Light's quite an important thing. If there weren't any light, the world would be one giant game of blind man's buff. And musical chairs would be unthinkably dangerous. Without light, photography would be unquestionably dull: "This ...

Even the keenest home video enthusiast is unlikely to pull £500 from a pocket for a copy of Adobe's premium video editor, Premiere Pro CS3, so it was a good idea for the company to introduce ...

In an era where company after company seems to be cutting corners, Serif surely deserves a mighty pat on the back. Its Home Creativity Suite 2008 pack not only comes in a sturdy box, but it ...

Sony's Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition offers an uncomfortable glimpse into the latest tactics from software publishers to get you to register your software. The main Movie Studio Platinum 8 application, one of the very best ...

Apple's iLife suite comes free with each new Mac sold, but is also available as a standalone package. The new version, designated iLife '08, has been heavily revamped, with major rewrites to the core applications iPhoto ...

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 ...

Hidden within the depths of Microsoft's assorted Web entities, with an eye firmly on the success that Google has enjoyed with a similar set-up, is the online presence of Microsoft Live Labs. This is where a ...

Thanks to the arrival of the computer, the days when architects and manufacturers spent hours painstakingly drawing floorplans and exploded diagrams by hand are virtually gone. However, computer-aided design packages have often been prohibitively expensive, thus ...

If God made the human race in his own image, the question is, did he use Photoshop to air-brush out any rough edges? Or was he - or indeed she - more of a shareware sort ...

A recently-released Mac tool that's moving into its new PC home, Roxio Crunch is an application designed to take video files and shrink them down to an iPod or mobile phone-friendly size. Assuming, given the drop-down ...

The success of sites like YouTube and Google Video that promote video sharing suggests that this is an area that will only continue to grow in popularity. Portable multimedia players, mobile phones and gaming handhelds that ...

We've met previous versions of Pinnacle Studio more than once on our review bench, and often had to send them home with the same words: a super piece of software, but with worrying stability issues. And ...

Adobe's Creative Suite for graphic designers has been so successful that the company has gathered almost all of its programs into themed suites and released new versions all at the same time. There are now Production ...

Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer consists of three programs rolled into one. The main two are Magix Xtreme Photo Designer 7, a comprehensive photo editor, and Xtreme Graphic Designer, the remit of which is vector-based graphics ...

Now under the stewardship of Corel, Ulead's competent VideoStudio product nonetheless faces some familiar problems. Firstly, it has at heart a relative simplicity, which it fails to offset properly against more advanced tools for experienced users ...

Anyone who has played The Sims 2 will be used to the idea of designing your own home and then filling it with furniture, electrical fittings, plumbing and adding gardens, fences and hot tubs, etc. You'll ...

Corel Painter is the leading 'natural media' painting program, which means that it attempts to simulate the use of physical watercolour and oil paints, ink, pencil, charcoal and pastel in an electronic form. It can be ...

What number follows 11? According to Serif it's X2, an oddly similar scheme to Corel, who couldn't face releasing CorelDraw 13 and switched to the Roman hybrid X3 a year or so ago. Whatever the reasoning, ...

The Windows platform suffers no shortage of graphics software, but Xara always offers something special that lifts its products clear of the seething mass of competition. The new Xara Xtreme Pro is another good example. It's ...

You can kill two birds with one stone, people sometimes cheerfully remark, as if this were a good thing. They never seem to point out that you'd have to be a vicious, animal-hating sadist to do ...