Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006

As digital camera prices continue to fall, digital photography is sure to appeal to millions more looking for a way to capture and preserve their memories—and Digital Image Suite makes it easy for consumers to quickly do more with their photos.

Here are a few of the new features included in Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006:

• New Hierarchical Keywords and Labels provide stacked tags that consumers can use to organize, sort through and find their images in the way that best suits them — whether that’s finding all the photos of a family vacation or a particular picture of a certain someone.
• New Hover Thumbnail enlarges thumbnail images whenever a mouse hovers above them, making it easy to view the image, along with details such as date taken, file type and size, resolution, and assigned Labels.
• New Video support offers consumers the option to view and organize their videos in the same place as their photos. They can easily assign a 5-Star Rating, add Keywords and captions, or mark videos with customizable Flags representing a variety of actions such as For Review or To Share.
• New Black & White Effects unleashes the artist within, making it easy to transform color photos into stunning, contrast-rich, black-and-white images from a variety of preset filters, altering color tone or manipulating each of the color channels.
• New Intuitive Crop intelligently analyzes the composition of a photo, such as faces in portraits or family photos, when a consumer clicks on the Crop task and suggests a way to crop the photo that will properly frame the subject(s) and create the best possible image.
• New Photo Story 3.1 allows anyone to create a photo show with voice narration, customizable pans and zooms, and music. This year Microsoft has added the ability to make quick edits (red-eye removal, apply black-and-white filter), create an original soundtrack, and burn a CD with high-resolution VCD files, perfect for playing back on a TV.
• New Sharing Disc allows consumers to easily burn photo CDs to share with friends and family, without disrupting detailed photo archive settings.
• New Device Sync Support makes it easy to share photos with mobile devices such as Pocket PCs and Smartphones through syncing with Windows Media Player. Consumers can simply flag the desired images, and the next time the mobile device syncs with the PC, the photos will automatically transmit.
• New RAW Support for Canon and Nikon cameras allows consumers to view and organize images shot in RAW category of formats, a high-quality photo format captured by many models of digital cameras. In addition, consumers can save the RAW format as a JPEG or ZIP file for easy editing of the image.

Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 is available for $99.95. Microsoft offers up to $40 in rebates — a $30 mail-in rebate open to all consumers who acquire Digital Image Suite 2006, and an additional $10 digital camera mail-in rebate (if consumers purchase any digital camera within 30 days of acquiring the software). www.microsoft.com