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Microsoft Digital Image Suite 10

$129

Despite lacking the versatility of Photoshop Elements' Photo Browser and the power of Paint Shop Pro's image editor, Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 10 offers strong features particularly appropriate for beginners. The interface can be quirky, though.

Organizing

Digital Image Suite 10's Digital Image Library gives users fewer searching and grouping options than does the Organizer in Photoshop Elements 3. It also lacks support for RAW images. Where the Digital Image Library does stand out, though, is in its ability to archive images, either on demand or automatically at scheduled intervals.

The Digital Image Library's Find Similar Picture command lets you search visually for areas of light and dark, as well as similar exposure, grouping the results into Most Similar, More Similar, Less Similar, and Least Similar categories. This arrangement yields more-organized search results than you can get from Photoshop Elements. In our tests, we searched for results similar to a picture of a woman in the corner of a store. The Most Similar results we obtained were of the exact scene captured in our source image. The More Similar results had the same lighting and orientation but sometimes different subjects. The Less Similar search results were of like color and brightness, while the Least Similar group was a catch-all collection.

Editing

The mini lab, Digital Image Suite 10's batch-editing feature, is excellent. It lets you apply a combination of one-click fixes to a selected group of images. While in the Digital Image Library, choose Touchup Batch Edit in Mini Lab from the Tasks menu. The Mini Lab's interface opens up to present you with levels; contrast, color, and exposure Auto Fix tools; and rotation and resizing options.

For damage control, Digital Image Suite includes some worthy Healing Brush--type tools such as the Blending Brush; however, Elements 3's Healing Brush is easier and faster to use. Digital Image Suite's Blending Brush provides you with a different interface in which you can edit only one image at a time. Smart Erase lets you erase unwanted objects (such as trash cans under palm trees) by lassoing and clicking them. With small or simple objects, this saves buckets of time. You can instantly remove wrinkles, for example, by simply dragging a selection box around them. But when you use the tool on large, complex objects, you end up with a big smudge.

Of the four applications in our roundup, Digital Image Suite 10 does the best automatic photo stitching to create vertical or horizontal panoramas. Though you can manually match up two photos, we had trouble matching up perspectives and stitching images without common borders.

A few shortcomings for advanced users: Digital Image Suite 10 can't save to Photoshop's native file format for editing layers, and its own layers format is limited. It also can't apply some commands to 16-bit-per-channel images used by professionals.

Sharing

While Digital Image Suite offers the largest selection of project templates--including forms for Calendars, Greeting Cards, and Photo Crafts (such as designing playing cards)--the designs tend toward the corny or the Hallmark saccharine (such as the pink floral theme of the baby album). One notable exception is the vast array of Business and Address Card templates, which are cleanly designed. Additionally, the suite comes with the Photo Story 2 slide-show software. This easy-to-use application lets you create a Ken Burns-style Windows Media Video (WMV) composed of still images. The software walks users step-by-step through selecting images, adding audio, and creating custom-configured panning and zooming effects.