Picture It 99 From Microsoft

There is a lot of competition out there when it comes to software that lets you be creative and have fun with digital pictures. Microsoft's latest entry, Picture-It 99, does some pretty amazing things that you've only seen before in advertising or professional photography. For instance, says Microsoft's Jonathan Schwarz, there's a technique called emphasize....

"Where we can take an object in the photo and emphasize it by changing the background to black and white or blurring it or adding some other special effect. We're seeing a lot of that done in advertising now, where the object you want is in color and the background's in black and white."

Everyone has vacation pictures with some unwanted people who stepped into the photo at the last second. Picture It lets you doctor them out. And it makes the whole thing easy and fun. The two CD set includes projects like calendars, magazine covers and easily let's you put your pictures on the web. In a nutshell...

"Picture-It 99 really provides powerful editing tools and manipulation tools as well as two CDs of content, so they can do fun projects with their photos that they can share with their family and friends."

The fifty dollar package ranks among the best photo editing programs for consumers, along with Adobe's Photo Deluxe and MGI's PhotoSuite.