Picture It! Publishing Platinum Software programs in Brewster, New York

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.
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.
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.
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 bookplates. 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 2001 now 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, touch up 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.
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.
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.