Software
Review of: |
 I
have been more than anxious to use Microsoft's Picture It 2000
(version 4) but reluctant to buy this revision since I have version 3.
I felt lucky when it came as part of the MS Home Publishing Suite 2000
and I believed that although it is part of a suite, it still is the full
program. After I started working with Picture It 2000, I realized that
Microsoft not only included this software in the suite, but also integrated
it into the suite. Because Picture It is fully integrated, there are fewer
templates for the various projects than the previous version contained.
I was particularly interested in business card templates because I like
to do business cards with pictures that I have taken. Unfortunately there
are only 3 templates in this copy of Picture It 2000. Although Home Publishing
has many different business card templates, none of those lend themselves
to using personal pictures. Picture It 99 had one template that I used
by inserting a picture that I had taken usually of flowers and then matching
the color of the print to the colors in the picture.
Launching Picture It 2000
My next big disappointment in MS Picture It 2000 is in the ability to
change a picture to grayscale. In order to have photos/graphics to accompany
the reviews in By now I am afraid I was beginning to have a very pessimistic attitude towards Picture It 2000 and a certain animosity towards Microsoft because I was in a predicament. I was forced to remove Picture It 99 in order to install Picture It 2000 so this made comparing more difficult, but even worse, I could not use the features in Picture It 99 that I had come to depend on. But this is the newest version and has some really nice new features. I had just taken some pictures in e-mail mode that I wanted to do some things with. The first thing was to get all of the pictures in the correct direction. Here I tried the mini-lab. This is a new feature that is really quite nice. I opened all of my pictures and using ctrl+click I selected the pictures that needed to be rotated. With one click I was able to rotate three pictures at one time. I was also able to correct the tint on all three with one choice. Another usage of the mini-lab is in printing, especially when printing more than one picture per page. With this, I had mixed emotions. I was able to select the pictures that I wanted to print and then choose the size of prints and Picture It would go ahead with the prints. This could however, waste a lot of photo paper if one is not careful. With Picture It 99, it was necessary to drag the picture from the filmstrip to the template, so (as I recall) you could do multiple pictures but also utilize all of the paper. With this 2000, the program does one print of each picture even if you have 2 pictures and 4 positions. I had wanted to do two of each picture and could not accomplish my goal. Picture It 2000 does seem to utilize the photo paper better, though by extending the prints and having less wasted white border. One of my favorite features in Picture It 99 is also available in Picture It 2000 and that is the ability to print index prints. Since I use a Sony Mavica which takes pictures directly on floppy disks it is a very handy file system to be able to do index prints of each floppy and then store the print and floppy together. My next step was to check out the Projects tab. I was extremely disappointed in this part of the program. There are a minimal number of templates for each category and many of the really good templates that were available in Picture It 99 have been deleted. Under collages there were only three choices. Cards had very few choices. There were three top fold, four side fold, two tri-fold and three four panel or quarterfold. Fun Stuff did not have enough templates to be able to truly do fun things. The sticker category had only six: one shipping label, one home canned goods label, one wine label, and three address labels. Under Business there were a limited number of business cards, 6 flyers and 5 certificates. There were also limited mats and frames. Under the Projects tab it is also possible to go to the Web or on line. I thought these last two were the same thing but they are two different items on the Projects tab list. Two things that I like about Picture It 2000 are the interface (I think there is a better word but the thesaurus was no help) and the mini-lab. The interface, or color scheme, for Picture It 2000 is a very pleasing blue and the format seems to have more of a flow to it. The mini-lab is a really “plus” new feature but is not good enough to compensate for the loss of other features. I believe that this software program has left little or no room for
any creativity. I question the value of the excessive number of web projects.
There are so many Internet web sites that have cards and other items to
send over the Internet via e-mail that I do not see myself using MS Picture
It to do e-mail cards. I strongly suspect that I will remove Picture It
2000 and re-install Picture It 99 while I wait for a newer vastly improved
version of Picture It.
Microsoft Picture It 2000 comes as a part of the Home Publishing Suite 2000. Microsoft Home Publishing Suite 2000 is available at almost any location that carries software. The list price is $54.95. I have found MS Home Publishing Suite 2000 at Office Depot, Sam’s, Wal-mart, Circuit City, Best Buy and CompUSA. It currently comes with a $20.00 rebate coupon in the package. The Rebate expires on September 30, 2000. If you watch the software ads, Home Publishing Suite 2000 has been on sale repeatedly for either $24.95 or $19.95. This price with the $20.00 rebate makes it very affordable software. Microsoft Picture It 2000 is also available as a stand-alone product priced at $44.95. This software also has a rebate of $20.00 good through September 30, 2000. I have also seen the stand-alone version on sale, so that with the rebate it can comfortably be made a part of your software library. MS Picture It is available at the same stores that carry Home publishing suite.
Rose Lynn Saenger |