ACDSee 7.0 is a PC-only cataloguing andimage-editing tool that's supplied in a bundled form with some digital cameras.You can use it as a folder browser with a standard directory tree

Olympus Studio 2 supports professional photographers and engaged amateurs to get perfect results out of the images within a minimum of time.

Canopus's ProCoder has been unchallenged as a media encoder for a good few years. Despite competition from Compressor on the Mac platform and Sorenson Squeeze, ProCoder managed to do just about everything right and deliver phenomenal results to boot.

Windows Movie Maker first saw light of day in 2000 when it was introduced along with Windows Me. Both the mother OS and the application itself were not well received, the former blighted by technical glitches and the latter by a woeful lack of features

During the course of its last two incarnations, Illustrator CS3 manages to hone these existing tool sets while introducing yet more trend-defining features, all held within a redesigned and much streamlined program interface

Compared to the recent mass-adoption of photo editing programs, spurred on by the digital camera revolution, vector-based drawing has become something of a lost art.

Answer the following question: a hydra is (a) a Greek mythical monster with many heads, (b) an album by Toto, or (c) a clever piece of software for digital photographers? The answer, of course, is (c)... It's not as exciting as a Greek monster but it is infinitely more interesting than an album by Toto.

One of the few mainstream software markets with several applications of roughly equal weight is home-video editing. There's Adobe Premiere Elements and Corel's Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus, as well as Pinnacle Studio Plus 11

The field of OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, has more than its fair share of acronyms floating around, but one of the most potentially exciting is ADRT

Updated Desktop publishing allows you to create everything from a leaflet, a poster or even a brochure. The first thing to know about this latest package from Serif is that it has launched each product independently, but this is a cost-effective way of picking up three distinct tools: PagePlus 11, DrawPlus 8 and ImpactPlus 5 for a mere £50 (inc. VAT).

With the soaring popularity of digital cameras, image-editing software packages are now ten a penny, which is what many of them are worth. This one is great though...

Although Photoshop is largely used by professionals, its influence has crept in elsewhere, and even consumer graphics applications often have interfaces based on that of Adobe's giant. Scribbles, in common with the likes of Acorn and Apple's iPhoto, offers a truly unique, innovative approach, this time for sketching and drawing.

Sony Image Data Converter SR comes free with Sony digital SLRs, together with a companion package called Image Data Lightbox SR. First impressions aren't good. Both applications look crude and dated, and it's annoying to have to use two programs.

The digital SLR has brought high-quality photography to the masses; we're all out there, clicking away, producing shot after shot of high-quality RAW files, and yet when it comes to sorting and editing this veritable torrent of images, what do we do?

Powerful photo-editing software normally comes with strings attached, in the way of high prices and steep learning curves. Unlike the full-blown edition of Photoshop, which costs nearly £600, Elements is the most mass-market editor on the market

You may have come across Serif's PagePlus if you've ever needed to create a poster, flyer, calendar or small booklet on your laptop. It's one of the oldest and most widely used home-based DTP (desktop publishing) packages

It's commonly held that nine out of 10 Flash designers use Photoshop, and three out of four use Illustrator. It's logical, then, that following Adobe's acquisition of Flash top of everyone's wishlist is better integration with existing Adobe products

Like other programs that require a similarly lengthy time to build image collections into albums, Smart Pix Manager is based on a full database application that stores wide-ranging data extracted from your images.

Renowned for producing quality, cost-effective creativity software, Serif brings a typically logical layout to the latest version of its photo-album program.

This program is completely free to download and use. Even so, it looks anything but cheap, with a definite cool sophistication to its design and some smart Web options - as you'd expect from a program that's pioneered by Internet overlords Google.

One can be forgiven for thinking that free software is only ever, well, free because it's not really good enough to sell. However, if ever there was a program to change your mind then it's Adobe's Photoshop Album Starter Edition, which is now in its third version.

Easy to install, ACDSee is nevertheless not the quickest off the mark, taking over four minutes to catalogue our set of 1,000 photos. This is easy to forgive, however, because the program’s database goes to great lengths to grab all the information about your pictures that it possibly can, which can come in handy, as we’ll see later.

On paper, Adobe Premiere Elements is a no-brainer. It's a sensible, serious, affordable editing program with an interface and workflow that comes from its big sibling, Premiere Pro.

New versions of Final Cut, in both Pro and Express iterations, used to be accompanied by the kind of dizzying excitement reserved for kids on Christmas morning. Each successive update seemed to usher in a wealth of new features, either ground-breaking in their capabilities or previously unseen in an affordable non-linear editing program.