Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006

Microsoft has been hovering around the home photography market for a while, firstly with the so-so Picture It and more recently with the much better Digital Image Suite. It’s aimed at the same people who might consider Photoshop Elements or one of the dozens of other image editing programs on the market, but it contains some features that might interest power users, too.There are two versions of Digital Image 2006: Standard, which contains the image editor and photo library programs; and Suite, which adds power features such as support for RAW files, Photoshop plug-ins, panoramic stitching and Photo Story 3.1, which you can use to turn photos into video slideshows. The Suite also includes twice as many templates and images as before – together with additional photo filters.

The user interface is designed to be as simple as possible and looks very like the Explorer windows in Windows XP, with toolbars at the top, a main window for the image you’re working on and a panel of options on the left-hand side of the screen. These options are divided into categories that you can expand and collapse with a single click, so for example there’s a category of Auto Fixes for quickly sorting out dodgy snaps, a category with touch-up tools, and so on.For most people the Auto Fixes will be the most useful tools. You get one-click fixes for colour balance, for exposure, for contrast and for levels, and there’s a nifty Camera Phone Auto Fix to improve mobile phone snaps. Elsewhere you’ll find the obligatory red-eye removal together with familiar tools such as a blending brush, colour and saturation adjustment photo filters. You also get some basic text editing tools that you can use to add normal or shaped text to an image.

In addition to the Editor you also get the Library, a file browser that’s designed specifically for managing your images. A star system enables you to rate your photos, and you can also apply one or more labels to make images easier to find. You’ll also find three useful batch processing features: one for batch renaming, one for batch conversion of file formats, and one for batch resizing.You’ll find a fourth batch option in the Tasks menu: Batch Edit in Mini Lab. This is one of the program’s best features, and enables you to apply effects – colour, exposure, contrast, levels or cameraphone auto fixes such as image rotation and image resizing – to multiple images simultaneously. It works flawlessly and you can see the results in real time before saving the modified images.

Digital Image is no Photoshop, but the overwhelming majority of digital camera owners don’t need a heavyweight image editing application. Microsoft’s offering is easy to use, fast and surprisingly powerful, and it will happily adjust your images for burning to CD, sending by email or publishing on the internet. Unless you really need panoramic stitching and some extra templates we’d recommend the Standard version: at around £29 it’s extremely good value for money and contains every form of photo fix you’re ever likely to need.