Picture It Digital Image Pro is a powerful photographic image manipulation tool that gives Photoshop Elements a run for its money. Check out our Australian review.
Adjusting photographs using professional graphics tools can be confusing. You're often expected to understand obscure relationships between various filters and effects, guessing your way through mathematical digits to find the adjustment you need to fix your family happy-snaps. Microsoft Picture It Digital Image Pro does away with the unfriendly interfaces of programs like Photoshop and has advanced tools geared towards solving common problems and errors in your digital photos. There are less expensive packages in the Picture It range, but Digital Image Pro has the most advanced features, allowing high-quality photo retouching.
Something we were slightly miffed about was the way the program insists that you upgrade your web browser to Internet Explorer 6, as well as installing the latest version of Outlook Express, whether you'd like them or not. Strangely, you are not given the option to refuse these installations. Too bad if you don't use Internet Explorer. Having suffered that, you're on your way.
Once into the program, your pictures are shown as thumbnails at the bottom of the screen. The current layers of your project are displayed on the right of the screen. The toolbar along the left side offers options that are named after common operations like "Add Something" and "Touchup". If you need more workspace, you can optionally shrink hte menus down to simple icons. The entire workspace is well organised and set out in a straightforward fashion to let you immediately get down to business.
Operations like removing the "Red Eyes of Satan" from your beloved Grandmother, hiding scratches and dust on old scanned pictures, removing objects from view, cropping and special effects are all very simple to do. There is of course the obligatory stuff like templates for digital albums, e-cards, flyers, calendars and all the other things you may need for your next Parents & Citizens Association meeting. At the same time, they surprisingly don't hamper your powers of adjustment much.
There are some surprisingly advanced options for the editing tools in Picture It Digital Image Pro 7. Lighting, brightness and contrast controls have been set up to allow the most relevant adjustments, that behave in ways you would expect them to. You can choose to adjust things like the "shadows", "midtones" or "highlights" of a shot. There are more tools to help the blundering photographer: you can sharpen up blurry pictures taken slightly out of focus. We weren't expecting great things from this feature until we applied it to some drunken party photos we just happened to have. We were particularly impressed with the final resuls, and reminded ourselves not to carry cameras when we're drunk.
Picture It Digital Image Pro 7's overall ease of use is accentuated with a selection of video tutorials that cover most aspects of the program's operation. This makes an already easy to use tool accessible to almost anybody.
Picture It Digital Image Pro 7 really impressed us with its ease of use, powerful features and logical layout. If you have a large collection of digital photos that aren't quite right, this is the tool for you. Highly recommended.
Microsoft Picture It Digital Image Pro 7.0
Company: Microsoft Australia
Price: AU$229
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 20 58
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