Microsoft Picture It! is a discontinued photo editing

application Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

created by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

. Microsoft acquired the intellectual property rights and full U.S. trade registration from RomTech, later renamed eGames, and released Version 1.0 of the application in September 1996. Borrowing from the wizard

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

concepts of

Microsoft Publisher Microsoft Publisher is a desktop publishing application from Microsoft, differing from Microsoft Word in that the emphasis is placed on page layout and graphic design rather than text composition and proofreading. Overview Publisher is includ ...

, 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 Alvy Ray Smith III (born September 8, 1943) is an American computer scientist who co-founded Lucasfilm's Computer Division and Pixar, participating in the 1980s and 1990s expansion of computer animation into feature film. Education In 1965, A ...

, founder of

Pixar Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...

, in 1978) while running on an 8 MB

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * Ra ...

Pentium Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium processor from which the brand took its name was first released on March 22, 1993. After that, the Pentium II and Pe ...

computer. Microsoft purchased

Altamira Software Altamira Software was founded in Mill Valley, California by Dr. Alvy Ray Smith, Eric Lyons and Nicholas Clay in 1991. The company's primary product was Altamira Composer. This PC based software pioneered object-based drawing and image editing. ...

, the company owned by Alvy Ray Smith, in 1994 and made Smith a Microsoft employee. The Picture It! file format used the extension (Microsoft Image Extension). The extension was also used by

Microsoft PhotoDraw Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000 is a discontinued vector graphics and raster imaging software package developed by Microsoft. History Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000 Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000 was released in 1999 along with Microsoft Office 2000 Premium and D ...

although its format was incompatible with Picture It!. In 2001, Microsoft merged its ''Home Publishing'' product with Picture It! to create ''Picture It! Publishing''. In 2003, Picture It! was significantly changed, expanded with more advanced editing features and rebranded as

Microsoft Digital Image Microsoft Digital Image was a digital image editing program created by Microsoft. It was a successor to Microsoft Picture It! Microsoft Digital Image came in three different editions: ''Digital Image Standard'', which offered tools for editing im ...

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 Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

. Picture It! shipped in a number of editions and versions:

Versions

*Picture It! 1.0 (1996) *Picture It! 2.0 and Picture It! 2.0 Express (part of

Microsoft Plus! Microsoft Plus! is a discontinued commercial operating system enhancement product by Microsoft. The last edition is the Plus! SuperPack, which includes an assortment of screensavers, themes, and games, as well as multimedia applications. The Micr ...

98) (1997) *Picture It! 99 (3.0) (1998) - 2 disc set *Picture It! 2000 (4.0) (1999) - 2 disc set *Picture It! 2001 (5.0) - the last version to support

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

. (2000) - 7 disc set for Picture It! Publishing Platinum 2001 (with the merger of Picture It! and Microsoft Home Publishing) *Picture It! 2002 (6.0) (2001) - 5 disc set for Publishing Platinum 2002 *Picture It! 7.0 and Digital Image Pro 7.0 (2003) - 2 disc set *Picture It! Premium 9, Digital Image Pro 9 and Digital Image Suite 9 (2004) - 2 disc set *Picture It! Premium 10, Digital Image Pro 10 and Digital Image Suite 10 (2005) - 2 disc set *Digital Image 2006 and Digital Image 2006 Anniversary Edition (2006) - 2 disc set

Editions

*Picture It! Express - Scaled down edition of Picture It! *Picture It! Photo and Photo Premium - Picture It! editions with only photo editing features *Picture It! Publishing (Gold, Silver and Platinum editions) - Picture It! editions with photo editing as well as home publishing features *Picture It! Print Studio and, Photo & Print Studio (UK editions of Picture It! Publishing) *Picture It! Library - An image organizing application since version 9 Suite edition,Microsoft Press release announcing Digital Image Suite 9
/ref> which later became Digital Image Library and eventually some features went into

Windows Live Photo Gallery Windows Photo Gallery (formerly known as Windows Live Photo Gallery) is a discontinued image organizer, photo editor and photo sharing program. It is a part of Microsoft's Windows Essentials software suite. The product has been unavailable for ...

*Microsoft Greetings Workshop, later Microsoft Greetings (a scaled-down Picture It!-based application with only greeting card templates) - single CD

References

{{reflist Discontinued Microsoft software Photo software