Microsoft made a believer out of me when they produced Digital Image Suite 7, which I have used along with some other photo editing programs since that time. The new version is Digital Image Suite 9, they skipped version 8 and went to straight to 9 with this effort. This software has added some nifty features. The major revision is that this version encompasses not only Digital Image Pro 9 (their photo editing program) but also has Digital Image Library 9. You might be wondering what the big deal is about that, so let me explain. Now this suite has some special qualities, with one being that combining these programs increases your ability to work with your digital images by increasing the ways you can access, edit, organize and archive your images. For example, you can scan a photo in with a scanner, you can download pictures from your digital camera or you can archive your photos onto a CD or DVD drive. I should also mention at the outset that there is a bonus inclusion called Photo Story Lite, which adds some flexibility and power if you want to convert your photos to video.

What you need is for your system to be running at least Windows 98/ME/2000/XP on a Pentium class, 700 MHz processor PC or equivalent with 400 MB free hard disk space, at least 256 MB of RAM and a Super VGA, 16-bit color display at 800 x 600 screen resolution. Your system should also have a Quad speed or faster CD-ROM drive with at least 1 MB of Video RAM. You will need a Microsoft mouse or compatible pointing device, with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 software required and included. Up to an additional 60 MB of hard disk space may be required for Internet Explorer upgrade. This installation will not replace your primary browser. Finally, according to the Microsoft website, you should have a Modem (33.6 kbps or faster recommended), and Internet access for Internet functionality. Some Internet functionality requires a Microsoft .NET Passport.

This software claims that it is compatible with most digital cameras, scanners, printers, and storage devices and that it supports JPG, MIX, PNG, TIF, BMP, GIF, FPX, and more image file formats. I did not try working with all of these formats, but I can vouch for JPG, TIF, BMP and GIF files working well in this software. The minimum requirements are fairly basic. I tested the product on my computer, which has an Intel P4 3.06 GHz CPU, with 512 MB of RDRAM, running Windows XP Professional, with 80 and 160 GB hard drives.

The Digital Image Pro 9 portion of the suite is an easy to use, yet full-featured photo-editing program. You can opt to make adjustments automatically or you can use the manual controls to achieve precisely the look and feel you want from the particular image you are editing. There are very helpful tutorial and instructional videos included on the CD. These videos cover some aspects of both basic and advanced editing. There is also a nice manual, which increases the variety of topics and as a rule, goes into greater detail than what is offered on the tutorial videos. However, if you have used this or similar products in the past, they might be on the simplistic side and you might want to just skip over them.

The program is fairly standard in how it works, using icons, toolbars and the task pane, which makes it pretty easy to use. The one difference that is most noticeable is that you can only work on one editing task at a time because of the format (editing opens up a specific Task Pane for whatever procedure you are using). Besides that minor annoyance, the program is smooth and clean. I like to try the automatic corrections and if they are not satisfactory, I can cancel them and go in manually to edit the photo. When you start the program, you will see your options on the top half of the screen. You can select buttons that open a file, open files from a camera, scan a picture, batch edit photos, create a project or open the Digital Image Library. Another nice feature is that thumbnails of your four most recent opened photos will be displayed, making it very easy to work for awhile, stop and come back later to finish your project. You can also do a number of other things that many of us do routinely such as changing the size of your image by size of printed image (inches), pixel dimensions or resolution.

What other tools are worth telling you about? Well, as I mentioned the Levels and Contrast automatic repair procedures are good. Most of the time, they work just fine and there is no need to tweak them. You can also correct the tint, hue, saturation and There are also many things you can do to your photo besides touching up the photo. For example, you can work with the image format, add special effects, and give it “edges” or even something else like adding text, lines or shapes into the photo. One especially neat trick is the way the program allows you to straighten a photo that is crooked. This works very well for those photos where you or your subjects were a little bit offline. Finally, I have to mention my favorite tool, which is not the red-eye auto-fix tool that was my favorite in the previous version, rather, the Smart Erase tool, which allows you to erase areas of the photo and fill in those sections with pixels that surround the area to be erased. One way that I used it extensively is to erase the date stamp that most of my digital photos have. You simply use the mouse to freehand draw around the area and then click fill in and the area is filled beautifully and looks great. Finally, you can batch edit photos in the “mini-lab” after you have selected several photos, say ones that are too dark, for example, you can use some of the automatic features to correct the problem in all of the photos at once. I’d call that quick and dirty editing, or should I say quick and easy photo editing at its best.

When you use this program, you will find lots of other things to do with your photos than just edit them. For one, you can create all sorts of projects such as greeting cards, designs, letters, and even animations with your images. Your first foray into Digital Image Library begins with this program searching your hard drive(s) for image files. Once you have them in your “library”, you can archive them and even gather and edit data regarding your images. You can easily rename them to something that makes sense to you. With so many pictures, it only makes sense to make a slide show with added music and narration. This is where Photo Story comes in. I really did find this a delightful, versatile and powerful program to use with my digital images.

The software is available in local retail stores and when I checked, the going price was about $100.00, while that may sound like a lot, this suite of programs does have a lot to offer. It is available as Digital Image Pro (without the Digital Image Library) and costs about $60.00 on the street, as they say. For more information, check out the Microsoft website Microsoft’s online store and the price there is $69.99 after a $60.00 mail-in rebate.