Corel Painter IX’s wide selection of customizable brushes, tight integration with Wacom pressure-sensitive graphics tablets and easy-to-get-started interface make it the best painting software we’ve used to date. While Painter IX is primarily a painting program and not an image processor, you don’t have to be a painter or have any training in the craft to enjoy experimenting with your photographs.

Having just used Adobe’s new video-editing program to create a soccer video for my daughter, I can tell you that Premiere Elements is designed to make professional-level editing more accessible to everyone. My editing went faster and easier than any video editing I’ve ever done before.

It seems only natural that legendary optical manufacturer B+W would use its expertise to develop a set of software filters. Some of the filters stand in for glass filters you’d use over your camera lens, but many of the plug-ins go beyond that to provide effects that can be challenging to produce, even with image-editing software.