Without giving a history lesson, but for the benefit of those whose life has more exciting things in it than tracking the evolution of software companies, Paint Shop Pro was acquired by Corel a few years ago from a company called Jasc, which had spent years building it into a viable low-cost Windows challenger to Adobe Photoshop.

The final Jasc release of Corel Paint Shop Pro was version 9 and, after snapping up the rights, Corel rushed out a tarted-up (sorry, face-lifted) version 10 of the program snappily called Corel Paint Shop Pro X. A year later, out came the fully revamped Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI, and now we have Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.

Before reading any further, why not open up another browser window and search the IT Reviews site for 'Paint Shop Pro'? We've been reviewing the program since version 7, and the older reviews will give you a feeling for who the program is aimed at and what it can do.

Welcome back. You now know that Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo XI was the bees' knees in terms of offering Photoshop functionality at an affordable price for those lucky/unlucky enough not to own Macs (please delete according to your prejudices). It duplicated nearly all of Photoshop's features, was able to use filters and add-ons designed for Photoshop, yet included a host of simplified features to make it easier for non-professionals to use.

Version X2, which is the subject of this review, has all the same virtues, including the Learning Centre, which holds your hand while learning new features; the Organizer, where pictures can be stored, indexed and rated; automated editing tools for fixing badly-shot pictures, and a host of special effects filters if you feel like getting creative.

The new features are a mixed bunch. Some are very welcome, such as the automatic saving of every picture you work on into a sub-folder of its original folder, in effect creating a digital negative you can always revert to if things go pear-shaped during editing. Others smack of feature-itis, that strange disease that afflicts software vendors looking to swell an already bloated feature list.

The oddest of these in version X2 is a 'Thinnify' tool that claims to make people look thinner than they really are. What it actually does is make a sort of digital pleat in the picture so that anybody under the cursor looks a little bit thinner, but the rest of the picture, including anybody unfortunate enough to be nearby, gets stretched to fill in the missing pixels and ends up looking slightly fatter.

The Makeover tools, which are designed to hide blemishes, remove red-eye, whiten teeth and add fake tans, have been expanded with an eye whitener, just in case subjects have had a rough night before the shoot and are sporting bloodshot eyes that might give the game away.

The new graphite-coloured workspace is supposed to enable users to concentrate on the image instead of the interface, but we suspect the graphite is merely for the benefit of Vista users, and we opted to use the brighter XP-style colour scheme. Another feature that leaves us cold is the ability to change the language of the interface at will. Unless you're a bulk buyer for an international conglomerate with a peripatetic team of multi-lingual salesmen giving regular demos to foreign clients in different countries, you'll never need it; and the new Save for Office option is just a conglomeration of existing Resize and Save As options.

A feature we do like, and one which increases the appeal of version X2 to image editing newbies, is Express Lab. This is an enhancement to the file browser, enabling common editing tasks such as cropping, straightening, fixing red-eye and automatically correcting exposure defects to be carried out within the file browser, without having to load the picture into the full Paint Shop Pro Photo editing window and cope with its more complicated options and tools.

When you do feel ready to tackle bigger jobs, the CD contains hours of hand-holding video tutorials from Lynda.com, which if you bought them separately would cost at least half as much as the program itself.

Not worth upgrading to if you have either of the two previous Corel versions of Paint Shop Pro Photo, especially as some of the familiar keyboard shortcuts have been changed, but it should be at the top of your list if you're looking to move up from the free program that came with your digital camera to a professional level of digital photo editing.