It's interesting that four out of the six editors reviewed here contain tools for removing wrinkles and spots and five of them have ways of straightening pictures taken at odd angles. If you were cynical, you might think they'd all met in a bar somewhere and agreed on their feature sets.

The best implemented features are in Photoshop Elements, though there's not a lot in it and you should be able to tidy up your spotty or tired friends with any of the main packages.

It's easy to see where the key development work is going with each new version of these photo editors. The standard editing functions have probably reached a plateau and the improvements are now going into ease of use, in particular the level of automation.

It's a lot easier, for example, to click a photo with a red-eye tool and let it find the troublesome eyes, than to have to highlight each eye individually. Image extraction is continuing to improve and with sophisticated line detection, accurately removing a photo object requires less and less hard work.

A special word of praise must go to Roxio's PhotoSuite 7, which is no way a market leader but offers much of what the others do for less than half their price. Unless you really need RAW editing or metadata tagging, you should really give this a try.

Of the leading contenders, we'd put our money down for either Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro X. Both have a vast range of useful tools and your choice really comes down to which tools you think you'll make most use of. Adobe's strength lies in editing, functions such as the Magic Extractor and the Cookie Cutter, while Corel offers the better image management in Photo Album 6.