The number of companies in most sections of the software market continues to decline as mergers and buyouts reduce your effective choice. This isn't true of the burgeoning market for photo editing software, though. With more and more people switching to digital photography, the requirement for software to touch-up and organise your photos grows.

The latest round of new photo editors sees all the major players building extra features into their products, most aimed at improving the look of your photos with the minimum effort. The number of 'one-click' corrections for exposure, colour and common problems like red-eye continues to increase, which is ideal for those who simply want to tidy up the snaps they take on holiday and days out.

These applications, which come in at around £50, try to be all things to all customers. Most of the new applications introduce more sophisticated correction and filter effects and support for RAW camera formats, where you can virtually re-take a photo digitally on your PC.

As well as being able to retouch your photos to get the best out of them, most people want to organise them into albums and find specific shots quickly and easily through sophisticated searches. The idea of metadata, which tags your photos with useful information such as date and time, subject, camera settings or your personal star ratings, is becoming increasingly important. Searching on categories of metadata provides quicker and more precise results.

Printing out your digital photos is only one way of displaying them and most of these products offer albums, collages, greetings cards and other paper-based output. Additionally, many can produce slide shows for displaying on your domestic TV and all can arrange to send your favourite shots to friends and relations via e-mail.

So here are the six main players in the sub-£100 photo editing market, highlighting their new features and comparing them, so you can pick the product with the best fit to your requirements.

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