Microsoft Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001

by Dale Farris, President, Golden Triangle PC Club
December 2000

Microsoft Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001 is an advanced application that combines the best features of photo editing and desktop publishing into one program. While other related programs focus only on either of these two areas, this program goes the extra mile by combining these features into one program.

At this point, the seamless integration of digital imaging technology with desktop publishing functionality is singled out in this important program that is packed with features and is very competitively priced. With these combined components, you can create any type of personalized Web, print, or photo project to share with friends and family. In this one program, you can edit and enhance photos and then use these in newsletters, greeting cards, calendars, recipe cards, or any other similar home project.

In the 2001 version of Picture It!, Microsoft changed the name of their prior line of software, Microsoft Home Publishing, because of the trend in the market of merging home desktop publishing with photo editing capabilities. As consumers become more used to editing photos, they can easily put these into traditional desktop publishing projects.

Other Products in this New Line-up

The other Microsoft products in this new line-up of merged photo editing and desktop publishing include the following programs.

Microsoft Picture It! Publishing 2001 - Silver Edition      - $34.95
Microsoft Picture It! Publishing 2001 - Gold Edition       - $44.95
Microsoft Picture It! Publishing 2001 - Platinum Edition - $54.95

For those who want to do home desktop publishing projects that may include photos, Microsoft offers the Picture It! Publishing 2001 line-up of programs. Publishing Silver contains the one CD with the program, with two CD's of extra home desktop publishing content. The Gold edition contains two CD's of the program, with three CD's of additional home desktop publishing content, and the Platinum edition contains the two program CDs, plus five CD's of additional home desktop publishing content.

With the different interests and needs of different customers, and the different price point targets, these three Picture It! programs vary in features, as well as the number of included clip art, music, and photo files, and the number of template projects.

For folks who just want to edit, enhance and share their photos, and are not all that interested in home desktop publishing, they may be more interested in Microsoft's Picture It! Photo 2001 program or the Picture It! Photo Premium Edition 2001. Picture It! Photo 2001 features photo-editing tools and has one CD of content. Picture It! Photo Premium Edition 2001 features photo-editing tools, but has two CD's filled with photo projects.

Microsoft Picture It! Photo 2001                          - $39.95
Microsoft Picture It! Photo Premium Edition 2001 - $54.95

In addition, for those further interested in developing greeting card projects, Microsoft also makes available Microsoft Greetings 2001, a very specialized program that allows users to create customized greeting cards. Today's retail, home computer software market is filled with many of these various greeting card programs, and Microsoft Greetings 2001 is one of the better of these. Microsoft Greetings 2001 retails for $29.95.

Picture It! Support Web Site

Microsoft makes available a super site for owners of their Picture It! Publishing products, communities.msn.com/PictureIt
and like other similar sites for customers using photo editing programs, here you can create online albums of photos, upload photos from your camera or computer so others can see them, and invite others to view your album online. Also included are a lot of links to special tips, tricks, and techniques all designed to help customers with their photo editing and desktop publishing projects.

Operational Features

Common features standard to Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001 include the following.

Fix Common Photo Problems - use the tools here to fix such common photo problems as red eye, brightness, contrast, and tint, and use automatic correction tools to make difficult tasks simple

13,500+ project templates

200,000+ clip art files

1,400+ animated greeting files

2,800+ sound and music clips

Reminders - automatically reminds you of special dates

Spell Check - built-in spell checker checks spelling errors

Visual Previews - helps you quickly locate any photo or graphic

E-mail Greetings - recipients can receive and view your e-card with a web browser, and no other software is required

Mail Merge - send cards or announcements to those in your address list

Page Backgrounds - more selections of backgrounds, including images, gradient fills, and watermarks

Personal Web Page Support - create and manage your personal web page, animate Internet projects, integrate the program with most popular e-mail clients

Text Box Linking - write or edit with ease by having your text automatically flow between multiple text boxes

Illusions, Edges, and Effects - turn photos into fine art with more than 150 styles and frames

Large First Letter - choose from a variety of fancy first letter options

Font Formatting - view and choose from more than 150 fonts

The desktop projects included allow you to customize newsletters, labels and stickers, bags and boxes, gift tags, napkin rings, finger puppets, playing cards, photo frames and mats, and book plates. You can also create and send to friends special electronic greeting cards, postcards, and animated Web pages.

At the Picture It! Publishing Web site, you can download even more templates, such as new illusions that can be added to photographs, patterns, texture effects, and color effects.

There is more support now for online photo processing. When you have rolls of film developed, you can get your photos on CD or download them from a photo-processing Web site. With this program, you can edit and enhance these and then upload them to the available online album site, order prints and receive them by mail. Included in the product packaging is information from various vendors that have partnered with Microsoft to provide these neat additional services.

New Features

Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001now offers these new features.

The Gallery - preserve family memories, organize multiple CD's of content, search by name, date, keyword, or event to find what you're looking for

The Collection - collection of graphic designs from 200 professional artists, including images of children and animals, graphics, watercolor styles, and contemporary looks

Template Preview - lets you look at a design without opening the file

Home Page - helps you choose the perfect design and get started more quickly

Smart User Interface - recognizes what steps you're working on and presents features to fit a particular task

Online Photo Albums - use to create and share online photo albums

Custom Clip Art - create your own custom clip art

Helpful Movies - takes you step-by-step through image editing and project creation

Typical Uses of the Program

In Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001, you can pick from the many included pre-designed templates to help jump-start a project, or get many built-in creative ideas to help stimulate your own creativity. In all these projects, the emphasis is on the many ways you can add striking visual appeal to the projects or the photos, including color changes and enhancements, adding borders, lines or images to calendars, adding and enhancing text to the projects, and even printing the project on special paper. Special vendors providing these special papers have also joined efforts with Microsoft to help add this special touch to the projects.

You can import images into the program from digital cameras and scanners, as well as from existing folders on the computer, and from Web sites. Editing the images can involve many types of effects and enhancements, including fixing red eye, repairing dust and blemishes, repairing wrinkles, sharpening the brightness and contrast, correcting tint, as well as restoring older photographs.

Also, other standard photo editing tools are included, such as the crop tool, rotate, flip, move backward or forward, rearrange objects in the photo, and skew. You can cut out an object from a picture in several ways, including using the edge finder, tracing an area, cutting out by color selection, or using a cookie cutter shape.

The paint and color effects include freehand painting, photo stroke painting, art stroke painting, stamping, fill, clone painting, changing color, touchup painting, and black & white. You can also stretch or smear part of a picture, and put in a shadow to lend realism to an object.

The text enhancement techniques allow you to shape text, color and pattern selected text, and other tips that add emphasis to the text.

Photos can be combined into a collage, and you can add frames and mats to selected photos. Banners, signs, fun crafts, wearable art, gift box wrappings, and book covers and bookmarks are just a few of the many additional fun projects that fill this super program that is tailor made for the family. In addition, the newsletter, business card, flyer, brochure, postcard, and the award and certificate projects lend themselves for use in business. If you want, you can even add sound to these projects and put in motion animated messages for e-greetings.

The vendors working closely with Microsoft with this program include Burlington papers and specialty inkjet products, Fuji Film, Kodak PhotoNet, Madison Park Greetings, and Corbis photograph images.

Typical Output Reports

The primary value in this super program comes from working with the many pre-designed template projects and the attention to making an enjoyable user interface that is very easy to use. The addition of the many clip art, photo, and other bonus files adds greatly to the highly creative approach in this marvelous program. With the addition of color printers, users will be able to produce high quality projects that will be visually appealing, while also being fun to create.

Competition

While this program will not replace the premier photo editing program now on the market, Adobe's PhotoShop 6.0, it certainly does well what it is intended to do. With its very reasonable price and focus on projects for the home, the program is a sure bet for families to work together and produce these nifty projects. I suspect even users of PhotoShop will also be very interested in the many pre-designed project templates in Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001, as these are super ways to really speed up the process of creating all these neat project ideas. Even though the photo editing tools and techniques do not compete with the many processes available in PhotoShop, nevertheless, for most folks, the many tools that are designed into Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001 will be just what this target group of customers will want and will find fun to use.

Install and Setup

There are many important notes in the included Readme.txt file included with this program that users should know about.

You must have Microsoft's IE 5.5 or later and Outlook Express 5.0 or later installed on your machine to run Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001. If you do not have these already installed, the setup program will install both of these on your computer.

If you have beta versions of IE 5.5, you must first uninstall this beta version, before installing this program, as the setup program does not uninstall pre-release versions of IE 5.5.

If you are installing this program from a network onto a computer with Windows NT 4.0, make sure the proxy settings for IE are correctly set before starting setup of this program. Also, if your computer is running Windows NT 4.0 with a service pack older than SP 4, you must upgrade to SP 6a, before you can use this program. You must also log on as "administrator" on a Windows NT 4.0 SP4 or later machine. This program will not install correctly on a Win NT system when you are logged on as a user without administrator privileges.

There are three choices when installing the program, including typical, minimum, and custom. Typical is for quick and easy browsing of the clips, photos, and templates, and should be appropriate for most users. Minimum is for those with limited space on their hard drive, and Custom allows users to put content onto their hard drive, including clips, photos, and templates, that will reduce CD disk swapping, while requiring more available disk space.

Setup will install most content to the drive that contains the Windows folder and the Common Files folder.

For those installing this program that already contains Microsoft's Office 95 or later (Office 97, Office 2000), if you later remove your Office program, this will also remove some shared components that Picture It! Publishing Platinum Edition 2001 requires. After you remove the Office program, then you will have to also remove this program, and then reinstall it, before using it again.

If you have an older version of Microsoft's Home Publishing, Greetings, or Picture It! installed, setup will detect this and ask if you want to upgrade to the newer version or let two versions co-exist. For users of the 2000 version of the program, both versions can co-exist, but once you have opened and edited a project in the 2001 version, you will not be able to open it in the older version.

The other Readme.txt comments regarding graphics and layout tips, video cards and display problems, CD ROM problems, printer problems, audio problems, are fairly standard and explain basic corrective actions that most users will have run across before. However, the program may quit unexpectedly when used with the Microsoft Camcorder program included with Office 97.

There are also specific cameras and scanners that this program is not compatible with, and in some cases, the Readme.txt file does present some suggested workarounds.

The program can be installed on a network. To do so, copy the contents of each CD to its own network folder, and after completing this copy process, run the setup.exe from each network folder to install the program on a computer.

The many additional clip art, photo, and sound files cannot be separately accessed via disk in Explorer, and must be opened from within the installed interface. This makes sense, as the program is not designed as a catalog of these types of files, but is instead a more fully developed project development and photo editing program that also happens to provide access to these added images. For those who may be only interested in these image files, they are encouraged to look instead to the many other programs that are created solely for the purpose of providing the user with a catalog of images for use in various other applications.

Price

$54.95 street price (shop around, as prices may vary)

System Configuration Requirements

Multimedia PC with Pentium 166 or higher processor
Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000
32MB RAM minimum
64MB RAM recommended for Windows 95, 98, ME, and 2000
455MB hard disk space free minimum (595MB for install)
825MB hard disk space recommended (965MB for install)
IE 5.5 included and required
Up to 80MB additional hard drive space required if IE 5.5 must be installed
4x CD ROM or faster
Super VGA monitor with 1MB VRAM minimum
Microsoft compatible mouse or other pointing device

Optional Requirements

Modem, Internet access for Internet functionality, sound card, headphones or speakers, microphone for voice input

Contact

Microsoft Corp.
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
800-426-9400
206-882-8090
FAX 206-936-7329
www.microsoft.com

Acknowledgments

Thanks are in order to the excellent supplemental material supplied with the program that was of great assistance in the preparation of this review. Viewers are encouraged to also seek out other comments and suggestions from the reviews of this application found in the online versions of PC Magazine, PC World, and Windows Magazine.