Thank you martians, I think you ar absolutly right. I will see about Freehand, I used it way back when I was doing commercial art "in-house" but I don't remeber the "pattern recognition" stuff... This is what I need as my palsy becomes worse. I wish I could find an old copy of the 1995 program since I love small programs. My favorite paint software was/is Aprentice/Monet by Delta Toa, now available only as a bundle with MacCheese or something from a German retailer. Mac only alas. Anyway, off to find the Freehand demo. Oh, for diolma, PSP9 so far as I can tell has all the features as Photoshop 8 though I am having trouble with learning the new interface, it seems like it developed out of ColorIt! for Mac which was about $35 in 1995 and I thought had a much better user interface and more developed features then Photoshop 5 at the time. The PSP9 scripting looks a little less powerfull than the Photoshop but that is the only limititation i have found yet. Also I have not found Layer Styles yet.