Dave's Favorites: Play Jigsaw Puzzles With Your Pictures

A few weeks ago, when I wrote about how you can make creative photo projects using the Photoshop plug-in called Puzzle Pro, reader Judy Beaver from Lafayette, Indiana wrote in with a suggestion of her own: BrainsBreaker. The program isn't an artistic tool; it's a game that lets you create puzzles out of any picture on your computer.

BrainsBreaker is a blast. With it you import a photo, crop it down to the part you want to turn into a puzzle, and select the total number of and shapes of your puzzle pieces. Then the desktop turns into the digital equivalent of your dining room table, complete with puzzle pieces lining the screen edges, a clean work area, and even a slew of "boxes" for storing pieces you don't need to work with right away.

My family has found BrainsBreaker a great way to play with our latest digital photos, and I suspect that it would appeal to the puzzle lover in anyone. You can download a free trial--the load button is disabled, but you can drag digital photo files directly into the program window to try it out. If you like it, you can buy it online for $20.