Microsoft does Photo Imaging

I'm a long-time fan of Adobe Photoshop. To be honest, I've invested many hours of my spare time happily learning how to use the software, right back to version 3.0 in 1995. Photoshop holds a special place in my heart as the only application that has left me staring blankly at the screen wondering what on earth I should do next. I recall doing this for about a year before I finally started to get my head around the weird and wonderful concepts that Adobe's designers were introducing to allow me to do amazing things with bitmap images. And today I count myself as something of an expert, knowing most of the application inside-out.

All of which makes me a bit of a Photoshop snob. Having made such a huge investment in time, energy and hard-earned cash I'm constantly looking for ways to make use of my expertise to do things that mere novices wouldn't even contemplate.

So I was a big peeved to see how good Digital Image Suite (DIS) has recently become. I've always thought that Microsoft "doesn't do" high-end graphic manipulation. But (much as it pains me to say it) there are now things that a beginner can do in DIS 2006 that I can't easily do in Adobe Photoshop. In fact, I even found myself abandoning Photoshop CS2's Photomerge feature at the weekend to use DIS 2006's Panoramic Stitching capability. For the rush job I was working on DIS did a perfectly acceptable job of automatically and seamlessly stitching together a bunch of photos I had taken to produce a beautiful panoramic image. Of course, for high end precision jobs, Adobe still leads the way, but for the Average Joe DIS has a wealth of goodies and is extremely easy to learn too. Well worth a look if you're interested in getting more out of your digital camera. Details here: https://www.microsoft.com/products/imaging/products.aspx.

If you've read this far, you'll almost certainly also be interested in finding out more about the recently announced Microsoft Expression set of tools at https://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.aspx. It looks like this is due for release in 2006. Very interesting!