MICROSOFT Digital Image Suite review

Amateur photographers are spoilt for choice at the moment.

Microsoft's Digital Image Suite is the third big name photo editing program to receive a major upgrade for the holiday season, along with Adobe's Photoshop Elements 3 and Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 9.

As the name implies, this is a suite of programs that revolves around the Digital Image Pro 10 photo editor. There are several new features available in this version, which combine impressive power with admirable ease of use.

The Common Tasks pane that runs down the left-hand side of the screen includes a series of auto-fix buttons that can be used to automatically correct problems with exposure, colour balance or saturation. There's even an auto-fix option to compensate for the low-resolution and dark lighting that often affect pictures taken by mobile phone cameras.

More advanced users can delve deeper and correct these problems using the more detailed Colour and Exposure tools. As well as providing simple slider controls for adjusting the strength of individual colours, shadows, mid-tones and highlights, you can also edit these settings using a series of curves. Selecting the Edit curves command displays a graph that represents the colour or lighting value of every pixel (dot of colour) in your photo. You can then adjust those values with great precision by manually adjusting the curve on the graph. It's a powerful feature, but quite tricky to master. Fortunately, the auto-fix options work pretty well, so you can just rely on those to edit your photos quickly if you don't want to spend hours reading the manual.

Not all the program's features work so well, though. Previously we've noticed that Digital Image Pro's artistic filters, which are used to make photos look like hand-drawn sketches or paintings, don't produce particularly good results. That's still true in this version, with many of the filters producing results that look distorted rather than artistic. Adobe's Photoshop Elements has a more powerful range of artistic filters and special effects.

The other main program in the suite is Digital Image Library, which you can use to organise and archive your photo collection. The main change is the ability to add flags to the thumbnail previews of photos. These are little icons that can be used to remind yourself to print a photo or email it to a friend. Finally, there's an updated version of Photo Story, which allows you to turn a set of photos into a slideshow. As with many features in this upgrade, it's merely playing catch-up with Photoshop Elements.

That's the only real problem with Digital Image Suite. It's powerful and easy-to-use software, but still not quite as powerful as Photoshop Elements.