Picture It! Digital Image Pro 7

Digital Image Pro 7 provides 3,000 photo projects, 150 filters, and 5,000 images for creating professional photo projects, such as business cards, photo albums, calendars, flyers, and postcards. Filters such as Antique, Black and White, Distort, and Watercolor add instant visual effects to photos. Easily add flash to a photo, remove red-eye, reduce backlighting, and adjust levels to control shadows, midtones, and highlights. Additionally, enhanced Adobe Photoshop plug-in filter support allows users to further enhance their digital photos.

Digital Image Pro 7 leverages existing Office-type user interface elements such as the new file browser, which makes working with your photos much easier without cluttering the screen with excessive navigation elements. The improved user interface makes it easier to capture photos from a digital camera, a picture CD, a scanner, a hard drive, or the Web. You can also precisely edit and save several photos at once using advanced tools like photo batch processing. Our favorite feature of Digital Image Pro 7 is its seamless integration with MSN Photos. You can store and share your photos and order photo reprints, frames, cards, posters, and gifts, all from within Digital Image Pro.

If you need a software package for more sophisticated photo editing, Adobe Photoshop may be the way to go, but for the non-techie photo hobbyist, Digital Image Pro 7 provides powerful base-level features through an extremely simple user interface. --Rich Ting

Amazon.com Review
Picture It! Digital Image Pro 2003 is the grown-up version of Picture It! Based on the same interface and the same core functionality, it adds many more filters for special effects and more sophisticated editing tools, including cloning. You'll also get more than twice as many design templates for printed projects as well as support for PhotoShop plug-ins.

Picture It! Digital Image Pro includes the standard version's bread-and-butter features like being able to remove redeye; adjust the brightness, contrast, and sharpness; crop down to a specific area; and so on. You can apply a wide selection of filters to transform your photos into realistic works of art that appear to have been created in different mediums, including pencil, charcoal, and water color. You can quickly cut out a section around objects in the photo, adding textures and so on. There are good batch processing features, too, which allow you to rename a folder's worth of photos with a couple of mouse clicks as well as adjust the balance, color, contrast tint, and size of a selection of pictures in one go.

Picture It! Digital Image Pro 2003 adds dozens more filters for special effects, finer editing tools for removing imperfections from scanned photos (including wrinkles!), extra brushes that let you distort photos for bizarre effects, and paint freehand with many more brushstroke styles. There's even a brush that uses the program's library of photos as its "paint," as well as a cloning brush that lets you paint over one part of a photo using a sample from another part of the same image. You also get effective tools for fixing photos that have too-dark foregrounds or overly lit backgrounds.

Is the support for Photoshop plug-ins useful? It depends. They're not the sort of programs you'll have lying round the house, and if you've bought them, then it's probably because you use Photoshop itself. Certainly they're aimed more at professional designers than at home enthusiasts.

The program comes with a proper printed manual, which not only describes how everything works but also includes around 150 pages of hints and tips to help you get the best from your digital camera and scanner. Bravo. --Rob Beattie

Amazon.com Product Description
Picture It! Digital Image Pro offers a unique combination of powerful digital imaging tools, helpful wizards, and professional-quality photo projects. Picture It! offers advanced tools that let you manipulate your digital pictures to meet your expectations. Choose from more than 3,000 professional photo projects and a wide variety of special effects to enhance your photos, then share your creations through prints, e-mail, and the Web.

Picture It! offers advanced tools, from batch processing to Adobe Photoshop plug-in support, for precise, fast photo correction. The Mini Lab and Gallery tools let you import several pictures at once, make them perfect, and organize them so they are easy to find and use. You can use photos from just about anywhere--digital camera, picture CD, scanner, hard drive, or the Web. With the new file browser, additional file menus, and startup window, it takes even less time to correct all your photos.

Picture It! Digital Image Pro includes 3,000 pre-created templates for letterheads, business cards, presentations, Web photo albums, photo cards, frames, calendars, magazine covers, and more.

I returned it to Microsoft for a refund. Then I evaluated trial versions of Photoshop Elements2, PhotoImpact8 and Paint Shop Pro. I bought Elements2 as the most user-friendly and feature-rich program for serious image editing.

My criteria for image editing software include: 1) Ability to handle large TIFF files, 2) Powerful selection tools, 3) Ability to adjust perspective, 4) Tools to adjust lighting, 5) Monitor and printer color management, 6) Versatility in printing photographs, and 7) Ease of use.

ABILITY TO HANDLE LARGE TIFF FILES?
Most of my digital images are scanned from 35 mm film or pictures. My film scanner runs at 2720 dpi producing images over 3800 pixels wide with a file size of 30 MB. These extremely high-resolution image files print full-page size with razor sharpness. The images can be severely cropped and still produce very sharp prints.

Digital Image Pro cannot handle these high-resolution, large image files. The software generates system errors when you send the file to the printer. Microsoft tech support said their software is not intended for use with large image files. By comparison, Photoshop Elements2, PhotoImpact8, and Paint Shop Pro handle the large files flawlessly.

POWERFUL SELECTION TOOLS?
At some point, you want to edit only a portion of the image, e.g. to change the lighting, color, focus, etc. or to add to or cut something out of the picture. The ideal image-editing program has a variety of tools for different methods of selection of part of an image e.g. by shape, color, contrast, etc. Selection tools should be intuitive, flexible, easy to use and easy to fine-tune for precision selection.

Digital Image Pro has a few primitive selection tools that work like a wizard to do the selection for you. The user cannot fine-tune the selection process. Conversely, Photoshop Elements2 has the best, most comprehensive and easiest to use selection tools in the industry. Elements2 offers a seemingly endless number of combinations and permutations of selection tool adjustments to do almost anything and all of the selection tools work together!!!

ABILITY TO ADJUST PERSPECTIVE?
Photographs with strong vertical lines such as buildings show perspective distortion when the camera lens is set to wide angle e.g. 28 mm or smaller. The image editing method to correct this problem is called "perspective transformation" to make the vertical lines parallel. Digital Image Pro does not support this kind of adjustment. Photoshop Elements2, and all the other "high end" image editing software, support perspective transformation.

TOOLS TO ADJUST LIGHTING?

Photography is all about lighting. Both Digital Image Pro and Photoshop Elements2 allow adjustments for light levels, fill flash and background lighting. But Photoshop Elements2 has an additional feature of studio lighting (Filter-Render-Lighting effects) that can add lighting to selective areas of the photo as if it had been shot in a professional studio!!!

MONITOR AND PRINTER COLOR MANAGEMENT?
Documentation with Digital Image Pro explains that software exists to calibrate the monitor and manage color so the printed picture looks like the screen. But Microsoft does not provide this software. Photoshop Elements2 includes software to calibrate the monitor (Adobe Gamma) and it manages the printer allowing the user to fine tune printer color to match the screen. You need to call or e-mail Hewlett Packard to get instructions on how to set up your printer's color profile so that Photoshop Elements2 can do the best possible job of managing color. Color management is a big deal. Microsoft only talks about it. Adobe gives us tools to fix the problem!!!

VERSATILITY IN PRINTING PHOTOGRAPHS?
Historically, Microsoft Picture It! had an advantage over "higher end" image software in terms of ease of printing individual or multiple pictures. Digital Image Pro added some new features to layout pictures for printing. With Photoshop Elements2, Adobe has caught up with Microsoft and bettered them with a new feature. Elements2 allows the user to create custom print layouts. This allows you to print multiple, different size photos on a page for consistent appearance in your photo album. See page 88 of the Elements2 manual.

EASE OF USE?
Entry-level software like Picture It! has been easy to use. "Higher end" programs like Adobe Photoshop have been very difficult to use. Digital Image Pro is a bit more difficult than Picture It! and it doesn't add much in the way of more power. However, Adobe has finally gotten it right!!! Photoshop Elements2 is remarkably easy to use with "Quick Fix" and "Recipes" and it is more intuitive than Digital Image Pro. Based on my criteria for serious image editing software, Photoshop Elements2 offers the best combination of power and ease of use.

BOTTOM LINE?
Digital Image Pro is entry-level image editing software with a misleading name. It should have been called Picture It Version7. It's OK for simple editing tasks. If your image editing requires power to handle large files, precise selection of part of the image, perspective distortion correction, serious lighting editing, color management of the monitor and printer, printing multiple pictures, you need a "higher end" image-editing program. From what I seen, Photoshop Elements2 is the best available for this need.


No, it isn't Photoshop, but it is good enough for me   December 3, 2002
SirWired (Raleigh, NC United States)
83 out of 83 found this review helpful

This program is not meant to compete with professional-level programs like Adobe Photoshop. Instead, it is more on the level with PhotoImpact, PaintShop Pro, and Photoshop Elements.

In my mind, the strength of this product is it's ease of use. It has several "fix picture" functions which work wonders. These functions (which adjust Contrast, Light levels (for tweaking shadows and highlights), and Tint (a.k.a. White Balance)) are great for digital camara users. You can correct a whole batch of photos at once, and the results generally come out pretty good.

The feature of this product not present in the cheaper versions is the ability to "add" flash and reduce backlighting. No, the program cannot save you if the exposure was so far off that the information is simply not there, but it can correct the majority of bad lighting situations.

One of the drawbacks of using a digital camara vs. a point-and-shoot film camara is that with the film camara, the photo lab will take care of adjusting the white balance and tweaking the exposure on your prints without any input from you. This program gives you that capability for your digital prints.

Of course, it has the obligatory red-eye fixer, pointless effects, clip art, project templates, etc. Ignore all that.

One nice bonus is it includes a real paper manual, not some short installation brocure.

The user interface of this package is very friendly (much better than Photoshop Elements, PaintShop Pro, or PhotoSuite). Most of the functions are self-explanatory, and don't involve you having to have any idea what is going on behind the scenes.


Very powerful but easy to use!   August 16, 2002
Maggie Miller (Dallas, TX, USA)
61 out of 67 found this review helpful

I just got this title and think it's great! I really like the new UI - much more like an Office-type application than in years past. It's much quicker to find the features I'm looking for and to make edits to my photos than with other graphics software. The UI also gives me more space to work with my photo rather than cluttering up my screen with navigation. The new file browser along with the mini lab (batch editing) make working with pictures from my digital camera much faster. It also comes with some free plug-in filters from Alien Skin in addition to all of the Picture It filters. Picture It Digital Image Pro includes some new options for adusting lighting manually and automatically. You can even adjust shadows, midtones, & highlights by hand and use the "dodge and burn brush" to make adjustments. The included design templates for cards, calendars, etc are very useful.


Cool Program   August 16, 2002
38 out of 45 found this review helpful

I just bought this program, because I never have liked adobe and Picture it programs are so easy to use. It makes everything so simple. This software is great for Beginers.


Easy to use program   September 23, 2002
31 out of 35 found this review helpful

This program is so easy to use. If I were to only have one program to use, this would be it. The red eye reduction and the flash work great. There is also so many filters like watercolor and chalk. You also have alot of project templates to choose from...cards, calendars, etc. Emailing your pictures is simple and you can print in any size. Awesome program. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a program to work with their digital camera.