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Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9
If you are a photo enthusiast and have a huge collection of digital photos on your computer, and if you want to fix up photos to remove unwanted elements, then Digital Image Suite 9 is the perfect piece of software for you. This piece of software is meant for the average user that does not want to spend hours and hours learning a complicated environment. It is simple enough that even a person just beginning to use a computer could learn to use it with its great in depth manual and instructional videos. Digital Image Suite 9 includes Digital Image Pro 9 (which is used for editing your photos, removing blemishes, adding effects, changing the lighting, adding frames, etc.) and Digital Image Library 9 (which is used for organizing, viewing, printing, and archiving your photos).
Photo Editing
With Digital Image Pro 9, editing photos just got easier! The easy to navigate menus allows almost anyone to understand how to do something as simple as fix Red Eye, remove a wrinkle from a person's face, or increase the lighting in the photograph.
With the included Plus! Photo Story Lite, you can create a movie from your pictures, which includes a title page, narration, and music!
I decided to do a test photo job, to test the true ability of the software. I took the following photo of one of the TechReviewer.com team members:
Notice all the junk in the background (including a person), the scratch on his arm, and writing on his hand in the original photo (above). Now check out what I could do (below) with just a few different tools included in Digital Image Pro 9.
The results were pretty nice, although it did take some time. Digital Image Pro 9 includes a lot of nice features including a blending brush, smart erase, and a tint brush, not to mention over 200 filters, 5,000 images to create a collage or something similar, and a lot of templates for sizing your photos correctly for different purposes!
Digital Image Library 9
The second half of this suite is for organizing your photos.
The library helps to create albums easily, tag photos with keywords for later photo searches, has a 5-star rating system to display your best photos first, and includes a slide show for viewing your images at full-screen. One cool feature of the slide show is that it fades between images and allows you to select how long you want each image to be displayed for.
The archival tools of the Digital Image Library help to put your images on CDs for backup. I found that if you tell it to "Run Verification" when you make your backups, it takes forever! Of course it was too late to stop the verification after I told it to archive my 1,952 photos!
Conclusion
With this big software package comes a big price. The average price that it is currently going for (at the time of this review) is about $120. If you are looking for something to edit your photos with and keep them organized, then this could be your solution. I would recommend this for novice photographers only. If you are looking for an advanced tool set, I would stick with a software package like Adobe Photoshop. Although it is very simple to understand how to do things in this suite, the layout was not designed very well for working quickly and switching between tools.
ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 8-8-03
