Microsoft Picture It!

Last updated
Microsoft Picture It!
Developer(s) Microsoft
Stable release 9 (9.0.912.0) [±]
Operating system Microsoft Windows
Type Graphics software
License Proprietary

Microsoft Picture It! is a discontinued photo editing application created by Microsoft. Microsoft acquired the intellectual property rights and full U.S. trade registration from RomTech, later renamed eGames, and released Version 1.0 of the application in September 1996. Borrowing from the wizard user interface concepts of Microsoft Publisher, Picture It! was geared to make digital imaging easy for consumers. It was the first consumer imaging program to enable sprite creation, leveraging alpha masking (a concept published by Alvy Ray Smith, founder of Pixar, in 1978) while running on an 8 MB RAM Pentium computer. Microsoft purchased Altamira Software, the company owned by Alvy Ray Smith, in 1994 and made Smith a Microsoft employee.

Contents

The Picture It! file format used the extension .MIX (Microsoft Image Extension). The .MIX extension was also used by Microsoft PhotoDraw although its format was incompatible with Picture It!.

In 2001, Microsoft merged its Home Publishing product with Picture It! to create Picture It! Publishing. In 2003, Picture It! was significantly changed, expanded with more advanced editing features and rebranded as Microsoft Digital Image with the home publishing features removed and a focus exclusively on photo editing. Digital Image was also eventually discontinued in 2006 after the release of Windows Vista.

Picture It! shipped in a number of editions and versions:

Versions

Editions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Office</span> Suite of office software

Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is a discontinued family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for an office suite, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, Object Linking and Embedding data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adobe Photoshop</span> Raster graphics editing software

Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing. The software's name is often colloquially used as a verb although Adobe discourages such use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft FrontPage</span> Website editing and administration tool

Microsoft FrontPage is a discontinued WYSIWYG HTML editor and website administration tool from Microsoft for the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. It was branded as part of the Microsoft Office suite from 1997 to 2003. Microsoft FrontPage has since been replaced by Microsoft Expression Web and SharePoint Designer, which were first released in December 2006 alongside Microsoft Office 2007, but these two products were also discontinued in favor of a web-based version of SharePoint Designer, as those three HTML editors were desktop applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adobe Creative Suite</span> Discontinued software suite

Adobe Creative Suite (CS) is a discontinued software suite of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications developed by Adobe Systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nero Multimedia Suite</span> Computer software

Nero Multimedia Suite is a software suite for Microsoft Windows that is developed and marketed by Nero AG. Version 2017 of this product was released in October 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Corel Photo-Paint</span>

Corel Photo-Paint is a raster graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel since 1992. Corel markets the software for Windows and Mac OS operating systems, previously having marketed versions for Linux. Its primary market competitor is Adobe Photoshop.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Office 2003</span> Office suite by Microsoft

Microsoft Office 2003 is an office suite developed and distributed by Microsoft for its Windows operating system. Office 2003 was released to manufacturing on August 19, 2003, and was later released to retail on October 21, 2003, exactly two years after the release of Windows XP. It was the successor to Office XP and the predecessor to Office 2007. The Mac OS X equivalent, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac was released on May 11, 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Movie Maker</span> Video editing software for Windows

Windows Movie Maker is a discontinued video editing software program by Microsoft. It was first included in Windows Me on September 14, 2000 and in Windows XP on October 25, 2001. It was a part of the Windows Essentials software suite, and offered the ability to create and edit videos as well as to publish them on OneDrive, Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, Windows Live Groups, and Flickr. It is comparable to Apple’s iMovie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Office Picture Manager</span> Raster graphics editor by Microsoft

Microsoft Office Picture Manager is a raster graphics editor introduced in Microsoft Office 2003 and included up to Office 2010. It is the replacement to Microsoft Photo Editor introduced in Office 97 and included up to Office XP.

Microsoft Photo Story is a free application that allows users to create a visual story from their digital photos. The software uses the Ken Burns Effect on digital photos and allows adding narration, effects, transitions and background music to create a Windows Media Video movie file with pan and zoom effects. Once a photo story has been made, it can be played on a PC using Windows Media Player. Since the .wmv format is used, Windows Media Video Image is incompatible with domestic DVD players, users wishing to create a DVD or CD will need to use third-party tools to convert into DVD compatible format first.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft PhotoDraw</span>

Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000 is a discontinued vector graphics and raster imaging software package developed by Microsoft.

A number of vector graphics editors exist for various platforms. Potential users of these editors will make a comparison of vector graphics editors based on factors such as the availability for the user's platform, the software license, the feature set, the merits of the user interface (UI) and the focus of the program. Some programs are more suitable for artistic work while others are better for technical drawings. Another important factor is the application's support of various vector and bitmap image formats for import and export.

The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is an ISO standard, originally created by Adobe Systems Inc., for the creation, processing and interchange of standardized and custom metadata for digital documents and data sets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Office 2000</span> Office suite by Microsoft released in 2000

Microsoft Office 2000 is a release of Microsoft Office, an office suite developed and distributed by Microsoft for the Windows family of operating systems. Office 2000 was released to manufacturing on March 29, 1999, and was made available to retail on June 7, 1999. It is the successor to Office 97 and the predecessor to Office XP. A Mac OS equivalent, Microsoft Office 2001, was released on October 11, 2000.

Microsoft Plus! is a discontinued commercial operating system enhancement product by Microsoft. The last edition is the Plus! SuperPack, which includes an assortment of screensavers, themes, and games, as well as multimedia applications. The Microsoft Plus! product was first announced on January 31, 1994, under the internal codename "Frosting". The first edition was an enhancement for Windows 95, Windows 95 Plus!

A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner. Raw files are named so because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed, viewed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter in a wide-gamut internal color space where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a viewable file format such as JPEG or PNG for storage, printing, or further manipulation. There are dozens of raw formats in use by different manufacturers of digital image capture equipment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Photo Gallery</span> Discontinued image organizer, photo editor and photo sharing program

Windows Photo Gallery is a discontinued image organizer, photo editor and photo sharing program. It is a part of Microsoft's Windows Essentials software suite. The product has been unavailable for download since January 10, 2017, as the Windows Essentials line of products have been discontinued.

Microsoft Digital Image was a digital image editing program created by Microsoft. It was a successor to Microsoft Picture It!

Windows Imaging Component (WIC) is a COM-based imaging codec framework introduced in Windows Vista (and later available in Windows XP Service Pack 3) for working with and processing digital images and image metadata.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FastPictureViewer</span>

FastPictureViewer is a freemium image viewer for Windows XP and later. Its aim is to facilitate quick review, rating and annotation of large quantities of digital images in the early steps of the digital workflow, with an emphasis on simplicity and speed. As an app with a freemium license, a basic version is available cost-free for personal, non-profit or educational uses, while a commercial license is required for the professional version with additional features. The basic version starts as a full version trial.

References