Photoshop's great, but sometimes I need a much lighter, thinner tool to get things done, especially when I'm posting images quickly to blogs or websites. I've written before about Pixelmator, a nice little $60 shareware app (pixelmator.com) but another one of my favorites go-to apps has just gotten an update.

ImageWell (http://xtralean.com/IWOverview.html) is a nice little $20 shareware app that "ets you quickly resize, crop, watermark, edit your images, take screenshots and then instantly upload them to the web, save to your computer or email them to a friend. ImageWell also lets you annotate your images with text, shapes, arrows and lines, quickly and easily. And it doesn't stop there - add a drop shadow, a shaped border, flip or rotate your image, adjust the sharpness and brightness, plus so much more."

And for $20, what more do you really need? There's drag and drop support between programs, you can put borders around your images (and fit them into nifty shapes) and a lot more.

Every photographer should keep programs like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements in their toolbox, but for the odd quick job, it's better to head to the small specialty programs that pack a punch and don't require a lot of sysem resources.

There's a free demo of the program (only a 960KB download) and you can easily upgrade to the full version. It's well worth the $20 to quickly drop an arrow or text on a file and share it with people on the web.