Erase-to-background enables you to paint away any part of a photo and leave just the unpainted parts as a foreground image. It's more intelligent than a simple eraser and detects line edges so works particularly well on high-contrast subjects. Other new tools include warp and mesh warp brushes. A major new productivity feature is the scripting recorder, with which you can teach the program a task and get it to repeatedly run that sequence of operations. This is ideal if you want to convert a batch of files from one format to another or resize a series of images. -Simon Williams.

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The only real improvement to PhotoPaint is the addition of a Touch-Up brush, which helps remove blemishes like dust and scratches from scanned photographs. Like the other modules of the program though, PhotoPaint can optimise finished images for export to Microsoft Office or WordPerfect Office applications and now provides a separate Export command to save images in a wide range of different graphics formats. The improvements to RAVE, the animation module of the Suite, are pretty much the same as in CorelDraw. They include the SmartDrawing tool, dynamic guides, which can be used from frame to frame in an animation, symbols (and their animated equivalent, sprites) and virtual segment delete. -Simon Williams.