Ultimate Paint is a great full-featured paint program with lots of special features. My favorite is the way it handles plugins. For those not familiar with plugins let me say that they are the most important and useful tools available for the graphics artist. Plugin filters will perform artistic functions that would take an artist hours to do by hand, that is assuming they had the creative vision and artistic skills to perform the tasks at all! While other paint programs come with a few plugins, Ultimate Paint already has dozens on board. This eliminates the hunting for and sometimes the purchasing of extra filters to get that special effect you're looking for. Ultimate Paint goes one better with its Filter Browser.

This great feature enables the artist to see side by side, what the different filters will do to the image. On other paint programs you can only preview one effect at a time but in UP you can preview them by groups. I also like the greater control I get with the emboss filter on UP.

You can download a free trial version or a totally freeware version of Ultimate Paint here: