If you are looking for a wonderful, fully-featured, powerful, easy, and -most of all- affordable graphic software (less than 90$ for downloadable version), you have only one choice: Paint Shop Pro 8.0 . It has everything you need, whenever you neet it - edit photos, add special effects, create Web graphics, draw, paing, animate, and organize your images, all in one solution.

 I use it for creating graphics for my web sites (I own about 5 web sites, and a couple of them with a lot of graphic), for retouching photos, for improving the quality of the covers that I print for my CDs, for any kind of graphic retouch I can ever need. I have been using it for a couple of years, and I am fully satisfied with it. There is no a graphic software that can be compared to it for Windows (including Adobe Photoshop, great and powerful graphic package, no doubts, but expensive -about 630$- and very complex to master).

If you need to create great looking 3D texts, logos (etc.), in a breeze (both for still images and animations), than you should download Ulead Cool 3D 3.5(less than 45$). This application is incredibily fast and easy to use: in less than 10 min from installation, you will be able to render your first great logo; you do not need to know anything about 3d, rendering, programming, or drawing (!): just type a text, choose your effects, and immediately see them applied on it. Results are quite outstanding.

In a few words: both PaintShop Pro 7 and Ulead Cool 3D are faaaast, easy and affordable.

 OVERALL: Excellent