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DECEMBER 21, 2001

CLICKS & MISSES
By Steve Hamm

Not Quite Picture Perfect
Microsoft is trying hard to make all things related to digital photography easy. It's not there yet


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It's an opportune time to get started with digital photography. Digital cameras, scanners, and printers are all getting cheaper, and Microsoft's new Windows XP operating system for the PC pays special attention to photography. XP includes links to the newly updated MSN Photos Web site as well as a handful of online photo-processing services. Most PCs shipped with XP include a basic photo-editing program. Add it all together, and you've got the tools to make digital photography accessible even to weekend snap-shooters like me.

My project: Use Microsoft's Picture It! Photo program and its MSN Photos (photos.msn.com) and MSN Communities (communities.msn.com) Web sites to help create a holiday greeting for my friends and family. I usually write a form letter each year and send it out with cards to 40 or so people. But this year I decided to go digital -- Web-publishing a letter and a collage of summer-vacation photos to go with it.

My idea was that I would post these two pages on a Web site and summon my friends and family to see them with a burst of e-mail. I was able to accomplish my goals -- but not the way I had envisioned and not without a lot of head-scratching. Microsoft is creating a host of online services, but my experience shows that, in digital photography, at least, it has a long way to go to build a smooth path between the PC and the Web.

WRINKLE REMOVER.  First, the tools. Rather than stick with the basic Picture It! Program, I decided to try out the more powerful Picture It! Photo Premium (which retails for $54.95 and sometimes includes a $15 mail-in rebate). The program, which works on earlier versions of Windows, too, is for designing photo-related projects ranging from newsletters and greeting cards to brochures and business presentations.

MSN Photos, which is easily accessible by clicking on an icon on the main screen of Picture It!, is a place to store your photos and send e-mail to friends and family alerting them to take a look. While MSN Photos has basic tools for improving photos, it doesn't let you easily remove wrinkles and other unsightly blemishes the way Picture It! does. MSN Communities, which the MSN Photos site offers as an alternative place to share pictures, also allows you to post documents, hold chats, and set up links for friends and family members.

I have most of the digital-photography gadgets and software a hobbyist would want. I don't have a digital camera. But last week I bought a new Dell desktop computer and a Hewlett-Packard all-in-one printer, scanner, and copier. So I'm able to scan in photos, edit them, and post them on Web sites.

CORRECT CONTRAST.  My project seemed to start off quite well. Picture It! Photo Premium is a powerful and easy-to-use program similar to Adobe's PhotoDeluxe. It's simple to load photos from your digital camera or from your hard drive after you scan in a printed picture. Once you do that, you can pick from all sorts of templates for albums, postcards, calendars, and brochures. There's a full array of editing tools for everything from cropping pictures to eliminating red eye.

To get started with editing, I scanned in a photo of my 14-year-old son, Daniel, eating gelato on a dim street in Siena, Italy. The program includes an auto-correct tool designed to adjust brightness and contrast with one click. It didn't seem to do much for me, but I used manual brightness and contrast tools to bring out the background images of pedestrians and a colorful store window display. I used a painting tool to remove the flash reflection from Dan's sunglasses. (Don't ask me why he was wearing shades.)

Once you have edited photos in Picture It!, it's a cinch to move them online. The MSN Photos icon on PictureIt!'s main screen takes you to a neighborhood on the MSN portal where you upload the photos you have edited. To share your photos with friends, you can send two kinds of e-mail. One technique simply attaches a photo to an e-mail that you launch right on the site. The recipient clicks on the "attachment" icon when he or she gets the e-mail and sees the photo. An alternative: You attach your photo to the e-mail as a Web page. When the recipients open their e-mail, they are taken to the MSN Photos Web site to see the photo.

ALTERNATIVE SITES.  This may be the ultimate in viral marketing. Once somebody lands on MSN Photo, Microsoft tries to turn them into a customer. In addition to offering glossy prints and merchandise such as T-shirts and coffee cups with personal photos printed on them, the site is equipped with a set of simple editing tools plus storage areas where people can stash their photos. If you're looking for alternatives to Microsoft, Shutterfly.com and Snapfish.com offer a similar array of photo-handling features.

I ran into trouble with my project when I decided to get fancy and publish my holiday letter and photos on an MSN Communities Web site. Creating the two pages was easy enough. I used Word and the document-publishing tools in Picture It! to prepare a letter topped with swoopy "Happy Holidays" greeting and to create a photo collage trimmed with a vineyard motif.

These were automatically saved as PNG files (That's a proprietary Microsoft file format that, I found out later, can be viewed only by others who also have Picture It! loaded on their computers.) It took about 10 minutes to set up a Web site, type in the e-mail addresses of people I wanted to invite to be members, and send them e-mail. I quickly uploaded my two Christmas pages and stored them in the Documents file on my MSN Communities site.

TINY TYPE.  I hit the big glitch when I opened the file containing my Christmas letter to look it over. The type size was so small that it was illegible. I looked around for a tool on the site that would make the document bigger or magnify the text, but found none. Nothing in the Help files helped me out, either.

My solution: Call customer support. It took a bit of thrashing around, but it turned out that those jazzy Picture It! tools are really made for the print world, not for making documents to be posted on the Web. I had to go back and remake my files as JPEG files -- essentially photographs of the letter and collage. It wasn't as pretty. But it worked.

As usual, nothing having to do with PCs and Web sites is as easy as you would like it to be. Picture It! and MSN Photos were fine for basic editing and publishing. But they didn't take me to cyber-photography Nirvana. Maybe by next year.


Associate Editor Hamm covers software for BusinessWeek from New York
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