Vendor's Overview
Microsoft's Digital Image Suite offers you an expanded set of tools to fulfill your passion for digital photography in one powerful package. Digital Image Suite 10 helps you effortlessly organize, enhance, share and archive your photos. Digital Image Suite includes all the new features found in Digital Image Pro and also includes Digital Image Library. Digital Image Pro features allow you to create more professional-looking photographs. It offers powerful photo editing tools and techniques to help you fine-tune your images and let your creativity shine through. With advanced tools easy enough for everyone to quickly master, you'll enjoy taking your digital photography to a higher level.

Retails for $99.95.

Features

• Flags: Flags let you quickly designate the next-steps for photos as you view them-flag which photos to print, send off in e-mail, or touch-up.
• Auto Fixes: Do away with nagging problems by using the one-click Auto Fixes. They help you adjust color, exposure, and more-even make adjustments to camera phone pictures!
• Fix Picture Flaws: Picture too bright? Colors washed out? Bring your shots back into balance using the Color and Exposure toolsets to help you handle complex editing problems with ease.
• Stitching: Piece together multiple horizontal and vertical photos using intelligent Panoramic Stitching to show the whole story at once. Perfect for capturing the view from a mountaintop.
• Curves: Detailed level and curve adjustments allow precise adjustments over five curves-luminosity, red, green, blue and saturation.
• Reduce Noise: The Reduce Noise tool helps eliminate unwanted noise in your pictures, the random pixels in a photo that are slightly off-color or too bright.
• Red Eye: Fix Red Eye Tool helps you eliminate red eye from your photos, making precise adjustments so anybody will look perfect.
• Library: Using Digital Image Library to catalog your photos (choose by date, size, favorites, ratings and more), you can store and retrieve your photos faster than ever before. Digital Image Library includes multiple archiving options to ensure photos are always safeguarded in the right place, using automatic back-up reminders
• Sharing: Share more photos by quickly burning your collections to CDs and DVDs, or send them via e-mail. It's a great way to keep the people in your life closer.
• Images and Templates: With over 3,000 high-quality templates and 5,000 existing images, Microsoft Digital Image Suite gives you lots of ways to turn everyday photos into memorable projects.
• Smart Erase: Is there something in the background you'd rather not include? Just select the item to be removed, click the Smart Erase tool and you'll have a seamless correction.
• Photo Story: Create videos from your photos, complete with background music, narration, and title pages.

In Use
Digital Image Suite is basically Digital Image Pro plus Photo Story and the Digital Image Library. In fact, the startup screen shows "Digital Image Pro", not "Suite".

Digital Image Pro 10

Digital Image Pro is a combination of some of the features you might find in Photoshop, but packaged in a way that is simpler to use. The good part of that is that you can apply commonly used effects with a push of a single button. The bad part is that the flexibility and power of Photoshop is not present in Digital Image Pro. On the other hand, Digital Image Suite is hundreds of dollars cheaper than Photoshop, so if all you need is the functions that Digital Image Pro offers, than there is no need to spend the bucks on Photoshop or another high-end graphics editor. I'll attempt to cover some of those features.

Digital Image Pro has a side toolbar that provides you quick access to all of it's basic functionality. In the Quick Links, you can branch to your Digital Image Library (which is a different application), create a photo collage, or create a new project. Below those links, you have sections for Auto Fixes, Touchup, Format, Effects, and Edges.

The Auto Fixes section includes Color Auto Fix, Exposure Auto Fix, Contrast Auto Fix, Levels Auto Fix, and Camera Phone Auto Fix. Whereas in Photoshop each of these features are available in a number of different ways, it usually requires some understanding of how the fix operates. In Digital Image Pro, you just click on the Auto Fix, and the program does its magic. The user doesn't have to understand how it works, just whether you like the results or not. I enjoyed playing with this options on various photos. If you end up not being satisfied with any of them, you can perform manual touchups using the Touchup section.

Under Touchup, you have dialogs for adjust color and saturation, exposure and lighting, red eye adjustment, smart erase, blending brush, unsharp mask, and batch editing. I found these tools to be some of the more flexible tools available in this application, and I think they are easier to use than Photoshop's "Adjust Levels" and and "Adjust Curves". They are, in fact, quite intuitive, and help create some very nice results.

The Format section provides your standard functions for rotating, cropping, resizing, and flipping, as well as one that was not familiar to me called "Straighten Picture". This is a very cool tool for straighten the picture based upon a line you draw on the picture. For example, if you see an edge in the photo that should be straight horizontally, you can draw a line on that edge, and the photo is automatically adjusted so that the edge is now horizontally straight. This is a very nifty tool.

The Effects section is another useful and fun set of functions. There are single-click tools for making the photo antique (aged B&W), simple black and white, and a negative effect. The effects with settings include Diffuse Glow, Distort, Filters and Freehand Painting. I wasn't impressed with Distort, but I really liked the Diffuse Glow and Filters. I especially liked the Accented Edges filter that allows you to transform a photo into something that looks like a painting, providing elegant and styling results. The "Chalk" filters do a good job along those lines as well. There are several filters to choose from, and they are categorized to make it easier to select one. You also see a coffee cup image sample for each filter, so you can get a rough idea of what the filter does before you apply it. The "Paint" filters were my favorite (and includes the Accented Edges filter).

The Edges section are functions to accent the edges in the photo, and include soft, highlighted, designer, stamped, art stroke, photo stroke, and frames and mats. The soft edges provide an easy way to make a subtle edge around the picture, sort of like fading to white (with a snowy feel to it). The designer edges are fun as well, allowing you to stylize the edge and also add text. The only issue I had with the designer edges is that there is no undo during the wizard. I had added some text and edge, and when I got to the last step where you can move the image, I experiemented with moving, but had no way to undo. I had to cancel which caused all of the edge changes to disappear. It was easy enough to re-do the edge. I tried experimenting with the frames, but every time I selected a frame, it asked me to find "/PIP" on CD 2, and even when I found the folder, it said it could not find the frame.

After using Digital Image Pro, I would have to say that I am pretty impressed with its functionality and feature set. The interface can do with some improvements, but the usefulness of this tool is definitely apparent. It is not as feature rich or robust as Photoshop, but for those looking just to work on photos, there is a very good set of tools provided, and for much less than the price of admission into Photoshop.

Digital Image Suite also includes an application called Photo Story (it's not directly linked from within Digital Image Pro like the library is). Photo Story walks you through a process of building a movie using photos, narration and background music. It's always in "Wizard" mode, walking you through the steps of creation (even when you are editing an existing movie). The software is relatively simple to use, but not always intuitive. For example, when importing pictures from a folder, it is not obvious that you can import all of the pictures (no buttons to select a folder or to select all). However, doing a Ctrl-A does select all the pictures of an open folder. When working on a Photo Story with a lot of pictures, it can be very sluggish. For instance, I went to delete a duplicate picture by pressing the DEL key. At first nothing happened, so I thought the DEL key was not recognized (there's also an "X" button to delete). However, after a delay, the wait cursor showed up, and after a further delay, the picture was finally removed. There is no "undo" on this Import and Arrange screen, so I couldn't tell if perhaps a second picture was deleted by accident (since I pressed the DEL key more than once when I didn't get an immediate response). When placing a title, you can change the justification (left, center or right), but you cannot manually move the title. For my test, I wanted to move it to the dark area of the background picture where the title would show up the best, but no such luck. On output formats, I was only given the option to save the movie as a Windows Media Player format. It would have been nice to have the option to use Quicktime, MPEG, or some others. Saving, by the way, also took a long time. First it saves the WMV file, then is saves the Story project (.PSC), but even after the progress bar completed, it stayed up for awhile continuing to chug away.

My overall opinion of Photo Story is that it is similar to the way iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD on the Mac can create slideshows using the Ken Burns effect. It requires fewer steps and less understanding of the software, but it also does not come close to affording the number of features or flexibilities provided in applications like iMovie. iMovie may require more steps, but it's still very easy to use, and comes free with Mac OS X. Note, also, that Photo Story can create Video CDs, but does not support burning DVDs like iDVD.

Fianlly, in addition to Digital Image Pro and Photo Story, the suite also includes Digital Image Library (which can be directly accessed from within Pro under Quick Links). The Digital Image Library is Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPhoto. It does not have near the ease-of-use nor the features of iPhoto, but it does provide basic organization and browsing of your photo library. I did not find a need to spend too much time in it, but for setting up your image library, it serves its purpose.

Digital Image Library

The heart of the Digital Image Suite is Digital Image Pro, and that also explains why Digital Image Suite is only $10 more than Digital Image Pro. You are paying just a little bit more for Photo Story and Digital Image Library, and it's worth the extra bucks to have those tools included.

Check out the following images that I worked with in Digital Image Pro. The first one is an original photo, and the second one has gone through just a few effects in Digital Image Pro. The thumbs do not show the detail, so be sure to click on the thumbs for the full sized image.

Summary
Digital Image Suite is a bundle of three applications: Digital Image Pro, Digital Image Library and Photo Story. The heart of the suite is Digital Image Pro, an easy-to-use application for editing photos. Digital Image Library is a simple application for importing and managing your photo library, and Photo Story is a simple wizard for creating slide shows complete with Ken Burns effects, narration, and background music. I was pleasantly surprised to find as many cool and easy-to-use functions as I did in Digital Image Pro. A lot of the mundane steps needed to perform many of these functions in Photoshop are simplified to much fewer steps in Digital Image Pro, sometimes just with a single button-click. It does not provide all of the flexibility, robustness and features of Photoshop, so it will not replace Photoshop as a graphics editor. However, for those who are looking for an application that does nothing but work with photos, and looking for shortcuts for performing complex editing tasks, Digital Image Pro really does shine. It has some interface issues that could be improved, and I had difficulty accessing frames from the CD, but it's still a nice powerful tool for working with your photos. What I would really like to see is Digital Image Pro ported to the Mac and integrated with iPhoto and iMovie. Now that would rock!

Pros

• Complex photo editing tasks streamlined into simple functions
• Some very cool effects and editing tools
• Easy to use
• Lots of function for the price

Cons

• Digital Image Pro begs to be ported to the Mac
• Some interface annoyances
• Photo Story only outputs in Windows Media format
• Digital Image Library falls short of iPhoto features and versatility

Overall Rating:

4 out of 5 Mice