What is Picture Window

What is Picture Window®?

Picture Window is a unique software package for photographers that turns your personal computer into an incredibly powerful electronic darkroom. It lets you bring your photographs into your computer, enhance them using powerful image editing tools, and then create high quality prints, multimedia slide shows, photo screen savers, and much more. Unlike many expensive image editing programs designed for professional graphic artists and illustrators, Picture Window was created expressly for serious amateur photographers who want more creative control over their images and for professional photographers who want to expand their business by offering digital image processing services at affordable prices. If you're a photographer, you'll find Picture Window uses familiar terms and techniques, and lets you do perspective correction, color balancing, retouching, and tonal adjusments quickly and easily.

How does Picture Window work?

It all starts with the same 35mm camera and slide or print film you normally use -- it's what happens next that's different. You can also use Picture Window with digital cameras, video frame grabbers, or other sources of digital images, though currently film remains the most convenient, cost effective, highest quality way to capture images. And you can start working with your existing library of slides and negatives right away.

There are three steps to using Picture Window -- Getting photographs into your computer, working with them in the computer, and getting them back out again.

Step 1 -- Digitize.

There are several different ways to access images from your computer. Picture Window works especially well with Kodak's revolutionary Photo CD or new Picture CD system -- just send in your 35mm slides or negatives and you get back a special gold CD-ROM your computer can read. Photo CD and Picture CD scanning services are available worldwide and are very reasonably priced, and each disk holds up to 100 high quality digital images. If you want to digitize photographs yourself, Picture Window also works with any TWAIN-compatible scanner, digital camera, or video frame grabber (a device to capture still images from video). Finally, Picture Window can read and write all the standard image file formats so you can exchange images with other programs or computers.

Step 2 -- Enhance.

The real fun starts when you have converted your photographs into a form your computer can use. Picture Window's image editing tools are extremely powerful, yet easy to use. Our heavily illustrated "plain english" manual gets you productive quickly. And Picture Window has enough depth of features to handle almost any image editing task, no matter how complicated. Here are just a few of the things you can do:

Cropping
Combining elements from different images
Adjusting brightness and contrast
Dodging and Burning
Correcting color balance
Adjusting color saturation
Filtering (using custom, CC, or Wratten filters)
Converting color images to black and white
Hand coloring black and white photos
Eliminating red eye
Restoring old or damaged photographs
Retouching dirt specks and scratches
Sharpening and Unsharp masking
Global or Selective blurring
Removing distracting backgrounds
Placing text over images
Creating album pages
Resizing images to different resolutions
Vignetting
Solarizing
Posterizing
Embossing

Step 3 -- Output.

Once you've created your masterpiece, Picture Window offers you several output options:

Create multimedia slide shows. You can store 30 or more high quality screen resolution images on a single 3.5" floppy disk. And you can add one-line captions, blocks of descriptive text, and even sound to each image. Picture Window slide shows are stored in standard HTML format which can be read by most web browsers, making it possible for nearly anyone to view them, even it they have a Macintosh or use some other platform. You can copy slide shows to a floppy disk or a CD or even post them on a web site. This is a great new way to share images with friends and family, distribute portfolios of your work, create talking postcards, or send presentations to clients or business associates. Several sample slide shows are available from our web site. To view a sample slide show, just click the link below:

ss1.html or atchafalaya.html or Lake Powell.html

For best viewing using Internet Explorer, press the F11 key to enter Full Screen mode.

Print photographs using your own printer. Picture Window can print to any device that has a Windows printer driver. This includes black and white or color laser printers and the new low cost color ink jet and dye sublimation printers that produce near photographic output in minutes. Picture Window can print images as large as you want by automatically breaking them up into overlapping tiles which can be trimmed and taped or mounted together.

Export your images in standard image file formats for inclusion in documents, newsletters, web pages, or presentations, send them to remote sites electronically, or take them to the service bureau of your choice for reproduction.

Create a screen saver or wallpaper from your favorite photographs.

Why an electronic darkroom?

There are many reasons for going digital. Unlike working in a conventional darkroom, you can experiment freely without wasting time and materials, work for as long or as short a time as you want, and you can save your work and pick up later right where you left off. And, if you make a mistake, you can just undo it and start over. All this without having to find space for and set up a darkroom, mixing chemicals and making sure they are fresh, and working in the dark. Finally, the digital darkroom lets you do many things far more easily than by conventional methods, like text overlays, dodging and burning color images, compositing elements from multiple images, hand tinting black and whites, special effects, and repairing damaged photos.

What do I need to run Picture Window?

Although Picture Window will even run on older 486 computers, we recommend a Pentium, especially if you want to work with large images.

Picture Window 3.0 is compatible with Windows 95/ 98/ME/2000/XP or Windows NT 4.0 or later. (It will not work with Windows 3.x.).

To display photographic images on your computer you need a display capable of at least 256 colors, but a 24-bit (16 million color) display is highly recommended.

If you want to use Picture Window Pro and its color management features, you will need Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows XP as earlier versions of Windows do not support the ICM 2.0 color management that Picture Window uses. You will also need a 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit display.

To create high quality prints up to 4x5 or electronic slide shows, we recommend 32 MB of RAM. To create 8x10s, we recommend at least 64MB of RAM. More RAM is always better.

To input images into your computer you need a Photo CD compatible CD-ROM drive (all drives manufactured in the last several years are Photo CD-compatible), a TWAIN compatible scanner (or digital camera or frame grabber), or some other source of digital images in one of the standard image file formats.

What does it cost?

Picture Window can be purchased directly from Digital Light & Color for only $49.95 + shipping and handling. When you order Picture Window, you get a CD-ROM containing:

Picture Window 3.0 software for Windows 95/ 98/ ME/ 2000/XP or Windows NT 4.0 or later.
Electronic manual and collected white papers.
Photo Screen Saver software.
Bonus programs: Depth of Field Calculator, Scanning Resolution Calculator, Glossary of Digital Imaging Terms, and Ephemeris.
Ten sample images in Photo CD format.

For detailed pricing information, see our Price List.

A more advanced version, Picture Window Pro 3.0 is also available for $89.95. The Pro versions adds the following features:

Full support for color management using ICC color profiles.
Monitor Calibration software and overlay.
The ability to capture, load, save, and edit 16-bit black and white and 48-bit color images -- this lets you make tonal and other adjustments to scanned images with greater accuracy.
The multi-point alignment feature in the Composite transformation -- this lets you warp and register images with great precision.
The Color Correction transformation -- this lets you apply highly selective color corrections.
The Chromatic Aberration transformation -- this lets you correct images for chromatic aberration caused by optics that are not fully color corrected.
The Match Reference transformation -- this lets you apply automatic color corrections to an image based on an image of a test target such as a Macbeth ColorChecker or Kodak gray scale.

How can I find out more?

For more information or to order Picture Window, just call Digital Light & Color at (617) 489-8858, FAX us at (617) 489-8859 or EMAIL mailto:info@dl-c.com.

Or check out some of the other information available at this Web Site: