PaintShop Photo Express is from Coral's hugely successful PaintShop line of products, and is the younger brother to PaintShop Photo Pro. The Pro version is a feature intensive professional package better suited to the dedicated enthusiast, while the Express version is better suited to the amateur home user - hence it's inclusion here.

PaintShop Photo Express borrows essential features from it's big brother, and bundles them with excellent organizational and sharing tools that make one very useful product indeed.

Here's how PaintShop Photo Express stacks up to our buyer guide criteria:

Editing effects
Like all home user photo editors, the basics are covered. Don't expect to see any advanced options here, since this product is squarely aimed at the home user. The effects available are of excellent quality and will enhance most photos by way of scaling, cropping, color balancing, brightness, contrast, focus/sharpening. Solid basics with no bells and whistles.

Wizards and one click operations
Since the editing options are limited they are all very easy to use. Red-eye removal and blemish removal are intuitive.

File formats
All major image files can be opened and saved to.

Organization and sharing
This is where PaintShop Photo Express exceeds. File organization extends to all types of media files including photo, music and movie. They can all be categorised, named and placed in albums.

The software allows you to easily create photobooks and slideshows which can be transferred to DVD at the click of a button. Likewise photos can be posted to all popular photo sharing websites such as Facebook, Flickr and Youtube.

Tutorials and training
Tutorials are included with the software but the product is so intuitive a little trial and error will get you through. However those without prior knowledge of photo editing would benefit from going through the beginner training tutorials so that the basic principles can be introduced.

Help and support
Coral is a veteran software developer and has a good support structure.

Overall, PaintShop Photo Express is an excellent choice for a home user who simply wants to perform basic editing and then store and share their pictures. Those looking for more complex editing tools will be disappointed - but I suspect most amateur photographers would be very happy with PaintShop Photo Express as their editor.