Lisa Cekan

ArcSoft's Perfect365 is a fun, if limited, program that allows you to add a variety of makeup styles to a digital face to improve the complexion, get rid of blemishes, and pump up the color of the eyes, lips, and cheeks.

Like other facial enhancement software, such as Portrait Professional, Perfect365 locates the key points of the face--the corners of the eyes and mouth, the edge of the cheeks, and the outer points of the nose--to recognize an individual face and then adjust it. With it, you can smooth out skin and change its hue, add eyeliner and shadow around the eye, and make many other adjustments. You can choose from an overall "look" to add a particular style of makeup to the whole face, or use the makeup à la carte, adding just eyeliner, just lipstick, just blush, and so on.

Photos, music, videos... more and more of our files are being shared online and via email. And as more of us have mobile phones, tablets and laptops in addition to a desktop, sharing among devices becomes important. Various services have come out that allow users to store data and media files remotely, where they can be accessed by numerous devices at will. TappIn is a free or inexpensive online service that allows files to be shared by an iPhone, Android or Windows 7 mobile device (such as phones and tablets), as well as a desktop or laptop via TappIn's website.

Access photos, videos, music and other documents via TappIn’s Web interface.TappIn works slightly differently from remote access storage services like Dropbox. With Dropbox, you are buying storage space on the company's server and allowing others to access your files and folders there. With TappIn, you allow the app to retrieve your data from a designated folder, encrypt it, and send it to another computer or mobile device. TappIn is less expensive than Dropbox, because you are not paying for storage space, and it's faster, because you don't have to upload files. You're essentially opening up a channel into a folder on your computer for TappIn to access. The downside of this method is that the computer where the files are located must be on and not in sleep mode in order to be accessible to remote computers. TappIn insists that files are kept secure and private because they are SSL encrypted along the route from your computer to the remote computer.

The Internet is a great place to find recipes. Start with a search engine, and a few clicks later, you can find almost any recipe using any ingredient possible. But if you cook a lot and have built up a store of recipes, a strong, flexible database program can be very useful for finding and accessing favorite recipes quickly and easily. BigOven ($16/year, limited demo) is an easy-to-use and powerful database that lets you organize recipes and find them in a flash.

Photos and community ratings add color and context to recipes in BigOven.BigOven's word-processing-style interface has multiple panes so that you can click on a recipe and bring it up on the same page. It offers many different ways to browse for a recipe, including by cuisine, main ingredient, course, and keyword. Once you’ve found a recipe, you can easily edit it, add notes and tags to it, convert from Imperial to metric system, rate it, and add it to your favorites.

Given how many recipes are available on the Internet for just a few clicks, the only reason to buy a recipe storage program like Chef Master ($15, limited demo)is because of a superior interface. Unfortunately, this interface is not quick or easy to use. It’s simple and cute, with a blinking animated chef in the upper left and a nifty map of world continents that you can click on to bring up a list of countries. But once the novelty has worn off, Chef Master doesn’t do a good job of accessing recipes quickly and easily. Structuring it hierarchically by continent and then country means that you have to do much too much clicking to get to individual recipes. There’s no search function on the main page or even within the list of countries. You have to click the Recipe button at the bottom of the main screen, then click on Browse all Recipes in order find a search bar. That’s a long way to go to get to a shortcut.

Start searching international recipes in Chef Master by clicking a continent.Other recipe database software, like BigOven, for instance, offer a much more intuitive design, with a prominent search bar, MS Word-style interface, and tabs to make it quick to switch among functions. BigOven doesn’t have a focus on world cuisine built into its design, but it offers international recipes and makes it easier to find and access those recipes, which is what a database should do.

PhotoEQ ($33, 10-day free trial) is one of many image editors designed to make fixing common image problems quick and easy. It does a good job of combining an extremely easy interface with the most helpful tools for fixing common problems and providing just enough flexibility for users to make their own fixes.

PhotoEQ will automatically correct image issues and show you corrections on a split screen.Once you drag and drop an image from your files into PhotoEQ's interface, the software automatically auto corrects for basic image problems like exposure, white balance, and contrast. In addition to auto fixing, you can match your photo to a particular style, choosing from a few different options, such as newspaper, portrait, and scenery. I was pleased with the auto correction for most of the pictures I tested, but not always; for instance, it chose to gray out a bluish sky in a photo that highlighted a rainbow. Once the program has done its thing, it's easy to manually adjust color, exposure, contrast, and other parameters to create the look you want.

PhotoEQ is one of many image editors designed to make fixing common image problems quick and easy. It does a good job of combining an extremely easy interface with the most helpful tools for fixing common problems and providing just enough flexibility for users to make their own fixes.

Once you drag and drop an image from your files into PhotoEQ's interface, the software automatically auto corrects for basic image problems like exposure, white balance, and contrast. In addition to auto fixing, you can match your photo to a particular style, choosing from a few different options, such as newspaper, portrait, and scenery. I was pleased with the auto correction for most of the pictures I tested, but not always; for instance, it chose to gray out a bluish sky in a photo that highlighted a rainbow. Once the program has done its thing, it's easy to manually adjust color, exposure, contrast, and other parameters to create the look you want.

Of all of the files stored on computers and external drives of all kinds, media files are among our most cherished. Losing them can be horrifying, so after you've accidentally hit delete or someone has formatted over a USB drive containing all of your travel pictures, a data recovery program can be a simple way to head off a full-blown panic attack. Disk Doctors Photo Recovery Software ($50, free demo) is designed to help recover just those important media files.

Disk Doctors Photo Recovery's simple interface will help you bring back your lost files before the panic attack gets to full force.Disk Doctors Photo Recovery simply and quickly retrieves a wide range of graphic, video, and music files that have been deleted, formatted over, or corrupted. The software scans your system and lists the drives it finds, then you tell it which drive to search through and attempt to retrieve from. It works with a variety of storage types, such as memory cards, zip disks, USB drives, and hard drives. I used a USB drive and told the software to scan the drive and find the missing files.

Of all of the files stored on computers and external drives of all kinds, media files are among our most cherished. Losing them can be horrifying, so after you've accidentally hit delete or someone has formatted over a USB drive containing all of your travel pictures, a data recovery program can be a simple way to head off a full-blown panic attack. Disk Doctors Photo Recovery Software is designed to help recover just those important media files.

Disk Doctors Photo Recovery simply and quickly retrieves a wide range of graphic, video, and music files that have been deleted, formatted over, or corrupted. The software scans your system and lists the drives it finds, then you tell it which drive to search through and attempt to retrieve from. It works with a variety of storage types, such as memory cards, zip disks, USB drives, and hard drives. I used a USB drive and told the software to scan the drive and find the missing files.

MediaImpression's Windows Explorer-style browsing makes it easy to access your media files.This one-stop shop allows you to organize, manage, and edit a variety of media files with one program. Import your photos, videos-including high-definition video files-and music into ArcSoft MediaImpression 3 HD. Finding and accessing media files is easy with the standard Windows Explorer-style system along the left-hand side of the screen. You can tag files, add ratings, fix image problems, and batch resize, convert, or rename. Some other features include geotagging photos in Google Earth and recording videos to save in the program if you have a webcam.

A simple movie creator will stitch together more than one video and let you add music to create mini-movies. You can also drag and drop pictures to create a slide show. A video editor lets you fix a few image problems in videos.

Kids can use the PhotoStudio Paint tools shown in this screen detail to create their own artwork.ArcSoft PhotoStudio Paint takes many of the standard drawing tools in programs like Microsoft Paint and puts them in a simple, colorful interface that is easy and fun for kids to use. It includes a pencil, marker, crayon, and fill-in paint can, and you can adjust the width of the line of each tool. In addition to creating their own drawings on a blank canvas, kids can color in pictures that PhotoStudio provides.

PhotoStudio Paint would probably be most fun on a laptop or netbook that uses touch/multitouch technology. That would eliminate the difficulty of drawing with a mouse and let kids digitally fingerpaint. A stylus would be fun to use, too. My test system users neither, so my 8-year-old test subject had to struggle with the less fluid point-and-click of a mouse. Still, the awkwardness of drawing with a mouse did not seem to diminish her enjoyment. She eagerly colored in outlined pages, clicked through connect-the-dots pictures, added letters and numbers to the page, and placed clipart icons of bubbles and butterflies throughout her masterpieces. Once the drawing is finished, PhotoStudio Paint can play back the steps used to create it.

In addition to fixing everyday image problems, such as exposure, red eye, and color saturation, most photo editors allow users to change the style of their photos, making them black and white or sepia or adding other effects. PostworkShop (free for Basic edition; $49 for Artist; $99 for Pro) expands the special effects features to offer endless possibilities to would-be artists.

Place one or more than one style on top of a photo to change the look in PostworkShop.

In addition to fixing everyday image problems, such as exposure, red eye, and color saturation, most photo editors allow users to change the style of their photos, making them black and white or sepia or adding other effects. PostworkShop (free for Basic edition; $49 for Artist; $99 for Pro) expands the special effects features to offer endless possibilities to would-be artists.

PostworkShop changes the look of a photo by layering styles--just as you would in Photoshop-- on top of the original image. They offer hundreds of different artistic styles, such as oil painting, pencil sketch, outline in marker, watercolor, colored pencil, and many, many more. Once you've laid a style on top of the image, the software will let you make adjustments, such as changing the opacity and changing the width or length of a brush stroke.