Digital Light & Color Picture Window Pro 3.5

This is Serious Software for Photographers as Digital Light and Color says in the company website banner. This software has impressed me during about 4 months of use with a notebook and conventional desktop pc. It's a fast loading richly featured piece of software that equips its user to perform complex and finely tuned adjustments to digital photographs. Picture Window Pro 3.5 has most every image adjustment desired. Advanced controls using histogram analysis and variable curve adjustments were major attractions upon initial evaluation. This is not a drawing program. Several powerful tools seem to be worth the entire purchase price. A couple worth mention include one DL-C calls Advanced Sharpening. This includes a well-documented Noise Reduction dialog. The user needs to make several adjustments and tweaks in settings to produce optimum NR, but it works very well. Masks are another powerfully implemented tool to apply adjustments to portions of an image and are savable for different sets of adjustments. Understanding of Masks is critical to successful use of Picture Window Pro 3.5 Pipe line editing produces a new image for each set of transformations/adjustments to the image. The user can then just rotate through each version in its own window to see what they want to do next, or choose an incremental step and re-edit and then have a comparison version already available. The well-written PDF manual has hyperlinks to 'advanced' features and topics. The introductory tutorial will get most users up and running but it only covers basic adjustments. It is highly recommend printing the whole manual or purchase a copy to spend time studying the detailed steps presented for more complex and advanced features. If you are comfortable with your manuals in an electronic form then this is not necessary. This is a highly recommend program for the photographer seeking a 'Digital Darkroom'.

16 bit file support. Good file browser. Lots of powerful features and controls. Very well priced. Good for both film and digital image adjustment.

There is a noticeable learning curve for more advanced features proportional to the user’s familiarity with photographic terminology and previous software experience. I have not identified a readily available macro type function. Not a graphics design package.

Adobe Photoshop (various versions both full and elements for both Windows and Apple/Mac including the latest Creative Suite V2) JASC ULEAD COREL Have used assorted 'bundled' editing software.

Purchase has been the only Service experience and that was fine. DL-C has contacted promptly the individuals who recommended this software to me.