Built-in tracing and improved drawing, formatting and colour correction make X3 the best CorelDRAW upgrade in years.

COREL DESIGNER 10

A simplified interface, strong photo-to-art Focus and the low price make painter essentials a great buy.

New realism for bristled brushes and automatic painting that approaches manual quality give Painter X an edge.

For a new release, Snapfire already looks old-fashioned and unexciting, but at least the basic version is free.

Improved handling of templates, tracing, text and layers along with new table support, but ultimately X4 disappoints

A powerful high-end suite with a lot of potential. Make sure you have a high-end system to run it as the listed system requirements are very optimistic.

Painter 7 is a digital painting application that simulates the realistic subtleties of an artist's style using natural media, such as water colours, inks, oil paints, coloured pencils, felt pens, chalks, pastels, and more.

Moving in the right direction, but it isn’t easy teaching an old dog new tricks.

Throughout its long and chequered career – first under MetaCreations, then Procreate and now Corel – Painter has always stood out as the artistic and creative computer application bar none. The reason is simple: Painter's unique range of natural media brushes.

The first OS to make a serious effort at an easy, integrated Linux to rival Windows was the now defunct Corel LinuxOS.

Selecting the right photo editing software can be a difficult task, given the number of capabilities offered in today's graphics packages.

AVCHD support and some useful new effects keep this as the leading entry-level video editor.

If you find a scanner bundled with this software, it'll be hard to resist.

Computer mice are arguably the best thing since sliced bread - for computer users anyway - until you try to draw with one.

In Epsons more than comprehensive range it sits near the top, offering high speed in addition to impressive print quality.

Best-of-breed photo management, editing and sharing with great usability and value.

The Quark-killer has finally landed. For the last year, the hype about Adobe's replacement for the worthy but old-fashioned PageMaker (reviewed issue 22, p108) has been building to fever pitch.

Director 8 Shockwave Studio is now the platform of choice for those sites determined to provide the richest possible Web experience