Top 10 Gifts for Photo Fun-atics

Photoshop Elements is designed for amateur photographers, digital imaging enthusiasts, and small business users. It incorporates many of Photoshop's powerful features and interface elements without being too overwhelming to the novice user. Automated features simplify many tasks such as posting online Web photo galleries and stitching multiple photos to create panoramas. Easy-to-use designer layouts let you create photo book pages, photo album pages, greeting cards, CD and DVD sleeves and labels, slide shows, Video-CDs, Web galleries, "flipbook" animations, calendars, and more. The integrated photo organizer makes it an excellent all-in-one photo solution.

Wacom's newest line of graphics tablets is perfect for photo-funatics. You can use a graphics tablet to edit photos, paint and draw with pressure sensitivity, write in your own handwriting, or simply as a more comfortable pointing device than a mouse. The medium-sized Bamboo Fun has a 8.5" by 5.3" wide-aspect active area, and comes with a cordless pen and mouse. Included with the Bamboo Fun tablet is an excellent bundle of software, including Photoshop Elements and Painter Essentials.

Corel Painter Essentials is designed to help beginners or non-artists create digital art and turn photos into art work. Users can turn photos into paintings automatically, or by working with the cloning tools manually. Painter Essentials also includes many natural media brushes such as acrylics, airbrushes, art pens, oils, blenders, chalk, crayons, watercolors, palette knives, pastels, pencils, etc.

Splat! is a collection of fun and versatile effects for creating frames, textures, edge effects, borders, mosaics, and patterns. The six "content-powered" filters are: Border Stamp, Edges, Fill Stamp, Frame, Patchwork, and Resurface. Splat! includes hundreds of content files, plus you can create and add your own for endless variety. Splat! is compatible with most photo editing software that accepts plug-ins and makes a great addition to Photoshop Elements.

Alien Skin Snap Art is a collection of ten filters that can give your photos the artistic styling of colored pencil, Impasto, Pointillism, pen and ink, pencil sketch, pastels, comics, watercolor, oil painting, and Pop Art. Snap Art comes with hundreds of settings presets as well as manual controls, so users can transform photos into art work quickly and with the precise level of detail that they desire.

Microsoft Digital Image Suite offers simplified tools for image enhancement as well as a nice variety of professional-looking designs which can be personalized and produced without a lot of fuss. Includes creative tools and special effects, 5000 pre-made art elements, and 3000 project templates for cards, stickers, calendars, labels, frames, letterhead, crafts, and more.

ProShow is a feature-rich program for creating slide shows from your pictures, video clips, and music. The slide shows you create can be played back on a PC or burned to discs that can be viewed in most DVD players. You can also export the slide shows as MPEG video, screen savers, and more. It's easy enough to complete a slide show in less than ten minutes, but with all the options available, you may find yourself spending much longer to add effects, synchronize audio, and personalize your shows with captions.

The Logitech NuLOOQ navigator is a unique productivity-enhancing control device for anyone who works with creative software on a regular basis. It occupies very little desk space, and sets alongside your keyboard and mouse, trackpad, or graphics tablet as you control it with your other hand. The NuLOOQ is pre-configured to work with Adobe Creative Suite 2, Photoshop Elements, Microsoft Word and Excel, Firefox, Macromedia Flash, and more. I found the device quite flexible and comfortable to use, and it definitely increased my productivity, especially for photo editing and design tasks.