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 ...

created by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. 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 fro ...

concepts of

Microsoft Publisher Microsoft Publisher was 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. It was discontinued in Octobe ...

, 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. He is one of the 50 F ...

, founder of

Pixar Pixar (), doing business as Pixar Animation Studios, is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Pixar is a subsidiary of Walt Disney ...

, in 1978) while running on an 8 MB

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

Pentium Pentium is a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel from 1993 to 2023. The Pentium (original), original Pentium was Intel's fifth generation processor, succeeding the i486; Pentium was Intel's flagship proce ...

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 is a discontinued vector graphics and raster image editing software developed by Microsoft. It was released in 1999 as part of the Microsoft Office 2000 family of products and was specifically designed for creating and edit ...

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, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

. 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 Mic ...

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 and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

. (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. Key features included photo mana ...

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

References

{{reflist

Picture It! Microsoft Picture It! is a discontinued photo editing application created by Microsoft. Microsoft acquired the intellectual property rights and full U.S. trade registration from RomTech, later renamed eGames, and released Version 1.0 of the app ...

Photo software