With digital SLRs growing in popularity and compact cameras delivering larger image sizes, hard drives around the world are filling up with our photographic memories. File compression is one solution, of course, but it's a big negative when you're after the very best in image quality, especially with so-called "destructive" formats such as JPEG that degrade in quality the more you alter the files.

First things first; Painter does exactly what it says on the tin. Literally: our review copy of Corel Painter X came in a big paint tin. We got our mitts on the limited-edition version complete with special packaging and a glossy poster

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is the 'king' of image-editors, the program by which all others are judged. It's also the most expensive program on test, and it's starting to find itself outstripped by cheaper rivals.

Taking a step up from the normal world of taking photos, viewing and storing them on your computer and printing them out, professional photography demands a more 'workflow' oriented ethic.

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.

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.

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

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.

Corel inherited its Photo Album software when it bought Jasc, but now it's knocked the name on the head and made the move to SnapFire Plus version 1, seemingly in response to Google's Picasa

If you received a digital camera for Christmas, it will have come with its own basic editing software. While this will be fine for the basics, you may find you'll soon outgrow it. Serif PhotoPlus X2 is the next logical step, as it's an introductory product that has plenty of tools to help you develop your skills.

For users of versions of Studio 8 and upwards, we were promised a more stable and reliable editing platform with fewer bugs and niggles than we’ve become used to in the past. So, does Studio 11 deliver on its promises?

Photoshop Elements 5 benefits from an excellent photo organiser, smart enough to detect and remove red-eye as it imports your images. It's supremely easy to tag files, organise them into collections and find the shots you need.

Much as we love Photoshop, it's primarily a way to edit existing artwork rather than creating art from scratch. Traditionally, if you wanted to do a painting or drawing on your Mac, you turned to Corel Painter, but now there's a new kid on the block: ArtRage.