Microsoft Picture It!
| Developer(s) | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 2002
|
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
| Type | Graphics software |
| License | Proprietary |
Microsoft Picture It! is a discontinued photo editing application created by Microsoft. Version 1.0 was released in September 1996. Borrowing from the wizard user interface concepts of Microsoft Publisher, Picture It! was geared to make digital imaging easy for consumers. It was the first consumer imaging program to enable sprite creation, leveraging alpha masking (a concept published by Alvy Ray Smith, founder of Pixar, in 1978) while running on an 8 MB RAM Pentium computer. Microsoft purchased Altamira Software, the company owned By Alvy Ray Smith in 1994 and made Alvy Ray Smith, a Microsoft fellow.
The Picture It! file format used the extension .MIX (Microsoft Image Extension). The .MIX extension was also used by Microsoft PhotoDraw although its format was incompatible with Picture It!.
In 2003, Picture It! was significantly changed and rebranded as Microsoft Digital Image with the home publishing features removed and a focus exclusively on photo editing. Digital Image was also eventually discontinued in 2006 after the release of Windows Vista.
Releases
Picture It! shipped in a number of editions and versions:
Versions
- Picture It! 1.0
- Picture It! 2.0 and Picture It! 2.0 Express (part of Microsoft Plus! 98)
- Picture It! 99 (3.0)
- Picture It! 2000 (4.0)
- Picture It! 2001 (5.0)
- Picture It! 2002 (6.0)
- Digital Image Pro 7.0
- Digital Image Pro 9 and Digital Image Suite 9
- Digital Image Pro 10 and Digital Image Suite 10
- Digital Image 2006 and Digital Image 2006 Anniversary Edition
Editions
- Picture It! Express
- Picture It! Photo and Photo Premium
- Picture It! Publishing (Gold, Silver and Platinum editions)
- Picture It! Library
- Microsoft Greetings (a scaled-down Picture It! based application with greeting card templates)