Faces are among the hardest things to photograph well, and the advent of high-end digital photography serves only to magnify and enhance the normal blemishes and unflattering facial details that most of us prefer not to share with the world. Faces are also incredibly hard to touch-up well, which is why Photoshop artisans who work for fashion magazines get paid the big bucks. For the rest of us, there's Luxand Glamourizer ($30, 14-day free trial).

If you use Photodex ProShow Gold or ProShow Producer to create your presentations and slideshows, adding the ProShow StylePack Volume 1 plug-in ($20, buy-only) will give you even more creative choices.

Do you want to create nicely designed and coordinated marketing materials, such as business cards, trifold brochures, promotional postcards, coupons and so forth? Quark (the folks behind respected professional desktop publishing program QuarkXpress) has a new, free template design software/service combo called Quark Promote.

Large swaths of the world are subject to censorship, or else track their citizens' use of the Internet. Free program Freenet lets you anonymously browse the Web, share files, chat on forums, and more--no matter where you are. Download and run the software, and you become part of a decentralized P2P network that uses encryption and other tools to keep you hidden and anonymous. As you browse, your data is encrypted and sent through a series of Freenet nodes, making it very difficult to track you.

In the age of Google we depend on our Web browsers--and on all the features which make them so efficient to use. Personal settings and data such as bookmarks, history, cookies, and saved passwords are essential to productivity. FavBackup (free) recognizes the importance of such data and offers an easy and comprehensive way to back it all up. Perhaps even more useful, you can use the program to migrate settings to a browser on a different computer.

Need to correct colors, remove red-eye, or change the format of an image? Don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars for Adobe PhotoShop? ImageAnalyzer is freeware, and light, and it does many functions that the big apps do.

IGetMusic ($40; ten-day free, feature-limited trial) is an interesting app that listens to Internet radio stations for you and turns their streaming music into numerous portable M4A files, which can be played on most MP3 players. iTunes or other music apps can convert these into MP3 files, if you wish, for total portability. Unfortunately, this isn't one of those easy-to-use, launch-and-go apps.

Popularized in many of the highly acclaimed PBS documentaries produced by filmmaker Ken Burns, the technique of turning historic still images into something more palatable for a television audience (by slowly panning across the images, and fading in to new ones) has become a common technique for videographers with limited shooting budgets. PhotoFilmStrip (free) provides a one-stop application you can use to generate just such a video montage out of a series of still photographs.

The game is No-Limit Texas Hold'em, and Governor of Poker's attempt to build a story around it will make you long for a simple game of cards. As a cowboy in the Old West, you travel from tournament to tournament, playing for cash and property. Eventually, you can buy better modes of transportation to play in far-off Texas locales. Governor of Poker ($10, one-hour free trial) is a big idea that doesn't work in play.

The Ultimate Troubleshooter ($30; free, ten-use, feature-limited demo), as its name implies, promises to troubleshoot any and all problems you may run across when running your PC. However, it's not nearly as useful or powerful as similar programs, and the trial version is so lacking in basic features that you'll most likely want to stay away.

Many PC users in many lines of work will suddenly need to change the size or format of a whole bunch of images at the same time. It's really tedious to resize each image one by one, and it can take you all day--or longer. An app that can speed this process would be welcome indeed. SimpleSizer ($8, 14-day free trial) doesn't quite get there.

The more you use your PC, the more it gets bogged down with old, outdated, and incorrect, Registry errors. These problems slow down your PC and potentially lead to crashes and other problems. RegistryBooster 2010 finds those Registry troublemakers and fixes them for you, and helping your computer run in tip-top shape.