Microsoft Corp.:
Microsoft Picture It! V2.0

By keeping the goals of a consumer-level image-editing product in sharp focus, Microsoft has come up with a winner in Microsoft Picture It! 2.0. Unlike the suite-based programs in this roundup (Corel Print House Magic and Micrografx's Windows Draw 6), Picture It! is a single application designed for a specific job: editing and working with digital photos. While it can't match the breadth of a suite, Picture It! offers all the tools you need within a well-designed interface.

When you install Picture It!, the program automatically installs the Media Manager, which creates a new folder called My Pictures). The My Picture folder takes advantage of Common Object Model extensions to store extra file and directory information with each image.

Picture It!'s interface is very visual: Each flyout menu--additional selections that appear when you pass or "fly" over a toolbar's icons--offers a thumbnail illustration and a description of the function of that tool. The filmstrip along the bottom of the screen holds thumbnails of all the open projects, which can include greeting cards, calendars, certificates, trading cards, business cards, stickers, and custom mats. When you select one of these projects, you have the option of switching to it or adding part or all of it to the project currently in use.

As with Corel Print House Magic, when you select a tool or project from the left panel, the panel changes to become a step-by-step guide to completing a given task. Here, we really like Picture It!'s Hue/Shade color swatches, used for selecting gradient fills. We would prefer all of Picture It!'s fills to use this approach; currently, the others use an HSL (hue/saturation/lightness) scheme that is not as intuitive.

The Smart Task Fix tools include red-eye reduction, color correction, and brightness/contrast adjustment. They work well, though we obtained much better results by manually outlining the red portions of the eyes. Picture It! also offers a small but attractive set of special-effects tools and easy collage manipulation.

The program doesn't support plug-ins, but its engine does, so future versions will likely offer them. Picture It! also boasts a complete set of output options, including printing via Kodak's Image Magic service, thumbnail prints, and multiple reprints of images. In addition, a number of Picture It!'s projects integrate well with the Internet; for example, you can create e-mail postcards, which Picture It! saves and sends as executable files. Picture It! also supplies Wizards for generating slide shows.

Like Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Picture It! forces you to perform tasks in a step-by-step manner. This approach can become tedious at times, but it fulfills the needs of consumer-level users. And of the products we review here, Picture It! offers the best balance of power and usability.

Lori Grunin

From the December 16, 1997 issue of PC Magazine