Film is dead. Well, OK, some professionals and hobbyists still use film cameras to take still images, but for anyone with a computer, digital cameras offer so many advantages over traditional film that the average family should immediately abandon film for digital--it'll save them money in the long run.

That said, one of the major advantages involves the ability to edit photos before committing them to paper, and Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 excels at just that.

Even though it's a powerful photo editor, PSPPX2 offers interface options for seasoned experts or kids and everywhere in between. Seasoned users can use the standard menus, while PSPPX2 offers step-by-step walkthroughs (a "Learning Center" palette) for those who've never used an image editing application or who like to be guided through the process. Combining the ability to use macros (a repeated series of actions you'll want to use again and again) with layers, lots of effects, and all manner of tools, PSPPX2 offers more features than the average consumer could need.

The application features three ways to work with images, either the standard layout, a full screen edit mode, or the Express Lab, which focuses on just the basic options to quickly edit a batch of photos with basic tools like brightness and red eye correction. I found some of the features didn't work for some reason in the Express Lab, like the delete button, and I have no idea why. The standard view offers a photo browser to quickly find images on your hard drive.

My favorite features are the Retouch and Restore palette, which can do skin smoothing and other makeup-like effects. I find these features to be educational, showing girls especially how computers can be used to enhance a person's appearance, even changing apparent weight, the way they do in magazines and marketing, helping them understand that the images they see in print are not actual photos per se, that nobody actually looks like that. Tools like the warp brush can create caricatures of people, and a nice collection of other effects can give photos an artificially aged effect. A "Time Machine" allows photos to take on the appearance of various development processes through the past century.

Besides easy options to email and print photos, it offers a web sharing option, it offers a shortcut button to Yahoo! photos, which no longer exists, but not an easy upload to Flickr, the default standard photo sharing site that replaced Yahoo! photo. Hopefully, this will be addressed in an update.

Although it's a great application, it's not without room for improvement. I've seen more intuitive interfaces. I had a difficult time figuring out how to close a photo to open another one. While it offers several options for screenshots being sent to the clipboard, there's no noticeable "New image from clipboard" to make sure to get image sizes correct.

I recommend this application for families, being intuitive enough for children around 10 and up to use, and I recommend making copies of some images and experimenting with all the different filters, tools, and effects. Significantly less expensive than full professional photo editing software, this application offers everything a family photographer needs at a reasonable price.