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Home >> Photography >> Digital Picture
Window Pro 3.5
For many of these people, the software used to edit their digital photos will never be anymore more complex than what came free with their cameras. For others attempting to learn more about photography, those freebie programs will become limiting very quickly. When the search begins for a more powerful and flexible image-editing program, it will also quickly become apparent which application reigns supreme and is held above all others. Adobe Photoshop is the 800 lb gorilla of the digital image editing software world. It has been around for over a dozen years and each iteration has added more features to make it the dominant player in the graphics world. Just recently, the newest version was announced, Photoshop CS and the initial previews of this version would only confirm that Photoshop will continue to reign supreme amongst the diverse crowd of graphic artists, photographers and other power users. That is not to say that Photoshop is perfect, as there are a few concerns about Photoshop and depending on who you are, they are not insignificant.
I have been dabbling with Photoshop since Version 4, going back to 1997 when I was playing around with a Umax flatbed scanner, but did not get really serious about learning how to use it until Version 6 came out. This was more a result of me not having a significant number of high-quality digital images to work with and truthfully the dam did not burst until Version 7 came out when I finally had the Nikon D100 and Minolta film scanner to produce meaningful digital files to work with. So despite the history with Photoshop, I would not say that I really got into it until fairly recently and I can also state that my use of Photoshop would barely scratch the surface of its capabilities. Owing to my lack of expertise with Photoshop, as well as preferring a “purist” or minimalist approach to digital editing, I am not looking to embellish my digital files, but to merely enhance them for personal enjoyment, thus my editing needs are not complex and quite conservative. Photoshop can be considered overkill for what I typically do in the digital darkroom environment and if not for having had access to it at very favorable costs, I would probably still be using Version 5. I am sure that there are many more out there wanting to become involved in digital imaging, but without the resources available to afford the full blown latest and greatest version of Photoshop. $1200 is a big chunk of coin and can buy a pretty decent lens, or a basic studio lighting kit, or anything else that a cash-strapped photographer would like to devote resources to than for a piece of software, even if it is the industry standard. However, I should note in fairness, that the $1200 hit would be a one-time up front cost with the upgrades being more reasonable, albeit still very expensive being in the CAN $400 range. Overall though, Photoshop represents a pretty hefty ongoing investment that has to be upgraded with the Adobe piper every couple of years, depending on how up to date you need to be. Now Photoshop is not the only game in town and there are other respected pieces of software that can do many of the same things as Photoshop, such as CorelDraw (US $300), JASC’s PaintshopPro (US $100), the GIMP (free but apparently buggy with Windows since it was originally created for the UNIX platform), and even Adobe has a “light” version of Photoshop called Elements (US $100). Some of these applications can be quite expensive themselves, but the digital photographer on a budget can keep the ledger in the black with some options costing about 1/10 or less than Photoshop’s cost. In some cases, Adobe Photoshop Elements even comes free as a bundle with scanners and cameras, e.g. my Minolta Scan Dual III came with Elements, which I quickly gave away given that it’s redundant and stripped of many of the features photographers would want to use Photoshop for and would have otherwise been used as a table coaster for my coffee. I won’t even get into how much of a piece of junk the old Photoshop LE was, which was a shameful debasing of the Photoshop marquee by Adobe (some would say the same of Elements too). Now, just because you can do many of the same basic things as Photoshop with some the lower cost alternatives does not mean you get something for nothing (or at least a whole lot less). There may be some critical shortcomings that make it less attractive upon closer examination. Color management is one critical issue that may stop a budding digital photographer from dipping his or her toes into the waters of JASC’s PaintshopPro or other application. If the software is not color savvy, you will not be able to edit with any accuracy for what you seen on the monitor to what you output as a print. In some cases, color management is “available”, but is nothing more than using sRGB color space for editing and that is definitely not what one should be doing for quality editing. And do you really expect Elements to be as powerful and flexible as the full Photoshop? Of course not, Adobe wants to entice you with a cheap or free copy and get you hooked into paying hundreds more in an upgrade to the full version. Does that mean you’re stuck having to buy into and feeding the Adobe machine or other applications that may be a whole lot less, but emasculated in features for that low cost? No, as the previously mentioned cottage industry includes some remarkable people who have created very high quality applications as a response to what they considered as lacking or an outright rip off amongst the offerings of leading brands or companies. Vuescan, created by Ed Hamrick, pops to mind as a highly regarded application to replace the dreck that some scanner companies pass off as software to their customers. It is not the prettiest scanning application around but it can produce some fine results and even offers some features that may not be offered by the original software, and perhaps most importantly, it is available for a very affordable US $40. Add to this cottage industry group Jonathan Sachs, creator of Picture Window, a cost effective David alternative to the Photoshop Goliath. Jonathan Sachs made his name with Lotus 123, the landmark spreadsheet program that dominated the computer landscape for the business and accounting fields in the 1980s and early 1990s, the days before Microsoft exerted its considerable mass with Excel. The good old days when WordPerfect was still the dominant word processing program (anyone remember those templates to fit over your keyboards) and Windows were something you used to view the scenery outside. Jonathan Sachs is also a photographer who decided to create his own editing application. The information at the Digital Light and Color website (used to market, distribute and support Picture Window) states that Sachs created the first version of Picture Window in 1994, which is quite a long history (now at Version 3.5). However, despite the note at the website about favorable reviews in various leading photography and computing magazines, Picture Window does not seem to be much known amongst digital photographers. Case in point, I mentioned to one very computer and software-savvy friend who is also an avid photographer that I was reviewing Picture Window Pro and he asked what it was about, as he had never heard of it. My first reference to Picture Window came when I browsed through Norman Koren’s website last year and noted his preference for this editing application over Photoshop. Koren has a detailed review and tutorials about how to use Picture Window and certainly he is an enthusiastic user and supporter of the software. It was very interesting to note that Digital Light and Color has recently advertised Picture Window in Shutterbug magazine (October 2003) with a full-page ad, and the image used to illustrate the ad was taken by none other than Norman Koren. I did not look into Picture Window any further than the very brief reviews of Koren’s web pages and put it out of my mind until recently when I received some comments about the Pocket PC article I posted. In that article/review, I mentioned how Jonathan Sachs had created some great freeware software for the Pocket PC that photographers could find useful. A reader mentioned and tied in the association of Jonathan Sachs to Picture Window and Norman Koren’s review and that I should look into reviewing it as well. I demurred at first but the reader persisted and thus we came to this stage where I have now reviewed Picture Window, so here we go. Biases Before going further I will note for the record and admit that I like Photoshop despite its complexity and high cost and I do use third party filters, actions and automations to ease my workflow when warranted. As already stated, I am by no means a skilled user of Photoshop as much of the hardcore technical parameters that other users consider as basic operations are still ones that I am learning to use. However, I do use the program at work on occasion to create simple web-use graphics and the text-editing feature in version 7 is flexible and powerful and fits the bill for those needs. The IS department at work hoped that I could make do with PaintshopPro or Photoshop 5, which they had purchased licenses for some years back, but after some insistence they relented and purchased Photoshop 7. I think it worked out well since by having me do graphics in-house; they save on contractors’ fees. Photoshop is familiar and comfortable in terms of navigating through its menus and user interface and the ability to incorporate a digital RAW converter with it makes it a one-stop shopping application for many digital photographers. The new Photoshop CS adds even more powerful tools and an improved RAW converter as part of the complete package, so it is definitely a tough market for Picture Window to challenge for, especially when Adobe gives away the name brand in the Elements package with so many cameras and scanners these days – I think it would be very silly for a person to go out and actually buy Elements when chance will favor their next camera purchase including a free copy. Picture Window Pro 3.5 There are two versions of Picture Window, the standard and Pro and given the power and features of the Pro version, it is the one to go with and what this review is about. The Pro version costs nearly double the standard version; however, the Pro version is still less than US $100 (US $50 and US $90 respectively), so the amount is very definitely competitive to other software such as Elements and JASC’s PaintshopPro. What makes the Pro version worth the extra amount is the ability to work with 16 bit (*48 bit color) image files compared to 8 bit (*24 bit color) only for the standard version, as well as being color management capable. There are also other benefits that the serious digital darkroom editor will want to utilize such as more advanced sharpening, color correction and artifact editing.
One interesting feature that caught my eye is the ability to create a slideshow with music. Now this in itself is nothing special since there are a number of other applications that can do the same, but what intrigued me is the promise of the slideshow being small enough to fit a 30-image file onto a floppy disk and the potential of it being played back on most computers in the world through an internet browser. I already have a basic slideshow creator that I can incorporate music into, but the resulting EXE file is a CPU killer. Slideshows run fine on my own computer, which is now a less than entry level P4 1.7 GHz PC, but they bog down and run so slow as to be unusable on lesser computers. I have a Pentium II 400 MHz in the house that I used as a test for the slideshows and the music plays back fine, but the images cycle through about once every minute instead of the once every two or three seconds that I set in the slideshow application. Not good, but if the slideshow created by Picture Window Pro can run on this senior citizen of a PC, I should have no problems in distributing my slideshows to most anyone else. I looked forward to this feature in Picture Window Pro, as an enhancement to some photography-related services I offer with weddings - comments further down. I will do some comparisons to Photoshop, but this will be a general review and not one that will go into full details of how Picture Window operates. The Digital Light and Color website offers tremendous support for the application with a full 439 page manual available for free in Adobe PDF, tutorials and a message/support board that Jonathan Sachs uses to respond to user’s questions. I would highly recommend reviewing all of the technical and support information at the website for details on how to use the Picture Window Pro, as it would be impossible to do so in a general website review such as this. Instead I will go over some of the main features and what I think of Picture Window Pro as a whole. User Interface and Basic Workflow As with any new software, there is a period of adjustment trying to understand how it works and attempting to utilize it in the quickest and most efficient manner. I can do basic edits of an image in Photoshop very quickly because of my familiarity of where all the major controls are thanks to years of dabbling with Photoshop, and I must admit that I sat at my desk like a chimp scratching his chin looking at how Picture Window Pro (PWP) is laid out.
I read through the tutorial and even did most of it in PWP albeit with my own images as the test to get me started and familiarized with how PWP lays out its tools and features. In looking over the menus I can see nothing of significance being omitted vis a vis the most used tools in Photoshop (PS), except for the ability to create layers (more on this later). There are even special effect tools available just as there are in PS. The lack of familiarity with PWP in the beginning made for a longer editing session than what I would have otherwise have done in PS, but that is to be expected until I became use to where everything is and how to access the tools quickly.
There are no palettes of advanced features running down the right side of PWP as there is in PS, but there is an image browser found on the left side, which can be adjusted according to your choice of how big or small this browser should be. This obviously affects the size of the workspace and I like having as much of it as possible because pop-up windows do show up in PWP to establish editing parameters for a given tool. In some ways, you can set-up the PWP workspace to be similar to PS.
Another comment about keyboard shortcuts, as I was working away with PWP, every so often I did an Alt-PrtScrn to do a screen capture of PWP and using the usual Windows keyboard command of Ctrl-V did nothing to paste in the screenshot into a new file created specifically for the screen shot. With PS, I do the screenshot capture and open up a new file that PS will size perfectly for the file in the Windows Clipboard and then do a Ctrl-V and everything is hunky-dory. In PWP, I had to use the Edit/Paste command from the menu to do so. It’s not a major issue, but if you were working on a number of such screens, which I did for this review, then it becomes a bit irksome, especially since I thought Windows keyboard shortcuts would be pretty universal. One also has to get use to having all the major editing controls under the Transformation menu and within that menu, how certain types of editing controls are grouped into such things as Geometry for cropping, rotating and resizing an image. Then there is Gray for adjusting basic levels and curves and Color for affecting color balance and saturation. Coming from PS, it takes a bit of orientation, but it does all make sense in how similar tools are grouped together and without the PS background, a person new to digital editing should find it very logical. There is nothing of consequence missing from PWP, such as for adjusting and setting Levels and Curves; in fact I was very pleasantly surprised at how much PWP offers for its low cost. The workflow is a bit different but the end result is the same and it made me realize just how much extra there is in PS that I would never use. In comparing all the menu options, there is perhaps less than 50 percent of what PS has to offer and the first thought is good God, what’s missing from PWP. As you get on with working with an image you realize, goodness, nothing’s missing. Where I would use the Curves control in PS to adjust the primary and secondary colors (red and cyan, green and magenta, blue and yellow), one uses the Color Balance tool to do the same. It’s all there, just with some different names or terms, but quite a few that are consistent with PS words and terms.
To begin work with an image, open a folder using the always visible image browser to search through your hard drive and watch PWP create little thumbnails of all the images in that folder. PWP creates a browser file that resides in the folder that you directed PWP to, which I assume allows it to call back all the thumbnails quickly and efficiently for the next time you browse through the folder. Basic information such as the file name, file size and date the file was created, are available in the browser. Running the mouse over an image brings up a larger thumbnail for viewing and double-clicking opens the image in the main work space area. From here, there isn’t that much different about what you can or would do for editing the basics. PWP offers a preview window, which can be user-adjustable under the Preferences setting for small, medium or large previews, to show what your edit will do to the image. Once you apply the edit, the preview window goes away and a new version of the edited image file pops up for you to work with.
History and Layers (lack of) In a coincidence of sorts, as I was familiarizing myself with PWP, the Photo.net discussion forum for the Digital Darkroom had one poster complaining about Photoshop’s bloat and high cost and PWP came up as a low cost yet high quality alternative. However, another poster had qualms about PWP and its lack of ability to create layers, which received a response that the way PWP works, it does not need layers. This is one of the more intriguing aspects of PWP in how the edits and adjustments one applies to an opened image, creates a new version of the image in the workspace. You can go from the most recent edit right back to the original image and do instant comparisons. The advantage is just as with PS Layers, the original state of the image is left untouched by any of the edits. The edits build up on top of one another with each new version and you can go back in time/edits to a previous state easily. PWP adds a consecutive number to the file name in order to keep track of the edits. With this rather remarkable method of history states, one does not need layers in the same way that PS needs it and just as with PS, you can delete unwanted history edits along the way. However, if you have a big editing job, having a large number of editing screens in the workspace window seems excessive to me and I was thinking that it would be a bit tricky to navigate through dozens of history edits if you suddenly decide that you do not like where the editing is going and want to return to a previous state; however, there is a cycle through button that allows you to run through the editing windows pretty quickly. I don’t see this method as being anymore bloated than Photoshop’s own History palette. Think about it, PS normally has a limit of 50 history states – where are those History states located? Instead of showing them in the workspace as PWP does, PS retains those states in memory, either RAM or the Scratch Disk, so to me, the way PWP and PS work with History is similar, but with a different presentation and access, and both are going to tax your computer’s resources, depending on the image file’s size and editing complexity. I’ll note that other than some lag time in opening up 16-bit files, PWP was stable and had no issues running on my Win XP P4 system. This lag time was suffered in PS as well and subjectively, PWP seemed to run more efficiently than PS for some editing processes.
Other Features and Tools Although the user interface wasn’t “blowing up my skirt” (Charlton Heston in True Lies) in the beginning, as I got into using PWP for something more than simple levels and color balance corrections, I began to admire it more and over and over again I kept thinking how much power and flexibility was available for so little money. Some sample screens are below for cropping and color balance, but others not shown are a resizing option that uses the Bi-cubic interpolation method (same as Photoshop) and even a measurement feature that will provide RGB values for the user-selectable pointer (from 1x1 to 9x9 pixels). In perhaps a cheeky reference to his previous work, Jonathan Sachs uses a "123" button for this measurement tool in the tool bar.
Cloning After I went over the very well written manual on how to use the clone tool I was able to clone out the blue posts pretty quickly. Not as quick as I would have been able to in PS though, which is largely thanks to being able to use keyboard shortcuts to change the size of the clone tool on the fly and the somewhat different method of sampling and then painting over the intended subject area in PWP. However, if you ever used the PS Clone tool and wondered about how and why painting with it can clone in parts of an image that you never wanted to, the Clone tool in PWP shows exactly how and why the Clone tools work the way they do. Very interesting and educating to see the relationship between what is sampled and then how the brush actually works with those sampled pixels. Although the end result is very nearly the same as obtained in PS, I have to give the edge to PS, but this is specific to PS 7 and its Healing Brush tool that allows you to sample a tone from one area and then paint over another area and then have the tones blended and smoothed over. In PWP one can adjust the Clone tool for its transparency and softness and whether you wish to clone the subject in lighter or darker tones, but in a subject area where there is a continuous tone from light to darker shades, cloning can create a discrepancy as you essentially copy pixels from one part of the image over top of the intended target. PS’s Healing Brush allows you to touch up the cloned area to make for a more seamless editing job. However, prior to PS 7, the PS Clone tool had the same limitation as the PWP Clone tool.
Distortion
Control
Red
Eyes
Sharpening
Masks The manner in which PWP follows through with a mask though, is not very intuitive and a read through of the manual is a must to utilize it properly, but once through, it is not too hard afterwards. It requires you to draw an outline for the mask, either free hand or using a set shape such as a circle or rectangle, or the useful spline method to create a number of lock-in points along the edge of the mask you are creating. The spline method starts off with a large oval that will be pulled and pushed along the mask edges by the lock-in points you create. Once the mask area is established, as marked out in light red, you apply it and a new editing window pops up with the mask shape outlined in black and white.
Saving this B&W outline allows you to call it up whenever you wish to do more custom mask edits to the same image. To carry on with additional edits using the mask requires the B&W outline to be open as the same time as the actual image being edited.
The pop-up editing windows, e.g., Color Balance or Saturation, have a little box that can be clicked on to activate the mask outline and thus one can apply the edits to just the portions of the masked area instead of a global edit to the entire image. You can invert the mask created so as to reverse the portion of the image you wish to edit.
Photoshop is a bit different to affect the same kind of edit. For the sample image seen here, I used the Magic Wand tool to select the basic area I wished to mask out. Then I used the Select Similar feature to grab more of the selection and to obtain a very precise incorporation of the rest of the sky portions of the image, including all of the little areas of sky in-between the tree branches and leaves. Using the Magic Wand and Select All does not always work though, especially if your intended area is of similar tone as another part of the image that you do not want to edit, as you would find all of the same tone being selected by the PS tools. Thus you may have to do a free hand outline or use a similar Spline tool in PS to create a custom mask.
With all of the sky area selected I applied an edit to saturate the sky, which turned purple/magenta thanks to how Fuji Velvia rendered the scene. Then I inverted the selection and saturated the rest of the image area outside of the sky. I went overboard with the saturation for example’s sake, not because I actually enjoy seeing cartoonish colors in my images J
On an overall basis, the two mask/selection tools work effectively, but PS, in appropriate situations, can have a more precise tool than PWP to allow for more detailed selections. For more on how to use masks effectively in PWP, check out Norman Koren’s tutorial for more precise information than my cursory overview (link at end of review). Special
Tools
I suppose you never know when you might want to use some of the fun features thrown in any image editing program and to PWP’s credit, the kaleidoscope is the only one of the special effects that seems slightly out of place, as all the other ones I can definitely see as being useful for various jobs, but this is getting into more graphic artists territory than straight photography. However, in keeping with the PWP way of doing things, the special effects are not over done and seem just right in their number, which compared to the number of filters and effects I have for PS, is a nice change of pace. I have dozens upon dozens of various effects available, but ask me when was the last time I used any of them except for some specialized sharpening, sepia toning, and de-noising filters, and I’ll draw a blank look on my face. Slideshow Creator As mentioned in the introduction to this overview report, I had high hopes for the Slideshow feature in PWP. All the basics about what it could do seemed exactly what I needed. It can take full size, high resolution images and automatically batch process them into whatever size you want them to be viewed at in an HTML based process. It also has the added benefit that if you choose an image size setting larger than what a recipient monitor can display, the slideshow would automatically resize itself smaller to fit the monitor, e.g. you set your slideshow images to display at 1024x768 resolution, but if your dear old, favorite auntie who wants to view your wedding photos only has a 15 inch monitor running at 800x600 resolution. No problem, the slideshow will adjust and fit, but it will not do the same for a slideshow played back on a higher resolution monitor, e.g. that same 1024x768 show will not be any larger on a 1600x1200 resolution display. The creation of a slideshow is pretty straightforward, very fast and the interface is much better than the Picture Presentation Maker I’ve been using to create slideshows in the past. The major advantage that a PWP slideshow would have over a PPM one is that the PWP show has a hope in hell of being played back on the majority of computers. In creating the slideshow I came across one minor and one major factor that I found wanting in a good slideshow program. The minor issue is the introductory screen that pops up at the beginning of the slideshow indicating that the slideshow was created by Picture Window software from Digital Light and Color. Not cool if you want to distribute slideshows of your original work to clients and potential clients. However, I could have lived with that if the slideshow could incorporate music into the whole slideshow and not just on a per image basis. As it is now, PWP will only allow music or sound to be associated to individual slides and if you don’t set the time accordingly for each slide, the music or sound will cut out. And of course, no one is going to accept having to sit through a three or four minute song for a single slide. Despite the lack of music playback capability for an entire slideshow, Jonathan Sachs has indicated an edit of the HTML files can work around this limitation. Since my ability to decipher HTML is about as good as my five-year old reading his nursery rhymes, it won't be something I'll play around with too much. It was too bad that PWP had this limitation, because it would have otherwise been a very good HTML based slideshow accessible to a great many people; however, if you do not need music to be played back in the same manner as I need it, then it is a pretty decent as is.
Conclusion There is a lot more to Picture Window Pro than the brief introduction I’ve presented here and I would need to use it on a daily basis for a longer period of time before I could discuss all of its features and tools with the proficiency it deserves. Thankfully, you don’t need me to do so since the detailed manual is well written and very easy to follow despite what seems like a Photoshop- like bloat of 400 plus pages. It’s indicative of just how capable and powerful Picture Window Pro is. It certainly helped that I approached Picture Window Pro as a Photoshop user, so the various terms utilized such as levels, curves and un-sharp mask did not faze me, but beginners need not worry since the manual provides you with a good grounding in what each tool is for and how to utilize them effectively.
I admit that I did not hold out much for Picture Window Pro. Despite the favorable comments I found about it on the Internet, I still approached it with healthy skepticism and the mindset went along the lines of, Photoshop costs CAN $1200, for anything to even approach what Photoshop has to offer, it must cost an amount not too far off that steep price of admission. What can a program costing 1/10 of that amount be capable of? I am very happy to say that my skepticism was unfounded and that indeed, one can purchase an excellent piece of programming for a very affordable price. Certainly, there are differences, but they are mostly either cosmetic, as in Picture Window Pro is not as slick looking as Photoshop, are they are minor in the way words are used or the process to effect and edit, e.g., in Photoshop, the major edits are under Image/Adjustments whereas in Picture Window Pro, all the major edits are called Transformations. What is important is not what the edits or tools are called or even how much something costs, but the end result and for the majority of useful, day-to-day editing needs that a digital photographer would want to be able to do, Picture Window Pro delivers. It delivers it in a logical fashion with great flexibility and parameters that allow for very fine control over brushes and other editing controls. So much so that I found more similarities to Photoshop than not and that is just incredible for a sub US $100 application to be able to match all of the most important features of the vastly more expensive program. Picture Window may not be as well known as it deserves, but amongst those who do use it, there is a very loyal following and much of that has to do with the personal involvment of creator Jonathan Sachs. The users love the fact that Sachs is very involved in the support of Picture Window and ironically, some even suggest that while they would love for Picture Window to receive greater respect, they do not necessarily want to see it become better known for fear of losing Sach's personal touch. This indicates that there is a two-way flow of feedback on how to use Picture Window, as well as what could be done to improve it, which is a far cry from how other software companies treat their users. I wonder if becoming involved with a leading digital camera maker would help to introduce more users to Picture Window. Not every company has fallen into the Adobe web, Canon, for example, distributes ArcSoft applications with their consumer digicams. Why not a partnership with Nikon or other brand to distribute the base Picture Window software, e.g. a bundle with NikonView, which provides basic RAW conversion coupled with Picture Window would put a budding digital photographer on the right path, from the entry level Nikon digicam right up to the high-end Coolpix units. Throw in a coupon or rebate to upgrade to the Pro version at a good price and there just might be a decent captive market to exploit. I have attempted to get to know other editing applications in the past, but I dismissed them almost outright because I was getting right into Photoshop at the time and I always considered the lesser Photoshop LE and Elements as commercial sell outs by Adobe. However, in a good marketing move by the company, Elements is upgradeable to a full version of Photoshop for obviously less than the full cost of buying from a retail outlet. Coupled with all the free versions of Elements floating around every time a scanner or camera is sold and a person could save a bit of money going down the Photoshop route, but you would still end up paying an exorbitant sum of money. And in the end, you may only end up using just a few basic tools for that princely sum of money. If you have princely ambitions but only a pauper’s budget, Picture Window Pro is what I would recommend for anyone wanting a powerful editing program. Although I will still remain a Photoshop man even after all of these comments, primarily because I have more than photo editing needs at times and more often than not, I utilize Adobe Camera Raw right within Photoshop, as a quick and easy method for editing sample or technical shots taken with my digital cameras for this website. It is a workflow that I had prior to reviewing Picture Window Pro and will be one that I will continue using for such non-critical needs, and occasionally I am asked to review software that requires continued use of Photoshop. Admittedly, it is also difficult to change one’s ways, especially after spending some years learning and understanding how something works, but I will state this though, if I did not already have Photoshop, I would be a very happy Picture Window Pro user. For a person with no Photoshop biases (or brain-washing), Picture Window Pro punches well above what its purchasing cost would indicate and it is a worthy competitor to Photoshop. Recommended! Additional resources: Norman Koren's more thorough review of Picture Window Pro Readers Comments: From:
"Michael Wild"
Followup Comments from Michael about adding music to Picture Window slideshows:
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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There
is no doubt that digital imaging and photography have entered into
everyday acceptance. Film sales are decreasing little by little
with each passing year and store displays provide greater prominence
to digital cameras. Where once I saw a great many film point and
shoot cameras at parties and gatherings, I now see their digital
counterparts.
The
full workspace has some good features to it. The top of the workspace
immediately below the menu items has a tool bar with the most commonly
used items available for quick access. It runs laterally across
the top instead of vertically, as with PS’s tool bar and I kinda
like this setup because it seems to be a more efficient use of the
workspace than PS. I don’t know how many times I’ve come across
PS power users exhorting the virtues of a dual monitor set-up, one
for the main workspace and the other for holding all the menus and
palettes available in PS. Truth be told, I’d be a dual monitor man
myself if I had the desktop space to accommodate two monitors, and
this is even though I have a 21 inch CRT running 1600x1200 resolution.
As for the PWP tool bar, it would be nice to be able to customize
it by being able to add in your own most used tools, and that would
really show up Photoshop from an end-user perspective, but I suspect
that such a feature would drive up the cost of PWP, which is not
what its users would want.
Double
clicking on an image in the browser opens it up in the main workspace
for editing. On my monitor, running 1600x1200 resolution, the image
opens up at 1:4 or 1:3 size ratio depending on how large I've set
the browser on the left side of the workspace. The image can be
enlarged further through “+” and “-” buttons in the tool bar, or
straight to 100 percent magnification via the very convenient “1:1”
button. It’s too bad that there are no keyboard shortcuts available,
as with PS and its Control + or – ability to enlarge or decrease
an image’s magnification, as I find it fast and intuitive.
At right is an image of the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Park garden that I used
as a test for the Clone tool. At the right side of the image are
two blue posts (as marked by the red arrows) that mar the scene
doubly so by their reflection in the water. I attempted to fix the
scene by trying to muddle through the process, but I got nowhere
and it just goes to show that a read through the manual is a good
idea, no matter how smart you think you are 
Some
features offered were very interesting and intriguing, e.g. an out
of gamut warning that reveals itself on the various sections of
the image in the color you choose in the Preferences settings. This
goes hand in hand with the color management capabilities of Picture
Window Pro and it does not appear to leave anything significant
out in comparison to Photoshop.