Picture the scene. It's late at night and you're hunched over your keyboard, trying your amateur hand at movie producing. Smoke drifts lazily from a lit but untouched, half-ashen cigarette as you lovingly tinker with the ...

As with an increasing number of products from Ulead, there's much to admire about the company's new video editing solution, VideoStudio 7. From the colourful, friendly opening through to the layout of the main working screen, ...

Thanks to the success of TV programmes such as 'Changing Rooms', people all over the country have been annoying their neighbours and putting their families through major stress by 'redesigning' the interiors of their houses. A ...

When we reviewed a recent version of Paint Shop Pro, our conclusion was that it had some great features, but they were obscured by a cluttered range of add-ons and extras that simply got in the ...

When reviewing well established applications, there's always a temptation to cover just the new features, assuming the reader is already familiar with what's gone before. So, before describing Serif DrawPlus 7's new goodies, here's a brief ...

At the top of the graphics market Adobe very much rules the roost. High-end applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator are recognized industry standards and are responsible for a sizeable amount of the cash in Adobe's ...

To our mind photo editing is as much fun as doing the washing up or mowing the lawn. It's an evil necessity that goes hand in hand with the wonders of digital cameras, and all we ...

This is not the most exciting or world-shattering piece of software on the planet, but it's worth a quick review anyway. Most people will be familiar with clip art, the sort of thing that first appeared ...

For the past few years it's been possible to download programs from the Web which allow you to 'rip' the contents of DVD movies and store them on your hard drive, sometimes in a more compressed ...

It's about time people stopped treating PhotoPlus as a simple photo editing application. While it's certainly true that it can perform all kinds of editing and effects on photo images, there's a lot more to it ...

More and more designers are turning to 3D tools to enhance their designs and express their creativity, and this is where Poser comes in. Described by Curious Labs as 'The Ultimate 3D character Solution', Poser 5 ...

Video editing used to be the preserve of TV professionals in £100,000 editing suites. Then Adobe and Matrox introduced the hardware and software to make semi-professional PC DV editing systems available at around £4,000. Since then, ...

Adobe Photoshop has always been the application of choice for professional image editing. And with the new features and improvements that have been implemented in version 7, its appeal is now stronger than ever. To describe ...

The marketing strapline for this product is "Know any picture-framers? They're going to be busy". Umm... no, they're not. Not from what we've seen, anyway. PhotoArtMaster is a supposedly simple tool designed to take your scanned ...

The prospect of playing DVD movies on a PC or notebook is quite an appealing one. True, you won't usually have the luxury of a wide-screen monitor (unless you can plug your PC into your TV) ...

Illuminatus Opus is the successor to Digital Workshop's very popular multimedia authoring tool, Illuminatus 4.5. It's ideal for creating anything from a simple slideshow of your holiday pictures to a full-blown corporate presentation or even an ...

Page Plus has reached version 7, so logic dictates that maker Serif must be doing something right. However, unlike some of the professional-level products here, Page Plus is a home-user tool, offering a semi-professional range of ...

Quark XPress holds a warm place in the heart of many journalists and layout artists. It's been around for well over ten years (a lifetime in computing terms) and has built up an army of satisfied ...

Corel Ventura doesn't so much install on your PC as colonise it. Installation takes in the order of 15-30 minutes and a total of 259MB of programs is copied to your hard disk (much more if ...

Legacy is a powerful concept in the world of computing. It explains why your PC boots through DOS, for example - Microsoft had to retain compatibility with the old operating system in case any users out ...