Bring new life to your photos with this powerful effects suite

A great starter 3D application, but with enough power to cope as your skills develop

Can Popcorn stay relevant against the free competition?

Is there a place for yet another video converter?

You don't need to spend millions to make professional 3D movies

Can this Photoshop wannabe finally match its expensive rival?

Well-featured, good-value DTP software with lots of potential

One of the best-value packages available but is it worth upgrading to the latest version?

Tame your media collection with Corel's new all-in-one editing software

Roxio's latest disc-burning software puts the focus on getting creative

Give your Desktop personalised icons

The leading figure-posing package gets a makeover and the ability to search for content

Photoshop is one of the few applications that stands alone in its market. There may be other ways to edit images – photographers have Adobe's own Lightroom and Apple's Aperture – but nothing matches Photoshop's breadth and depth of features.

PopChar 4 sits discreetly – even invisibly, if you like – in the menu bar, but when you click that little icon a floating window pops up showing you the full range of characters available.

Without fonts a designer is nothing.With too many fonts a designer can be paralysed.So how do you keep a decent collection of typefaces under control? FontAgent Pro 4 claims to be the answer, providing you with fast and efficient ways to keep your fonts organised, helping you browse, search and find the right ones fast, turn individual fonts and whole sets on and off, and more besides.

What do you do if you’re a company that has developed a whole range of well-regarded, one-trick, photo-editing packages? Why, you sit down with your marketing manager and work out how you can bundle different ones together in new, exciting and profitable ways.

Digital authoring is less of a niche pastime these days. People are happy to spend their free time putting together their own Web sites, DVDs menus and multimedia discs.

Doozla is play-to-learn graphic design software for youngsters. In our office it got the thumbs-up from parents and grown-up kids alike.

Although a cursory glance at the dictionary reveals that Flux means ‘fluidity’, other synonyms include ‘unsteadiness’ and ‘yo-yoing’, and those are perhaps more appropriate for this newcomer to the web-design scene.

Adobe Photoshop may well be the most powerful piece of software you’ll ever own. It may well also be that you only ever scrape the surface of its abilities, hovering around the Filter menu

Apple’s Aperture development team must be furious. No sooner does it release a shiny new version of Aperture that works nicely and runs quickly, than Adobe announces that it too is updating its RAW image editing and cataloguing app.

The chore of editing and burning digital video onto DVDs seems sufficiently off-putting that, for many of us, our hard drives have become video bottlenecks. The new edition of PowerProducer, with a quick-fire, step-by-step interface, aims to make it quick and easy to put your video creations on to disc, so they can be viewed on TV, as nature intended.

Despite its low price and small footprint, ACDSee Photo Editor 4.0 is neither the smallest nor the cheapest software. The 57MB download gives you a seven-day trial and if you register with ACDSee you get a CD key that extends the trial to 30 days. Should you decide to buy, the online price is £22 (inc. VAT) with an optional £4.99 for an extended download service.

For years, PC users have craved something as intuitive as Apple’s iLife suite and as powerful as Adobe Photoshop Elements to share, display and edit photos and videos. There’s no shortage of excellent applications, but a one-stop shop has never really made the grade. However, MediaShow 4 gets pretty close.

Freeway Pro is a web design program that doesn’t edit HTML code. Much like a desktop publishing program, your website is displayed and edited as a single document. Once you’re done, Freeway Pro converts your document into HTML and uploads everything to the appropriate server.