There are more than 100 effects -- all of those of Core Image, plus some plug-ins added by the developer. The effects are easy to find, easy to use and easy to edit. If you have an older machine there is an option to not update an effect until you release the mouse button. Otherwise, the effects are done in realtime. I am using Imaginator on a 800 MHz G4 iBook with 640 MB of RAM and its works great on images destined for the web. On a 1.6 GHz MacBook Air, Imaginator is very fast. It is likely a screamer or an iMac or Mac Pro, but I don't know that.

Layers are easy to add with four commands:

• Add another image
• Reuse base image
• Add text
• Add paint layer

Effects can be applied to each layer. You can, for example, place blurred text on top of a crisp image. Or put the text behind a translucent image to shine through. This is all done by applying effects to the layers individually.

The documentation is concise, and, where needed, visual. For example, the documentation about various color blends includes visual examples to give you a good idea of what each blend does.

About support: On a Sunday evening, I contacted the developer because Imaginator would not open Pentax RAW images---although it did fine with "generic" raw---and he fixed the issue by Monday morning. BTW, because of their size, RAW images are pretty sluggish on my older iBook, but that is not really an Imaginator issue.

For $49 and life-time free upgrades, I cannot image a better deal.