Well, I can't get write anything to the review section due to technical problems but I would really like to let people know about the latest version of Picture Window Pro. The last review on this web site is very, very old. Note, I'm not associated with Digital Light and Color in any way, this is just a review!

After Amazon messed up my "automatic" order for Adobe Elements 3, I started looking around at other alternatives to my current PhotoShop 5.5. One of the products I downloaded was the 30-day demo of Jonathan Sachs Picture Window Pro. I had looked at this product a long while back and didn't like it much. The latest version, 3.5.09 is great.

The object of PW is to work with the photographer, not the graphic artist or prepress guru aimed at by PhotoShop. PS is a very nice product, but it includes so much more than I ever used.

The design is very not-PS. In the beginning, it took a lot of effort to figure out how things are done. But after going through the tutorial and working on a few of my own photos, the workflow became evident.

Everything revolves around the "Transformations." The major transformations are categorized into "geometry", "color", "gray", etc. This arrangement becomes intuitive very quickly.

For example, cropping is done using "handles." This eliminates the select-and-crop of PS that forces you to redo mistakes from scratch. Another transformation is the built-in version of Color Mechanic (an excellent PS plug-in as well). Advanced Sharpening has new options and a better degree of control than a straight unsharpen.

There are no layers in PW. Each transformation is preceded by a preview window and ends with a new copy of the image. If desired, a graphical window history can be displayed. You can switch back and forth or just close the windows you no longer want. It also allows you to create branches off of a single image, not an obvious trick in PS.
After using PW for awhile, it was much faster and more intuitive than layers, at least for photographers.

PW has all the standard photographic PS stuff including distortion, CA, perspective controls, text, etc. Obviously, it does levels, curves, channels, etc.

Bad points? It does not handle RAW images, leaving that for dedicated RAW processing software. There is also a small bug in the picture frames that doesn't always change the framed image on-the-fly. Tech support is fast and knowlegable.

Not good or bad, there is strong support for the now ignored Kodak PhotoCD format.

The pro version is $90 and well worth it. PhotoShop, Elements, and PaintShopPro seem so cluttered now. This is a software package worth looking at.