The poor man's Adobe Photoshop - and for our money (having used both of them) much faster, much more accessible and much more user-friendly. This excellent graphics program will save files in nearly every major graphical format and perform a vast array of image manipulation effects. Paint Shop Pro also allows you to carry out easy file conversions from one graphics format to another and can make use of Photoshop plug-ins and generate some special effects that are beyond Photoshop 3.0's capabilities. Even so, the registered version of this shareware program only retails for around 10% of Photoshop's price. Versions exist for both Windows 3.x (the previous 3.11 release) and Win95/NT (the latest 4.x release). Download sites for both versions are now available worldwide. Without doubt, our Top Pick Of The Week!

Talent Communications's I-View is an off-line HTML browser that allows you to view your web pages without requiring any on-line connection or TCP/IP stack at all. Targeted primarily at web authors, internet and CD-ROM publishers this small but powerful browser will allow you to distribute web pages on a floppy disk or ROM with ease. The latest version supports HTML 3.2, animated GIFs, frames, CSS style sheets, client and server-side image maps and has a .WAV player built in. Trialware versions are available for Windows 3.x/95/NT and OS/2-Win and the fully registered version is only $US29.95 for a single-user licence.

ThumbsPlus scans your hard disk, seeks out graphics files and displays them in thumbnail galleries. You can click on any graphic to display it at normal size and get exact measurements of the file size and image dimension. Then - if you wish - you can alter its brightness, contrast or colour saturation; rotate it, invert it.... whatever you like! This is the consummate graphics cataloger that no serious digital artist can afford to be without. In fact, this truly remarkable program will catalogue just about every type of graphic file you can name including GIFs, JPGs, BMPs..... even TrueType fonts, Microsoft Publisher graphics, FIF (fractal image) files, Kodak K12s, multi-page TIFFs and SBIC files too (awesome!). Yet it's simple enough to master within 5 minutes. You can download shareware versions for Windows 3.x (the previous 16-bit version 2.x) and Windows 95/NT (the new 32-bit version 3.x), and full registration is a modest $US70.