Description:
Picture It! is a friendly photo editing program that makes it easy to transfer pictures onto your PC from either a digital camera or scanner and then edit them. The editing facilities are surprisingly powerful, too. Aside from bread-and-butter features like being able to remove redeye and adjust the brightness, contrast, and sharpness, you can apply a wide selection of filters to transform your photos into realistic works of art. Unlike many programs, if you pick the right photo, the results are realistic and the quality of the effect is excellent. Picture It! also makes it easy to cut out a section of a picture to use in another photo. You can also add text, format it as you would with a word processor, and then apply textures, rotate it, increase the size, and so on. As you add new elements to a photo, the program displays each one in a stack at the right of the screen. Because each item in the stack occupies its own layer, it can be moved in front of or behind other layers to create interesting effects. Budding artists will appreciate the simple drawing features that allow users to embellish photos, while those with no artistic talent get a wide range of predrawn shapes and colourful photo-quality stamps that can be pressed into service. There are some clever batch processing features where you can, for example, rename an entire folder of photos with a single title and have Picture It! automatically add an identifying number after each one. Similarly, the Mini Lab lets you adjust the balance, colour, contrast, tint, and size of a number of photos at the same time. Picture It! Photo Standard conceals considerable functionality beneath its friendly face and is a good choice for home use. --Rob Beattie
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