Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 review

If you have lots of digital photos gathering virtual dust on your hard disk, then it's time you got some photo editing software.

A good image editor will make dodgy photos presentable, and will allow you to have some creative fun too. The only problem is that many of these programs are still a bit complicated and intimidating for anyone who's completely new to digital photography.

Like its predecessors, the 2006 version of Microsoft's Digital Image Suite is aimed squarely at inexperienced photo editors. Most photo editing software presents you with complicated-looking palettes and toolbars. If you have no idea where to start, these won't help.

Image Suite takes a different approach. It opens with a single toolbar on the left-hand side called Common Tasks. From this toolbar, you can choose from a list of autofixes and tasks. These require no input from you - simply click on the fix you need, and the program will automatically apply the changes, for instance optimising colour or saturation levels.

If you want to use the other tools, you'll still need to know a bit about what you're doing, but it's much less confusing than most other programs. If, however, you still feel lost, assistance is close to hand. The program's help function is the best we've ever seen, with lots of walkthroughs illustrated by colour photos - so there's no need to stick to using the one-click autofixes forever.

This edition of Digital Image Suite contains several new features. They're all fun or useful, but not revolutionary. We enjoyed playing with the newly-added black and white effects. Other image editors have been able to render in greyscale for ages, though, so we were surprised to see this listed as a new feature. If you use the improved 'smart' cropping tool, the program analyses your photo and chooses an area to crop based on how it thinks the picture should be composed. This works well enough, but you can do it better and quicker by hand. We tried the panoramic stitching function on two sets of photos, both of which we've stitched perfectly with other programs. In both cases Image Suite failed abysmally to make a decent single image.

As well as the editing program, you also get a photo organiser, the Image Suite Library. After you install it, this searches out all the photographs on your hard disk. You can organise these in a number of ways, such as by date, file size, the camera they were taken with, and so on. As with all other image libraries, you can attach tags to your images. This edition's Library is the first to support hierarchical tags. So for instance, you might tag all the pictures of your relatives with the tag 'family', then tag them all individually by name. This allows you to narrow searches and makes browsing much quicker. Useful as this is, it's something that other programs can already do. We were, however, really impressed with the Hover Thumbnail feature. Whenever you hover your mouse cursor over a picture in the library, a preview of that image appears, again, which makes browsing a lot easier and quicker.

There aren't enough new features in this edition of Digital Image Suite to make upgrading worthwhile if you own the last edition. And if you're an experienced photo editor, you'll find its image manipulation functions far too basic. You'd be far better off with an advanced photo editor, such as Corel's PaintShop Pro. If, however, you're new to digital image editing, you'll find the software is easy to use and will enable you to get started, and have some fun, straight away.