Price: Suggested $109.00 Authors: JASC Software, Inc Web site: JASC Software

So, what do you do once you go on to writing more professional Web sites, and don't want to use free graphics on them? What if you need more features than the painting package that came with your operating system (like Windows Paint) offers? Go on to a commercial graphics package, of course.

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard in graphics creation and modification, but for occasional or home use it's very expensive. Paint Shop Pro offers 80% of the features for a much, much lower price - and unless you're an artist, you may well not use many of the more obscure functions that Photoshop offers.

Paint Shop Pro offers all the standard drawing and text features, including anti-aliasing (smoothing of the edges of text and images so that they look less jagged) and a wide selection of image deformations, effects and filters, with the option to create your own if you know how. Layers are supported, so that you can place objects over or under others and make them more transparent, and masks to stop you from editing certain parts of the image are available. Your 'brush' can take a number of different heads, including pictures, and 'Image Tubes', which draw different images as you drag them across the page, make it easy to create backgrounds for images. Multiple undos are possible. Usefully, there are a wide variety of input and output image file formats, although more can be taken in than written out - check the help files before assuming that you can re-save an image in its original file format if it's a more unusual one.

Animation Shop is packaged with it, providing a fairly easy way to create GIF animations with transitions and fade effects. It's designed to work with Paint Shop Pro, though - its own drawing features are pretty poor.

These are just the features of Version 5.0 - Version 6.0, which has just come out at the time of writing, should offer even more.

Any package has its limitations, though, and in Paint Shop Pro it sometimes takes more time than is really necessary to do some things, such as that you can't apply an effect to all the layers at once, but have to merge the layers first - and then you can't un-merge them again. Multiple redos were unavailable in Version 5.0, but should appear in Version 6.0.

Overall, Paint Shop Pro is an excellent and powerful product, considering its price, and the limitations within it are not too bad, especially as some may have been fixed in the newest version.