Once you have bought your digital camera it is easy to spend several hundred more dollars on photo editing software, but unless you are going to use a lot of time creating digital master pieces there are better ways of spending your money.

If you are home user who would just like to be able to correct a few problems with your photographs, keep them organised and put together some easy-to-create projects that show off your favourite shots, then all you need is something like the ACDSee PowerPack.

The package includes the core ACDSee, along with ACD FotoCanvas and ACD Fotoslate. All three are nicely integrated with both FotoCanvas, which is the image editor, and FotoSlate, which is used to create projects, accessible from ACDSee.

ACDSee has been around for a while and version 6.0 has several new features including the ability to rate your photos to separate your favourites from the rest, allowing you quicker access in the future. You also can now burn CDs and DVDs direct from the core program, creating menu structures and slideshows as you go.

The developers have worked on the KISS principle and have kept everything as simple as possible. You can organise and view all of your images in ACDSee and it will even acquire them from several popular makes of camera without the need to load additional drivers.

Like everything else about the package, FotoCanvas and FotoSlate are intuitive and easy-to-use. The toolbar icons are clear and their functions obvious and even when you decide to do something a bit more complex such as creating your own 12-month calendar or designing your own Christmas cards there is a wizard to guide you.

However, be warned. If you do decide to create your own 12-month calendar using your favourite photographs make sure you have plenty of memory and patience because the print file could end up being huge.

Although the project file for the calendar we created was only 103KB, the print file blew out to almost a gigabyte causing FotoSlate to hog all system memory for more than half an hour while it printed the calendar out on a DeskJet printer.

Apart from that it is hard to fault ACDSee PowerPack 6.0 either for its ease of use or for its value for money.