Picture It! Digital Image Pro 7.0
$109
Microsoft
(800) 426-9400
(425) 882-8080
www.microsoft.com
Rating: 2 out of 5 | It doesn't take a genius to see that digital photography is one of the Next Big Things in computing. So it's no surprise that Microsoft keeps nibbling at the market for image editing software. But Picture It! Digital Image Pro 7.0 makes it clear that the company will have to be content to just nibble. An annoying interface, slow performance, and a dearth of "Professional" features, mean DIP 7.0 isn't competitive with cheaper alternatives.
It's understandable that Microsoft avoided the palette menu paradigm with DIP 7.0, as it can be intimidating for new users. But the Microsoft alternative is far worse. Not only does it suffer from the cardinal sin of duplicate icons, but the interface also occupies too much screen real estate and requires you to perform too many clicks to complete simple tasks. In addition, I found the interface to be ugly and toy-like.
On our 1.6GHz P4 with 384MB of RAM, the program was noticeably sluggish when converting or saving image files. To top it off, DIP 7.0 doesn't offer any batch functionality. Need to convert 300 images from TIFF format to JPEG? You'll be wincing from carpal tunnel syndrome as you manually convert each image. The absence of this feature alone is grounds for stripping the "Pro" designation from DIP. You won't be able to preview the effects of your compression settings when saving a file with DIP, either.
Also annoying is Microsoft's seeming desire to change common formats and standards into proprietary ones. The default file format for DIP 7.0 is PNG+, Microsoft's version of the Portable Network Graphic standard. Ostensibly this is to let you save a graphic with editable layers as in Photoshop and other image editors. But using a previously established file extension is sure to cause confusion, especially among casual users. A better policy would have been to use a unique file extension to denote working copies.
The final straw is the lack of an evaluation version. Both Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements 2.0 offer free trial versions and cost less. We recommend trying them before shelling out for the more expensive DIP 7.0. 
by Chris Jackson
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