated help to make the process as productive and enjoyable as possible...

Tom Arah shows you the best way to bring some texture into your design work.

Long-term readers will know that I am a big fan and keen advocate of the use of seamless bitmap textures. Such textures play an essential role in the production of 3D work, as we saw again last month, but they can also prove just as useful within 2D bitmap and vector environments...

Tom Arah explores the ways in which 3D modelling and bitmap editing can be creatively fused.

The end quality of 3D output depends largely on the application’s handling of materials and, more often than not, this involves mapping imported bitmaps to your objects’ surfaces...

VERDICT: Piranesi gets the major overhaul of interface and tools that its extraordinary creative power deserves.

Piranesi stands out from all other bitmap editors because it is able to handle material and depth information as well as colour; it might sound a relatively small difference but it unleashes a massive amount of 3D painting power...

Microsoft pulls off an extraordinary feat reinventing desktop application design, but it's only the taste of things to come regarding the web.

For years now there has been talk of Microsoft’s determination to move into the design software territory normally associated with Adobe. Now, with the launch of the Expression Studio suite, the talk is over – so how does it shape up?

VERDICT: Bizarrely antiquated and underpowered creative asset management.

To give a general boost to its professional design credentials and in particular to its Expression Studio suite, Microsoft decided that it needed an application for managing media assets and so bought up iView MediaPro 3...

Tom Arah explores the 3D handling in Adobe’s recent CS3 releases and wonders if it is a sign of things to come.

With its current blitz of CS3 software launches, it might seem that Adobe has the entire creative arena well covered. However there’s one surprising omission from the list – 3D.

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VERDICT: Powerful and award-winning new versions of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator – and now Acrobat 8 Professional too.

So here they are – the new professional platforms for both print and web design have arrived...