by Microsoft Software
Platform:
Windows NT / 98 / 2000 / Me / 95
(20)24 used & new from $14.69
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Digital photo hobbyists finally have a high-quality photo retouching software alternative to Adobe Photoshop. With a user-friendly, streamlined interface, Microsoft Picture It Digital Pro 7 lets you easily apply filters for special effects, utilize sophisticated editing tools, create simple photo albums, and send e-cards of your photos through MSN.
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
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