Serious software usually costs serious money and software doesn't come much more serious than Adobe Photoshop. This de facto standard for image editing is used by everyone from photographers for retouching blemishes to digital artists creating original works.

But at over £500 all that pixel-pushing power doesn't come cheap. Eleven years after its launch, Photoshop has now reached the dizzy heights of version 7, so what's new?

Photoshop has never been an application that pushed the envelope and each new version tends to build on, rather than revamp, existing features.

This makes a lot of sense for such a widely used piece of software but Photoshop's clunky interface and steep learning curve have always drawn criticism from both professional and amateur users alike.

This time round, though, Adobe seems to have been listening and Photoshop 7's interface has been restyled with flat, shaded toolbar buttons. If you use Windows XP, it supports the colourful Luna theme too.

File management has always been a Photoshop weak spot and, while Paint Shop Pro has had an image browser since day one, Adobe has only just realised how useful a feature this is.

Photoshop 7's file browser sits on a tab at the top right of the window and shows your PC's folders as a tree structure in one pane and image thumbnails in another.

Pertinent image properties (date, size, resolution and so on) are also shown and images can be sorted by any of these properties, and ranked (rough, final and so on) and sorted too.

As with any image-editing application, Photoshop is prone to becoming cluttered with windows and palettes. Roll-up palettes were introduced a couple of versions ago but these can now be dragged and docked as tabs alongside the file browser.

This means that oft-used palettes can be accessed with a click and kept out of the way when they're not in use. Better still, Photoshop 7 can also save the layout of palettes and toolbars so, if you like everything arranged in a particular way when you work, you can set it and forget it.

When it comes to actually working with images, Photoshop 7 has a few new tricks up its sleeve.

One of the most welcome is also the quickest to use. Colour-correcting scanned photographs is something of a skill and can be far from simple. Choose Photoshop 7's Auto Color option, though, and your photo will be tweaked for best results in a trice.

Similarly, repairing damaged photographs in Photoshop used to require some in-depth knowledge of its various tools; now the new Healing brush makes it easy. This works like the clone tool in that you choose an area of an image to copy and then paint this on to a damaged part.

The clever part is that Photoshop automatically preserves the shading, lighting and texture of the area being painted over to give seamless, professional results.

For the more impishly minded, images can be comprehensively distorted with the improved Liquify tool, which lets you push, pull, shrink and stretch an image as though it were elasticated.

While Photoshop excels at editing existing images, its image-creation tools were a little limited. Not any more. A new set of paint tools effectively mimics a range of real media, making it possible to create such natural effects as watercolours or oil on canvas without the need for a third-party plug-in.

ImageReady, Adobe's web-specific image editor, has been bundled with Photoshop since version 5. Previous versions were fairly feature-rich but version 7 adds yet more goodies, particularly for working with image rollovers.

One that's missing, however, is the dockable palettes, so ImageReady users still have to contend with window clutter although they can still save their favourite window layout.

Price: £529 (full version inc. VAT) £99 (upgrade inc. VAT)

Contact: Adobe
www.adobe.com

Also consider: Paint Shop Pro
A great product. £95 - Excellent.