Cheap Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 [Old Version] (Software) (Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows 98) Price

PaintShop Pro is one of the original graphics editors, stretching back over 10 years. This latest version of the program features a new interface, which is more logically organized. Gone are the cumbersome floating palettes, so much a feature of earlier iterations. The tool options palette, for example, is now a context-sensitive ribbon under the menu bar. Lifting a leaf out of the CorelDraw handbook, the colour palette and several others have been rearranged as dockers on the right-hand side of the screen, too.

The painting engine itself has been rewritten, to give smoother control over your brushstrokes and it's now quite possible to do delicate work with the mouse, where before a graphics tablet might have been necessary.

Several new tools have been introduced and others have been enhanced, so they’re equally useful to the casual photo retoucher and the professional digital artist. A couple of examples are the red-eye removal and erase-to-background tools. Red-eye removal calls up a two-pane dialog, for editing on the left and preview on the right. After highlighting each eye in turn and selecting the color and hue you want it to have, the result can be a very natural looking pair of irises.

Erase-to-background enables you to paint away any part of a photo and leave just the unpainted parts as a foreground image. It's more intelligent than a simple eraser and detects line edges, so works particulraly well on high-contrast subjects. Other new tools include warp and mesh warp brushes

A major new productivity feature is the scripting recorder, with which you can teach the program a task and get it to repeatedly run that sequence of operations. This is ideal, for example, if you want to convert a batch of files from one format to another or resize a series of images. --Simon Williams, Amazon.co.uk