Articles Index

Adobe Photoshop CS6

For the ultimate in graphics power and flexibility, Photoshop can't be beat. Learn about the features, pros, and cons of Photoshop CS6 in this expert review.

onOne PhotoFrame 4 Professional

onOne PhotoFrame 4 Professional is a powerful frame building plugin for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, and Apple Aperture. The plugin ships with hundreds of ready to use frames that can be mixed and matched and combined with blending modes, opacity and 3D effects.

Inspire Painting App for iPhone and iPod touch

Inspire from KiwiPixel is a painting app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Inspire simulates wet oil paint which can be applied with four different brush types - or use a dry brush for a blending effect.

Colors! Painting App for iPhone and iPod Touch

Colors! is a painting app which was originally created for the Nintendo DS and later released for the iPhone and iPod touch. In features, it lags behind most other similarly priced apps in this category, but it does have a nifty art viewer that lets you play back other users' creations and upload your own artwork for others to view and vote on.

Brushes Painting App for iPhone and iPod Touch

Brushes is a painting app for the iPhone and iPod touch which features a number of brush styles, and the ability to export higher resolution images using the Brushes Viewer desktop application for Mac OS X.

Layers Painting App for iPhone and iPod Touch

Layers is a painting app for iPhone and iPod touch with extensive layering features. Layers is well-designed and intuitive, and includes tips and tricks to help you learn the features quickly

Picasa Digital Photo Software from Google

Picasa is a flashy and functional digital photo organizer and editor which has improved considerably since its first release. Although I expected better organization and searching capabilities from a Google property, Picasa is excellent for beginners and casual digital shooters who want to find all their pictures, sort them into albums, do quick edits, and share with friends and family.

DigiPro Graphics Tablet with Cordless Stylus Pen

The DigiPro drawing tablet is an inexpensive, yet capable, pressure-sensitive pen tablet for budget conscious users.

Vertus Fluid Mask 3

Fluid Mask 3 is a professional image cutout utility available for both the Windows and Mac platforms. It combines intuitive mask painting tools with intelligent edge finding capabilities to allow the user to remove backgrounds from images with ease.

Microsoft Expression 3 (formerly from Creature House)

Creature House Expression (formerly Fractal Design Expression) is a vector-based drawing tool featuring "skeletal strokes," a 2D drawing primitive which offers complete editability and scalability. Expression was the first graphics program to allow users to create brush strokes from arbitrary pictures, and remains the most artistically-oriented vector-based drawing package available.

Logitech NuLOOQ Navigator Design Controller for Macintosh and Windows

The Logitech NuLOOQ navigator is a unique productivity-enhancing control device for anyone who works with creative software on a regular basis. It works alongside your keyboard and mouse, trackpad, or graphics tablet while you control it with your other hand. Logitech NuLOOQ Navigator increases user efficiency by taking some of the load off of your mouse hand and reducing the time spent looking for keyboard shortcuts. Sadly, Logitech has chosen to discontinue this product.

Xara Xtreme Illustration Software

Xara Xtreme for Windows is a fast yet powerful vector-based drawing and illustration program, suitable for Web graphics, illustration, technical drawing, animation, cartooning, and compositing.

Corel Ulead PhotoImpact X3

PhotoImpact offers a suite of tools for Web graphics creation, image editing, photo correction and enhancement, plus plenty of extras for special effects and creative exploration. In fact, I consider it one of the best value photo editors for Windows.

Corel Ulead Photo Explorer (Discontinued)

An overview and summary of features for Ulead Photo Explorer, an inexpensive thumbnail image browser and organizer with exceptional Web sharing and HTML output options.

ArtRage 2.5 Painting Software for Windows and Mac

ArtRage is an inexpensive, fun, and easy-to-learn program for experimenting with digital art in Windows or Mac OS. The user interface is absolutely gorgeous and designed for ultimate ease of use. Children and adults alike will have a ton of fun painting and drawing with art tools that act and interact just like real-world paint, pens, pencils, crayons, and even glitter!

FlipAlbum 5 Suite for Windows from E-Book Systems

I'm not convinced that the book analogy is the best way to present digital photos, but if you like the idea of presenting pictures in a page-flipping album, FlipAlbum is a good way to do it.

Alien Skin Blow Up 2 Image Enlargement Plugin

Alien Skin Blow Up 2 can enlarge your images in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements with better results and with more functionality than competing products. The interface is straightforward and easy to use, but you might have a hard time justifying the cost against the printed results unless you do a large volume of extreme enlargements.

TechSmith SnagIt 9 Screen Capture Utility for Windows

SnagIt is one of the most comprehensive and powerful screen capture utilities available for Windows, offering advanced features and extra tools for organizing, simplifying, and editing screen captures.

ProShow Gold 3 from Photodex

Photodex ProShow Gold allows you to create simple to elaborate digital photo slide shows for computer or TV playback. It's highly customizable, with hundreds of transition effects, many audio options, and a variety of output formats.

XnView - free multimedia viewer, browser and converter

XnView is a fast and free image viewer and converter with support for a staggering number of file formats, operating systems, and languages.

IrfanView Free Image Viewer

A summary of IrfanView, a small and speedy free image viewer and thumbnail browser for Windows.

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4

The CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 is a value leader, providing capable, professional tools for just about any graphics task. The Suite includes CorelDRAW for vector-based drawing and page layout, and PHOTO-PAINT for image editing and photo retouching. Several supporting utilities also come in the box.

Canvas 9 Professional Edition

Canvas offers a unified creative environment for intermediate to advanced graphics software users on the Macintosh or Windows platform. This all-in-one graphics suite is an exceptional value.

PhotoArtMaster Gold 1.5 from Fo2Pix (Windows)

PhotoArtMaster Gold is one-of-a-kind software to help you transform your ordinary photographs into something you can be proud to frame and put on display.

Fo2Pix ArtMasterPro

ArtMasterPro lets you turn your digital photos into works of art with 15 interactive ArtWizards or full manual control. ArtMasterPro breaks your photo down into a number of simplified sources, which can be blended into an artistic rendering using ArtWizards or manual painting mode.