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Project Dogwaffle is a paint program that lives up to the name. Unlike many other paint utilities that focus on image manipulation, this one is a painter's paint program. The brushes, tools, and features are geared toward the artist--and what brushes it has! Oils. Pastels. Watercolors. Smudge, smear, and burn effects. It also has animation capabilities.

Project Dogwaffle also contains a particle brushing system (called organic effects here) similar to the same company's more advanced PD Particles commercial program reviewed on PCWorld.com in November.

Unfortunately, the free 1.2 version contains only a small subset of the features found in the more complete commercial version, which is up to 2.1b. There's also a Pro version, PD Pro Digital Painter, which is up to version 3.2. The missing features are many. It can only save in TGA (targa) or the bloated and unpopular BMP (bitmap) format, The developers recommend using separate conversion utilities for the rest. If it had to pick two, it should have stuck with TIF and JPG, as these are industry-standard formats used in a wide variety of applications, publishing settings, and Web 2.0 applications. The list goes on: Project Dogwaffle can't undo more than one step. It's missing a Twain feature for scanners and digital cameras. There are only two layers. All this corner-cutting is done in the name of file size, as it comes in just over four megs zipped.

However, in today's broadband day and age, the ability to fit on a USB drive matters little, since image fiends will need lots of space for image files, anyhow. Serious digital painters will quickly tire of the missing elements and will either be forced to purchase the commercial version, or stick to Photoshop.

--Steve Horton