Picture Window offers a full array of powerful digital tools for the photographer. The following sections highlight selected aspects of the Picture Window system.
Picture Window's tool bar gives you quick access to common features. And you don't have to remember what each of the icons does -- just leaving the cursor over one of the tool bar icons for a second pops up a short description of its function. The tool bar can be displayed at the top of the screen, along the side of the screen, or hidden.
Every feature of Picture Window is documented in its comprehensive help file. Context-sensitive help is always available by pressing the F1 key or by clicking on the Help icon on the tool bar. The help file also contains many tips that explain how to get the most out of Picture Window's features.
The complete Picture Window manual is distributed on the Picture Window CD-ROM in Adobe Acrobat format. The CD also includes a copy of the Acrobat reader if you do not already have Acrobat installed on your computer. Using Acrobat, you can view or search the entire manual at any time, and print any section you want to study off-line. The electronic manual is also accessible from within Picture Window via the Help menu. You can either install the manual on your hard disk for faster access or leave it on the CD-ROM to save space. In addition to the manual, there are additional white papers that explore a number of topics like scanning, retouching, and histograms in depth.
When working with Picture Window's retouching tools, you can undo your work a stroke at a time all the way back to the beginning of a session.
Picture Window's preview feature lets you see a proposed change to an image before actually making the change. This instant preview encourages experimentation since many different options can be explored in a short time. You can trade off preview detail and image size against response time.
Picture Window's File Browse command lets you view miniatures of all the images in a folder in small, medium, or large sizes. In addition to scrolling through the images, you can select multiple images for opening or deletion and you can print summary pages for future reference. It even lets you print images as CD jewel case inserts.
This tool lets the you magnify any part of an image without having to zoom the entire image.
This tool lets you zoom in on a specific feature of an image or zoom out.
This tool acts like a densitometer that can read out the precise position and color of any part of an image.
Picture Window supports use of the Windows clipboard, letting you exchange images with other programs without having to save and load files.
Picture Window's color picker lets you select colors in four different ways:
1) By choosing hue and saturation from a color wheel and brightness from a slider
2) By selecting any combination of standard Kodak Wratten or CC filters from a palette
3) By clicking on an image to select the color of that image at that location.
4) By entering numeric values.
The following is a sampling of Picture Window's basic image editing features.
You can crop images to any desired proportions with Picture Window's Crop transformation. The cropping rectangle is adjustable and can be locked to standard or custom proportions. It can also crop to oval or diamond shapes, rotate the image before cropping, control the softness of the edges of the image, and add a solid color border around the image.
The Warp transformation lets you rotate an image by any desired angle and, with the aid of a grid overlay, make a horizon level on the first try. Image rotation in 90 degree increments can also be performed using the Mirror/Rotate transformation, and arbitrary rotation can also be done in the Crop transformation.
These controls let you lighten or darken an entire image or just selected parts. You can adjust shadows, mid-tones, and highlights separately for more precise control, or break down the brightness scale into as many parts as desired and adjust each separately. This can all be done without altering the color of the image.
Color balancing is used to remove subtle or obvious color casts from pictures. Picture Window supports the traditional approach to color balancing using combinations of CC or Wratten filters as well as its own Color Balance transformation for even greater control. This lets you salvage photos taken with daylight-balanced film in fluorescent or incandescent lighting or correct for film processing problems. It is also possible to add a color cast to warm up early morning or afternoon light, or color-balance skin tones in one image to match those in another. With Picture Window Pro, you can also perform selective color corrections, modifying some colors in an image while leaving others unchanged.
The color saturation feature lets you deepen the colors in an image, effectively turning Ektachrome into Velvia, or even create otherworldly effects. The user can adjust the whole image or just selected parts, without making the image lighter or darker.
The geometric transformations built into Picture Window let you straighten out converging verticals in architectural photography without expensive perspective control lenses. The unique grid overlay lets users remove perspective distortion without guesswork, and even crop, scale, stretch, and rotate an image at the same time.
You can create a photomontage by extracting objects from one image and placing them in another image, scaling, rotating, or even warping them in the process so they fit exactly where desired. You can make overlay objects take on any desired amount of opacity or transparency, and even place them behind another object so they appear to be part of the picture.
With Picture Window, you can blur or sharpen any part of an image. An example of this feature would be softening a portrait or selectively defocusing a distracting background. Sharpening can help bring out detail and tighten up an image that is a little too soft.
The filtering feature lets you simulate placing a colored filter over an image -- the filter color and the filter factor are both adjustable. You can create your own custom color gradients or other patterns and use them as filters as well.
The Text feature lets users annotate images with text, using any existing TrueType or Postscript font, in any desired size, color or style. All text is antialiased for maximum sharpness.
Picture Window's monochrome transformation lets you simulate photographing a color scene on black and white film through different color filters. As you adjust the filter color, a preview of the results appears instantly onscreen. You can also convert an entire image to monochrome, leave parts of an image in color, or even use a color filter that has different colors over different parts of the image.
Picture Window's tint transformation lets you apply color to black and white images by converting different gray levels to different colors. For example, this feature can be used to create a sepia-toned print from a black and white image. Or the freehand paint tool can be used to apply color to a black and white image while preserving the brightness of the underlying image.
Picture Window's powerful page layout transformation lets you arrange multiple images and blocks of text over a background page of a specified size. Each element of the layout can be positioned and resized independently, and you can save and restore page layouts for later editing or reuse. This feature is perfect for creating album pages, photo business cards, ad layouts, real estate brochures, slide show templates, or any other situation where you need to arrange images and text on a background for viewing or printing.
The resize transformation lets you stretch or shrink an image, adjust its resolution, and set its height and width. Picture Window uses highly advanced resampling techniques to minimize loss of image detail or sharpness when resizing images.
Vignetting makes it possible to isolate parts of an image and fade the rest to black, white, or any other color.
You can experiment with solarization, posterization, embossing, adding noise, false coloring, kaleidoscope, spiral, edge enhancement, distorting, and many other special effects.
You can create linear, radial, square, or oval custom color gradients that fade smoothly from one color to another, or specify as many intermediate colors as they want, and even control the transitions from color to color. Gradients can be used to create masks (see below) or custom color color filters or backgrounds.
Picture Window's stereo transformation lets you prepare pairs of stereo photographs for viewing, either with red/blue colored glasses or with a standard side-by-side stereo viewer. The horizontal and vertical offsets between the two images can be adjusted for the best viewing while previewing the results on the screen.
Picture Window Pro fully supports scanning, read, writing, and editing images with up to 16 bits per component. Increasingly, scanners are being introduced with the ability to deliver 30-bit, 36-bit, or even 42-bit color data to your computer. This extended dynamic range gives you more leeway to adjust the brightness and contrast of the image without losing the smooth tonal range in the original image. If your scanner's TWAIN driver supports this feature, Picture Window Pro not only lets you read 48-bit color images into your computer, but all of its tools, transformations, and commands can be used to save, load, and edit these images without first reducing them to 24 bits.
Picture Window Pro can read and write 16-bit black and white images in either TIFF or FITS format, and it can read and write 48-bit color images in TIFF format.
Picture Window's painting and cloning tools let you remove tears and stains from old or damaged images, or, just as easily, erase unsightly power lines, remove facial blemishes and wrinkles or eliminate a hand or elbow that has somehow found its way into the frame. With a little more work, you can even remove or replace entire objects.
Picture Window's unique speck removal tool lets you remove dust specks and other small imperfections by simply clicking on them to interpolate the surrounding background over the defect.
Picture Window's lightening and darkening tools let you lighten or darken selected areas of an image.
Picture Window also has special tools for painting over images, eliminating red eye, drawing lines or arrows on an image, sharpening, blurring, smudging, and increasing or decreasing saturation.
You can select from a contact sheet view
of all the images on a Photo CD, and specify a desired resolution and image orientation.
You can adjust the shadow, midtone, and highlight brightness, the saturation, and cropping
for an image before reading it into computer memory.
Picture Window also supports the new Professional Photo CD format which lets you work with negatives or transparencies from 35mm to 4"x5" at resolutions up to 4096x6144 pixels.
Picture Window supports any TWAIN-compatible scanner, frame grabber, or other input device to capture images without leaving the program.
Picture Window can print images on any laser, inkjet, or other printer that has a Windows printer driver. You can print in either portrait or landscaped mode, adjust margins independently, and add captions to your images. You can also make poster-size prints using Picture Window's tiled printing feature.
Picture Window users can exchange data with other programs and with other computer platforms, such as Macintosh or UNIX computers. The program supports the following file formats:
Picture Window uses masks to restrict the effects of a transformation to a specific part of an image, to protect part of an image from the effects of freehand tools, or to specify what parts of an image are to be composited with another image. You can create masks for use with any image with Picture Window's mask tool -- this versatile feature lets you create, view, and save masks using many different techniques.
Masks are normally viewed as a semitransparent red overlay which gives a visual indication of which parts of the image are currently masked. To make the mask or the underlying image easier to see, you can change the color of the mask as well as its transparency.
Picture Window provides many powerful tools for creating and editing masks:
The lasso tool lets you specify a region to be masked by simply outlining it using the mouse. You can refine the mask by either adding to or subtracting from the currently masked area.
The rectangle/oval tools let you define rectangular or elliptical areas to be added to or removed from the currently masked area. Before applying the new region, you can reposition the location and size of the rectangle or ellipse.
The polygon tool lets you define a polygonal region to be added to or removed from the currently masked area. You can add or remove vertices to the polygon one at a time and reposition each one independently before applying the mask. Vertices can be positioned very precisely by zooming in on the underlying image.
The spline tool is similar to the polygon tool except that the polygon is drawn with smoothly curving edges rather than straight lines. You can precisely control the shape of the curves by adding control points as necessary.
The brush tool lets you apply or remove parts of a mask by painting with a variable size brush over the image. The brush tool can also be restricted to areas defined by the Color Range Tool (see below). Other advanced brush options help you separate complex objects from their surrounding background.
The color range tool lets you select areas to be masked based on their color as defined by ranges of hue, saturation, and brightness or red, green, and blue.
The feather tool lets you soften the edges of a mask by a specified amount, either by expanding or contracting the mask.
The blur tool lets you soften the edges of a mask by blurring the mask by an adjustable amount.
The brightness curve tool lets you define a density mask with great precision, based on the brightness of the underlying image.
The combine tool lets you combine two separate masks to create a new compound mask.
Masks can be saved (as a black and white image whose dimensions are the same as the underlying image) and later reused.
Digital Light & Color's patented monitor calibration technique is simple, accurate, and requires no expensive special hardware -- just a small film overlay that comes with the software.
Using this overlay with Picture Window Pro's monitor calibration command, you can accurately calibrate your monitor's gamma and white point and determine an optimum setting for your monitor's brightness control.
Color management provides a tightly controlled system for ensuring accurate color matches among scanners, image files, monitors, and printers based on industry standard ICC color profiles. Picture Window Pro supports comprehensive color management via the ICM 2.0 color engine built into Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
For a detailed discussion of color management and how it works in Picture Window, please click on the following link:
Picture Window 3.0 runs under Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP or Windows NT 4.0 or later. It requires a mouse or equivalent pointing device, a color monitor, a video card that can display at least 256 colors at a resolution of at least 640 x 480, and a CD-ROM drive.
To input scanned images, Picture Window supports Photo CD-compatible CD-ROM drives (all current drive models are compatible) or any TWAIN-compatible scanner, digital camera, or other source of digital images.
The Picture Window CD-ROM includes floppy disk installation files in case you want to use Picture Window on a notebook or other computer that does not have a CD-ROM drive.
The faster your computer and the more memory it has, the better. For best performance we recommend the following minimum configuration:
You will also need enough free space on your hard disk to save working copies of your images and, if you work with large images or a lot of small ones, you may need to allow extra space for your Windows swap file.
Picture Window makes full use of a feature in Windows called virtual memory. Virtual memory permits programs to use more memory than is physically present on your computer by reading and writing blocks of memory called pages to an area of the hard disk called the swap file. When using Picture Window, virtual memory lets you work on images that are larger than the available memory, up to the size of the swap file. The only problem is that when Windows swaps memory to the hard disk, the system slows down significantly. For best performance, there should be enough memory in the computer to hold Windows, Picture Window, and all the images you are working on.
The required image size depends on the size of prints you wish to make. To create high quality 4x5 prints, an image size of approximately 1MB is sufficient; to create high quality 8x10s, approximately 4MB of data is required. The following table summarizes the approximate memory requirements to avoid excessive swapping:
Print Recommended Minimum Size Memory 4x5" 16-32 MB 5x8" 24-48 MB 8x10" 32-64 MB
A display adapter is the part of your computer that drives your monitor. The speed, number of displayable colors, and resolution of your display are determined by your display adapter. Your monitor accepts the video signal generated by your display adapter and creates a visible image on its screen. The size and clarity of the image are mostly determined by your monitor.
You can run Picture Window using an 8-bit (256 color) display adapter. Such display adapters can be programmed to approximate a full range of colors by using a process called dithering. Dithering makes an image less sharp and distorts colors, making it difficult or impossible to calibrate your monitor or accurately preview images before ordering prints. In addition, Picture Window runs slower when using a 256-color display due to the extra computations involved in the dithering process. For these reasons, a 24-bit (16 million color) display adapter is highly recommended. Such display adapters are currently available for as little as $99. A 15-bit or 16-bit (32,768- or 65,536-color) display adapter is almost as good as a 24-bit color adapter, but distracting artifacts can show up in areas of subtle color variation such as clear skies. It is also difficult to perform accurate monitor calibration using 16-bit color.
The video memory on your display adapter is used to hold the image data displayed on the screen. The higher the resolution of your display and the more bits per pixel, the more video memory you need. Many display adapters can be inexpensively upgraded by adding additional video memory. To achieve a resolution of 800x600 using 24-bit color requires 2MB of video memory.
Display adapters vary in complexity. The least expensive ones often require your computer to do a lot of work to display text and graphics, and this can slow down your system. The more expensive cards usually employ special graphics acceleration hardware which speeds up many display operations and relieves your computer of much of the work involved in generating complex displays.
Picture Window runs perfectly well using a screen resolution of 640x480 on a 14" monitor. Monitor size is listed as the diagonal measurement of the screen in inches. For more comfortable viewing, good image quality, and easier comparison of multiple images, we recommend using a display adapter capable of a screen resolution of 800x600 (or greater) with a 15" or 17" monitor and 24-bit color. The following table summarizes the relationship between resolution in pixels, recommended monitor size, and required video memory.
Recommended Required Video Memory
Resolution Monitor Size 8-bit color 16-bit color 24-bit color
640x480 13-14" 512KB 1MB 1MB
800x600 15-17" 512KB 1MB 2MB
1024x768 17-19" 1MB 2MB 3MB
1280x1024 20-21" 2MB 3MB 4MB
While nearly all new CD-ROM drives can read Photo CDs, most drives more than five years old will not. Some of the older drives will read Photo CDs but are not multisession compatible. The first time you have images transferred to a Photo CD, a single session disk is returned to you. If you had less than the full 100 images transferred to the Photo CD, this leaves a lot of empty space on the disk. When you resubmit your disk to have more images added to it, the second batch of images is stored as a new session. If you have a single session Photo CD drive, you will be only be able to access the images in the first session. A multisession drive can read all the images on a multisession disk; making the disk look like a single session disk, with all the images in one unbroken sequence.
If you are purchasing a new computer and plan to use Picture Window, here's what to look for:
Good Better
CPU Pentium Pentium II/III
RAM 32MB 64MB+
Display 24-bit 24-bit
800x600 1024x768
Monitor 14" 15-17"
CD-ROM multisession Photo CD compatible
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