Picture-perfect with a user-friendly software package

By PETER GRIFFIN

Most people now understand the benefits of digital cameras. For one, you can look at the shot you've just taken and decide whether to press "delete" and have another go or add it to the collection.

No more hoping the camera film caught those picturesque moments in perfect focus.

But most digital pics end up simply dumped in a folder on your hard drive or burnt straight to CD.

To do that ignores the real benefits of going digital. It doesn't matter if you're a terrible photographer any more, because a vast range of editing packages allows you to touch up your pics.

Whether it's burning red eye you want rid off or an elbow intruding into frame, software will take care of it and everyone should invest in it.

There's a big middle market to be filled between the slapped-together editing packages the camera manufacturers flog off with their cameras and the high-end editing suites such as the pro version of PhotoShop. Microsoft is taking a stab at filling that void with its Digital Image Suite Version 9.

It's an updated version of the long-running Digital Image Suite line and has some useful improvements.

Just about every basic feature you can think of is here - fixing red eye, adding an effect over the pic, auto fixing colour levels, decorating the edge of the photo, adjusting focus or drawing on them.

A panel down the left-hand side of the screen will give you all your editing controls. You're guided through the editing process via wizards, which make the process easy.

You can make business cards, calendars or postcards incorporating your pictures and batch-edit a number of photos at once for a universal style. A new feature, Photo Story Lite, will let you create a little story board of still shots over which you can lay a voice track and background music. The whole photo slide show will then play back as a Windows Media Video file in Media Player.

Be careful there - if copyright protection in Windows Media Player is turned on you must recopy your music files to the PC for use in the photo story.

The archiving function is based on Windows Explorer - the device you use to view and organise the files on your hard drive. You'll be familiar with the layout.

Rate your pics and assign key words to them such as "birthday" or "holidays" so they are easy to recover later on. Eventually you'll build up a massive library of pictures that are easy to search and store.

In the process of putting images together for a website, I found the software worked well with Frontpage. Simple animations can be easily made up.

Smart Erase is supposed to cleanly cut out objects you don't want in the final picture. It doesn't work well if the background is multi-coloured.

The accompanying manual is very thorough. Helpful passages with titles such as "What is ISO?" and "Tips for online auction photos" gives you advice on photography as well as helping you get to grips with the software. A "typical" installation of Digital Image Suite will chew up a reasonable 380 megabytes of storage with the second disk loaded with clipart for spicing up your shots when you get back home.

The package measures up reasonably well to the similarly priced Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. Microsoft's advantage is familiarity, with amateur snappers who are Windows users likely to be right at home from the start.

Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9.0

Pros

Easy to use, Photo Story a nice addition.

Cons

SmartErase disappointing, you'll soon crave more advanced features.

Herald Rating: 8/10

Price: $150