This image editing package is a cut-down version of its more complex big brother, Painter X. Think of it as a far more budget-priced and user friendly program, with much the same remit: to allow you to transform digital photos into paintings, or just to plain sketch and paint away on a blank canvas.

Painter Essentials provides the beginner with some excellent video tutorials which introduce the basic tools and shortcuts, alongside full-blown, step-by-step lessons in the usage of the two workspaces the program provides (photo painting and straightforward drawing and painting). We wholeheartedly recommend that you watch these first, as they make it relatively easy to get to grips with the processes involved.

Photo painting is a literal term meaning to transform a digital photograph into a painting. On a basic level, this process couldn't be any simpler - you just import a photo and click on the auto-paint button, which transfers the image into any specified medium (oil painting, water-colour, chalk drawing and so on).

Various auto-painting parameters can be adjusted via simple menus, so a different brush or grain of paper can be chosen to further customise the resulting work of art. Incidentally, the interface is smoother than a silk canvas, with sets of well organised toolbars, a plethora of handy little keyboard shortcuts, and thirty-two levels of undo for when that still life picture of fruit goes literally pear shaped.

The results that can be obtained from photo painting are very impressive, particularly if you take the time to hone the image using Painter's tools. These allow for the usual image editing operations such as cropping and cloning, as well as more clever touches like smearing brush strokes and bringing some photographic detail back into a painting to create focal points (such as the face in a portrait picture).

Those who want to be more creative can manually trace and paint the image rather than using the auto-paint feature. Or indeed they can begin with a blank canvas and sketch out their own composition using a varied selection of brushes. Freehand drawing isn't easy by nature, however, and some artistic talent is required here, plus a graphics tablet is pretty much a necessity.

But for the average home user who simply wants to tinker with turning photos into illustrations, the mouse does just fine. This is an excellent little package, and great value for money when compared to the price of Painter X.

Painter Essentials is a very reasonably priced and powerful painting package that can produce some truly impressive results with a minimal amount of effort. A graphics tablet is necessary to get the absolute most out of Painter, and some of the more advanced functions are a touch trickier to understand, but it's still a very user friendly program on a fundamental level.