Graphics are a big part of our Internet experience. Everyone likes looking at a web page with pretty photos. Well, these photos and other designs don't just appear out of thin air. Software is needed to conjure up these images of pure delight. Paint Shop Pro has been doing this for over 20 years now and they show no signs of slowing down.

The software itself has gone through many advances over the years. While the things that it can do today are probably light years ahead of what most people will ever need, unless they are using the software for professional reasons, the basics of Paint Shop Pro alone make it one heck of a graphic creating machine.

One of the most basic and important things about the software is the ability to download your digital camera photos, or scan your 35 mm photos directly into the software in order to work on these photos. Without this capability, the software itself would be quite limited to importing stock images that you get off the Internet.

Once the photos are loaded into the software, what can be done with them is virtually unlimited. For starters, you can increase or decrease the overall size of the photo itself by resampling it. This is great for large photos that you want to put up on the Internet but don't need them smaller because of limited web space and problems with page loading. This is a function that web designers would be lost without.

Photos can also be saved in multiple formats such as JPEG and gif. This is important too as certain formats are better for certain uses. For example, if you want a fast loading web page filled with graphics, you would save your file as a special kind of gif that would actually show the photo as it's loading so people don't see a blank space.

Where you can really see Paint Shop Pro's power, however, is through the effects that you can get with the software. Any photo can be so drastically altered in appearance that it would be difficult to know what it originally was. Common effects include embossing, eroding, dilating and a lot more. You can also adjust the brightness and contrast of a photo, which is great for photos that are either too light or too dark in their original form.

And if all that isn't enough, you can also take a color photo and turn it into a vintage black and white one. What's even more impressive is how you can take an old black and white photo and add color to it. That's a really neat trick.

You can also posterize your photo which creates some very cool Andy Warhol psychedelic effects. You can also solarize your photo which also creates effects similar to posterizing but noticeably different when applied to the same photo. By combining a number of effects, you can come up with some very abstract pieces of work.

The above only scratches the surface. Add to this the ability to create your own drawings, add text, capture images and catalogue collections and you have a piece of software that is more than worth the moderate price tag that comes with it.