Digital Image Suite. RIP.

I've mentioned Digital image suite before. I always felt I needed to apologise for not using Adobe Photo shop. As several people commented, Photoshop was overkill. Digital image suite let me

  • Straighten Pictures which had been taken at an angle
  • Clone or blend out stray telephone lines, spectators, skin blemishes etc
  • Apply nice black and white effects (mixing red, green and Blue channels, tweaking contrast and toning in one go).
  • Apply "Glow" to portraits, and paint effects.
  • Sharpen the image, or apply selective blur to the background.
  • Stitch Panoramas together.

Vista has some token editing built in. It can rotate 90 degrees, crop, it can adjust levels and colour balance. It can fix red-eye. There's talk of a "Windows Live" branded version of Vista's photo gallery which will upload to Live Spaces. But this isn't expected to offer a lot more. So the news that we'd quietly killed off Digital Image suite was greeted with some dismay by a good handful of the photographers inside Microsoft, one of whom passed on a quote from Directions on Microsoft.

[Digital Image Suite] occupied an uneasy niche between the free photo editing and management software bundled with most digital cameras and Adobe's more full-featured products for serious amateurs, such as Photoshop Elements ...

With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft incorporated many of the features of the Digital Image product line into a free bundled application called Windows Photo Gallery, similar to the way that Apple bundles its iPhoto application with every Macintosh computer. This further reduced the market for a stand-alone version of Digital Image Suite.

... The cancellation of Digital Image means good news for Adobe, which now faces one less competitor in the low end of the imaging software market.

I'm not sure who's saying Vista incorporates MANY of the features of Digital image suite, when I make it 5 at most. For anyone who thought we wanted to fight Adobe on every front here's proof that things are rarely that simple.

Update: I forgot this Bonus Link Paul Thurrott has post some information about what's in the Live Gallery Beta.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, adobe, photography, digital image Suite