Corel is a past master at acquiring software companies and bringing their products into its stable through osmosis. Its most recent acquisition, JASC, is the creator of the much-loved Paint Shop Pro. It's now reached version 10, or 'X' as Corel names it, with some useful updates to its feature set.

Paint Shop Pro X tries hard to be as useful to beginners as to old hands and the interface now includes The Paint Shop Pro Learning Centre, which provides advice and instruction in a panel down the left-hand side of the screen. There are still a lot of tool icons attached to the editing window, though; a total of 20, with half of them offering alternative, related tools in fly-outs. This can be daunting.

The new functions are aimed at easy photo touch-up and the triple set of make-over tools is particularly welcome. The most useful is the blemish remover, which is a sort of targeted clone tool. A pair of concentric circles shows the area that will be replaced (centre circle) and the area that will be averaged to produce the replacement colour (outer ring). Aim it at a spot or pimple and it's quicker than a drop of Zovirax.

The suntan tool changes the most pasty-faced into veritable David Dickensons and the toothbrush can give us all teeth like Kylie's. A copy of Photo Album 6 is bundled with Paint Shop Pro X and this separate application provides photo management with strong search facilities through metadata like date and keyword. It also provides a variety of print templates to save on glossy photo sheets, and can handle both e-mailing and slideshows.

The Paint Shop Pro X package is a good combination of powerful utilities and the assistance which enables even beginners to use them effectively.