What I enjoyed most from the application is how easy it is to work with. With this type of program, you're looking to play around and Comic Life feels just like that. You can quickly drag and drop your images onto the interface, arrange them in order onto a page, drag bubbles and then enter your text.

Comic Life offers many shapes, forms and text lettering with styles reminiscent of the best cartoons and comics. All can be extensively customized to your taste from the style attributes tab on the right. I also quite liked the choice of filters, with which you can give a different aspect to your photos, like turning them into a scene from Sin City. If you don't want to get carried away into editing, Comic Life also features loads of page templates and themes that you can start off with.

Importing pictures onto the screen is easy, as you'll only need to drag and drop them from your desktop or pick straight from the preview pane in the application. Even more, you can use your webcam or DV camera to take snaps and post them immediately into your comic strip.

The only little downside to this app is that it sometimes uses up a little too much RAM.

Very intuitive and loaded with features, Comic Life is a great way to have fun with your pictures. It has all the bubbles, styles and fonts you'd expect to make good looking comics. Highly recommended.

Download Comic Life 2.1.1 in Softonic

The exact bundles of special effects it features are RetroPixels: retro art effects from the sixties and seventies, LoveFor80s: retro video effects from the eighties, BentPels: image warping effects from the nineties, FewTile: image tiling effects and BoobToob: analog TV effects.

Each bundle of effects in CatEye can be installed separately and they are conveniently grouped together when presented in Photo Booth. When you want to spice-up a conversation or surprise a friend, activate the Pong video game and watch balls fly across the screen.

If you're looking for a retro effect, then how about rolling back to the days of VHS video including a green hue for a really authentic worn effect? Alternatively, for fans of flower power CatEye has some cool flower child polaroid style effects too.

Although the selection of effects in CateEye is generous, only a few of them are really well done. Many of them are either poorly designed or are hard to identify exactly what they're supposed to be.

Nevertheless, CatEye is a fun way to spice-up iChat and Photo Booth sessions on your Mac.

Download CatEye 1.002 in Softonic

The results are very impressive. As soon as you install Posterino, it auto-imports all pictures stored on your Mac, whether they're stored in iPhoto, Aperture or any other application. The clear interface allows you to display your pictures in both list and thumbnail views. There are tons of cool templates such as grids of identical or odd sized image boxes which add a real twist to your posters. You can fill all of the boxes with individual photos making stunning collages which is one of the best features of Posterino.

Even better, after finishing creating your posters and postcards, you can choose export them to either Flickr or iPhoto. You can even send postcards by e-mail to your friends although you are only allowed to send a few for free in this trial version.

Using Posterino is generally a pleasure. The only problems you mount encounter however is when it comes to printing because of the increased dimensions of photos and images. Although your printer will warn you of this, it would be handy if Posterino had some way of auto adjusting images to print more easily.

Posterino is an excellent application for creating posters and postcards from your favorite images and photos.

Download Posterino 2.4.1 in Softonic

The developers of VueScan claim that it's the world's most widely-used scanning software among photographers, home users and corporations. Although this would seem far fetched, it's certainly true that it must be popular simply by virtue of it's simplicity and ease of use for anyone not familiar with scanning software.

VueScan is highly flexible which is another great aspect of it - it doesn't matter if you change scanner as it still continues to support it whatever model it is. According to the developers, VueScan supports more than 400 scanners and 185 digital camera raw files so you won't find any incompatibility issues. Installation is lightning quick as it's such a light package and there's little waiting around - just open VueScan and you're ready to scan.

VueScan is not only great for simple scanning tasks, but its also suitable for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). VueScan is impressively accurate in this respect although it works even better if you download this dictionary of common words. Just place the file (vuedict.dat) in the same directory as the VueScan program and choose the language using the "Output|OCR text language" option.

There's not much to it but in a way, that's the great thing about VueScan - it doesn't bloat your system with unnecessary features or scanning options.

Download VueScan 9.0.91 in Softonic

Nikon Camera Control Pro remotely controls most functions of Nikon digital SLRs from a computer that is connected via USB cable or though a wired or wireless LAN. It enables you to remotely use the advanced functions of the latest D3 and D300 models such as the Viewer for previewing and selecting images prior to transferring them to your Mac.

Of course, Nikon Camera Control Pro is also integrated with Nikon's photofinishing software Capture NX. You can control a huge amount camera settings including the exposure mode, shutter speed, and aperture. The main problem that users complain of is that this software doesn't update itself automatically properly. In the case of those on Mac OS X version 10.3.9 this is a good thing however as Nikon Camera Control Pro is no longer supported so DO NOT update to this version if you are currently running Mac OS X 10.3.9.

Nikon Camera Control Pro is the only effective way to control your Nikon remotely and complements well all of Nikon's software.

Download Nikon Camera Control Pro 2.0 in Softonic

Photo Booth is great fun on a Mac and Sparkbooth adds a new dimension as it uses your iSight camera to take photo booth-style photos and save them to your hard drive, upload them to a host of popular networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitpix and Posterous, or simply print them.

Sparkbooth more or less configures itself - it detects your iSight camera and starts taking the photos when you hit the Space bar. It then automatically saves, prints or uploads them and the entire application follows the same format you'd find in a real photo booth.

To upload your Sparkbooth photos to other websites, just enter your log-in details for each one in the Settings section. You can also add a logo and background image to your photos to spice things up a bit. You can also customize the logo on the main screen although this isn't really anything special. Sparkbooth would probably be particularly fun at a wedding as a way for guests to snap themselves during the celebrations.

Sparkbooth will give you and your friends hours of photo fun..

Download Sparkbooth 2.5.6 in Softonic

If your photos aren't particularly important, then protecting them with a watermark won't be of much concern but if you're a professional photographer, or if you use images for commercial use, then it's a real issue. Adding a watermark is a simple way to protect your images from illegal or unauthorized use. iWatermark is a very powerful and effective way to do it too - it provides just about every conceivable control over how you wish to add your watermarks.

To get started, simply drag and drop an image into the 'Input' panel. Then click on the output panel to select where you'd like to save the new file. It would have been nicer if a preview of your image appeared in the input panel but instead it's replaced by a generic icon. However, after this you have maximum control over how your image is handled and processed including the editing of EXIF and metadata. Note that iWatermark leaves the original files untouched but creates new images complete with the watermark of your choice.

In this trial version, you're limited to eight different example watermarks but the important thing is processing takes a matter of seconds. You can rotate, resize and reposition watermarks to your heart's content making it a truly customizable and powerful watermarking application.

Overall there's little to fault with iWatermark. From Meta-data preservation to embedding IPTC information, iWatermark covers every possible watermarking need for the amateur photographer.

Download iWatermark 3.2 in Softonic

ACDSee Pro attempts to provide a fast, flexible platform for managing your photos, and has been rebuilt specifically for Mac. The focus of the program is the browsing, viewing, cataloging and printing of images. This makes ACDSee a refreshingly simply program in terms of just viewing and organizing your photos. At the same time, however, it feels rather limited, especially compared to programs such as Picasa and iPhoto.

For example, there are no Geotagging options and no online integration features to help get your photos online. However, it does have a very lightweight and easy to use feel about it. The interface is divided into the 'View' and 'Manage' buttons in the top right, which are self explanatory. Use View when you want to view photos and Manage when you want to organize them. You can also set ACDSee Pro to automatically detect when your camera is connected for automatic retrieval of your images. Initially you get a two-day free trial but you request a key by email, you can extend this to February 19th 2010.

ACDSee is both refreshingly quick and lightweight for a photo management package, but it lacks the online and geotagging features that we've come to expect from photo apps nowadays.

Download ACDSee Pro 1.8 in Softonic

And there aren't many Java apps like ImageJ which specialize in analyzing images. ImageJ runs either as an online applet or as a downloadable application which you'll find here. ImageJ can display, edit, analyze, process, save and print 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit images and supports most major formats including TIFF, GIF, JPEG, BMP, DICOM, FITS and "raw".

The main use of ImageJ is that it can calculate area and pixel values which may be useful for graphic designers. It does however go a little beyond that too allowing you to measure distances and angles, create density histograms and also line profile plots. It supports other standard image processing functions too such as contrast manipulation, sharpening, smoothing, edge detection and median filtering.

Although ImageJ can be a bit slow in Java, its a decent image analysis tool considering its completely free.

Download ImageJ 1.46 d in Softonic

The problem is that in doing so, you usually lose a great deal of quality from the images. BenVista PhotoZoom is designed for all those that want to preserve the original quality as much as possible while increasing the size of the image at the same time. According to the developers, Benvista PhotoZoom does this via a "revolutionary S-Spline XL algorithm", which takes the patented S-Spline technology to the next level.

After you've opened a picture in Benvista PhotoZoom, you can rotate, flip and crop it until satisfied with its arrangement. You can also adjust image size to specific TV settings like NTSC or Pal, HDV or desktop for your computer. Benvista PhotoZoom even includes a very thorough list of print presets such as envelope, sheet or tabloid. These come in very handy if you know exactly what you want to use your image for. The result is that Benvista PhotoZoom is able to create extremely good photo enlargements with little noticeable loss in quality.

The rest of the interface is fairly self-explanatory. You can select whether to expand the number of pixels or via a percentage and also the resize method. This means that you don't have to choose the S-Spline algorithm as you can choose others such as Hermite, Bell and Mitchell. It would be useful to have had an explanation as to the difference between these as working them out is a matter of trial and error.

If you need to blow-up a picture with no significant loss of quality, then you'll be more than pleased with Benvista PhotoZoom.

Download Benvista PhotoZoom Pro 4.1.0 in Softonic

The advantage of ImageMagick is that it can be used to create images dynamically, making it suitable for Web apps. In addition, you can resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce and add special effects to an image with ImageMagick. However, ImageMagick is strictly for those familiar with the Terminal or command line as there is no GUI. You can only make changes to images using commands such as "$magick> convert rose.jpg rose.png".

For those familiar with programming languages, you can use C, C++, Perl, Java, PHP, Python, or Ruby to make changes. A high-quality 2D renderer is also included which provides SVG capabilities. If you are familiar with programming commands, then the range of actions possible with ImageMagick is truly impressive, including conversions, resizing, transparencies, animated GIFs and shape drawing. However, the lack of GUI will exclude most people from using it.

If you know your way around programming languages and need a powerful command line based tool, Image Magick is worth exploring.

Download ImageMagick 6.7.3-4 in Softonic

The program allows you to draw lines and type text onto your screen. This can be of good use for showing things to others on your screen, preparing examples or a presentation. Once installed and launched, you'll find the different tools available on the left of the screen. These had a tendency to hide behind other windows, luckily there's a button to bring them forward.

The line drawing and text tools had a good feel to them and I got around to filling up my screen with indications, lines and arrows in no time.

If you have a tablet, you'll find Desktastic great to work with though.

I was a little disappointed by the limitations in the program though. For one, the choice of colors is fairly limited. You can't really change size and there are only a few width and opacity graduations to choose from. I would also like to see a bigger choice of brushes and pens.

If you're looking for a simple screen drawing application, then Desktastic is for you.

Download Desktastic 3.0 in Softonic

There have been many attempts to bring web design to the masses - Apple's iWeb being one of the most notable (and disappointing) - but Flux 2 is widely considered to be one of the better efforts in the WYSIWYG web design application arena. Flux 1 users won't be disappointed by this latest incarnation and new users will be impressed by its all-round elegance, ease of use and power.

Flux 2 builds on Flux's excellent CSS features allowing you to edit CSS in the built-in code editor, or with the easy-to-use style editor, with changes being displayed in real time. The WYSIWYG page editor enables you to move elements around a page, alter their size, and tweak the margins with absolutely no CSS knowledge at all. The page editor is a genuine pleasure to use, allowing your imagination to run riot while you add new elements, tables, lists, images, movies, sounds and many other elements.

Flux 2 goes much further than those WYSIWYG web editors that only offer rigid templates and limited design power.

Download Flux 3.1.46 in Softonic

Download Remote Buddy 1.20 in Softonic

That's where ExactScan can help as a lightweight and flexible scanning software that supports just about any scanner out there. ExactScan features a generic replacement scanner driver with preview, hardware button support, image processing, workflows and much more. ExaxtScan has also been recently updated to include advanced image processing for auto-cropping and color space adjustments.

Finally, if you're sharing your computer, you can setup different scanning profiles for different users. The key appeal of ExactScan for most users however will be the fact that it supports such a large range of scanners. ExactScan includes scanner drivers for over 150 different scanner models so new or old, you should find that your machine is supported.

If you've always had to boot in Windows or use Parallels to find support for your scanner, you may find that it's supported in ExactScan. However, you may find the upgrade price a little steep.

Download ExactScan 2.14.3 in Softonic

That's not to mention the problems you may experience with different applications every time you connect a new camera. If you're suffering this problem then I can't recommend Cameras highly enough. It enables you to assign different applications to work with different cameras, makes it easy to see what is connected, and it's all presented in an elegant and lightweight interface.

Despite the name, Cameras actually works with all camera-enabled devices including the iPhone and many mobile phones with cameras. One nice feature of Cameras is the ability to download photos on connection. I often find that Picasa takes ages to detect my camera and when it does, it spends ages building previews. Camera removes this problem by instantly downloading photos to a specified folder as soon as the device is connected.

I also loved the fact that Cameras supports Growl alerts so that you have definitive confirmation when a device has or has not been connected. This is far preferable to the usual procedure of connecting a camera and then wondering whether it connected or not until the disk images appears.

If you only use one camera, then Camera may not be of much use but if you're dealing with any more than two devices, I highly recommend it.

Download Cameras 1.0.1 in Softonic

If you're a designer who gets stuck for ideas or just someone looking for color themes for their home or wherever, having color palettes to hand can be really useful. Based on Adobe AIR, kuler desktop is a neat widget that lets you browse new and popular color themes from Adobe's kuler site.

The kuler desktop interface is really attractive, and you can 'tear off' any theme you like and drag it around your desktop to wherever you need it. If you use any of Adobe's Creative Suite (3 and above) programs like Photoshop, you can import any theme directly into your work.

The only problem with kuler desktop is it sometimes struggles to connect to its API. It's annoying having to restart the app because it's not refreshing images. However, most of the time it's fine and can be really useful.

If you're looking for some inspiration, check out kuler desktop for tons of great color themes.

Download kuler desktop 2.1 in Softonic

Some say you can't make a silk purse with a pigs ear but I say take a look at Dress Assistant. Now, Dress Assistant doesn't actually make your computer help you get dressed in the morning (that would be quite something). Rather, it helps you decide what does and does not look good on you and inspire you down other avenues along the way. By using your iSight camera, Dress Sense can take photos of all your different garments and make you look dandy without even trying on a thread.

Dress Assistant has got quite a few natty little features too. You can categorize clothes by closet, season, preference and color, create and save combinations and also print them. It even accepts local weather info which suggests that Dress Assistant is designed for those that really have no dress sense - or common sense - at all. If you want to show off your designing skills, you can use the inbuilt editor to design your own and even show them off on the Dress Assistant forum to make like minded connections with other designers - or just get laughed at.

Dragging and dropping of clothes is not as smooth as it should be though and presentation is generally a bit poor meaning you can't help feeling that Dress Assistant is a rather amateur effort at a clothes design application.

Download Dress Assistant 3.6 in Softonic