Microsoft Digital Image Suite 10 review

Say what you like about Microsoft, but it certainly knows what the average computer user wants. And with Digital Image Suite it shows the same understanding of the digital camera user. In particular, Microsoft has always recognised that the editing and enhancement of your photos, which many other applications focus on almost exclusively, is only part of a much wider workflow.

To start you off, Digital Image 10's enhanced Import Pictures Wizard offers a one-stop method that works with digital cameras, scanners, memory cards and other devices. This wizard is available from both the main Digital Image Pro editing application and the bundled Digital Image Library application. It's with the Library that you take control of your photos, viewing and managing them as instantly resizable visual thumbnails, archiving them to CD, outputting multiple prints per page, emailing and so on.

By default you view your images based on a typical Explorer-style folder view, but there's also a date view, which again takes a hierarchical drill-down approach. You can also view your images based on keywords, although the Keyword Painter for applying these is surprisingly awkward. A new variation on the theme is to apply 'flags' to your images, marking them up for review, editing, sharing or print. Each flag has an associated icon and shortcut, so they're much easier to apply and this can be done either from the Preview pane or from the new Edit Bar, which appears while viewing images full-screen in the Library Viewer.

As well as viewing and managing your files en masse, Digital Image Library lets you select multiple images to be batch-enhanced using the Mini Lab capability of the main Digital Image Pro editing module. Options on offer include rotation (disappointingly, this isn't lossless when dealing with JPEGs) and a range of one-click Auto Fixes extended to cover Colour, Exposure, Levels, Contrast and Mobile Phone image enhancement. After applying changes, you're able to review them before saving.

These same Auto Fixes are available when working on individual images in Digital Image Pro, but you also have access to much greater editing power including local dodge and burn retouching, red-eye removal and cloning. Global correction power has also been seriously enhanced. The new Colour and Saturation command offers a Source Lighting slider that lets you retrospectively adjust colour balance according to the colour temperature of the lighting conditions, while the new Exposure and Lighting command lets you add flash, reduce backlighting or manually adjust brightness levels individually for the shadows, midtones and highlights in your picture. Most importantly, from either command, you can dig down to a new Levels and Curves dialog that shows you a histogram of current image values and lets you interactively change their mapping Photoshop-style. You can even edit image saturation in the same way.

Digital Image Pro lets you do much more than just enhance your photos. Creative options include the ability to create projects such as albums, animations and calendars and to add shapes, text and image-based objects to produce photomontages. To help you create your own compositions, Digital Image Pro 10 adds a new Hand Pan tool for interactively scrolling your image when working close-up and a new Selection Brush, which lets you paint over areas to select them.

As well as creating objects, the Selection Brush is useful for creating masks to limit the effect of adjustments and filters, especially as you can vary the tool's transparency. At first sight, the handful of creative filters on offer under the Effects menu seems disappointing, with just one new addition, Antique, which produces an effect like an old newspaper photograph. Select the All Filters command, however, and you have access to Digital Image Pro's most impressive feature: over 200 customisable artistic and special effects.