Picture Window Pro 5

Picture Window Pro is a powerful photo editing tool designed for serious photographers with demanding creative and quality standards. It provides a comprehensive set of over 50 photo manipulation and retouching tools which allow you to control and shape every aspect of your images and to create high quality prints, page layouts, multimedia electronic slide shows and other forms of output. It handles 24 and 48 bit images, and is fully color-managed, including soft print proofing. It includes a powerful Raw converter with advanced features like highlight recovery and noise reduction. Its batch workflow features allow you to easily work with the flood of images digital cameras now produce.

Pro Features

Image Editing

• Full control over all color and black+white image parameters
• Choice of quick and easy slider controls or full featured curves and histograms
• Full support for 48 bit color/16 bit B+W
• Full color management support
• Integrated powerful raw converter.
• Powerful curves and histograms for brightness and color channels
• Advanced resizing algorithms including Bicubic and Lanczos
• Blur and sharpening including Unsharp Mask
• Advanced sharpening with noise reduction, auto de-specking, selective application
• Lens Corrections including chromatic aberration, barrel, pincushion, light falloff, perspective
• Selective Color control for adjusting selected color while leaving overall balance undisturbed
• HDR/Image stacker for combining bracketed exposures for extended dynamic range
• Full set of freehand tools — brush, clone, speck removal, dodge & burn

New Transformations

2-zone and 3-zone adjustment: These transformations increase the vibrancy of your images by enhancing local contrast throughout the image. They are automated versions of the extremely popular multi-zone workflow pioneered by Den. (Check the message board for numerous examples and references.) (See the new Multi-Zone Adjustment white paper for details.)

Bilateral Sharpen: This new method of sharpening can improve sharpness more radically than unsharp mask before exhibiting undesirable artifacts. It is now an additional option in the Sharpen transformation.

Color Remap: This transformation lets you select a color from the image and then map it to a different color. The selection is based on hue, brightness and saturation. Selectivity can be adjusted from very sharp to broad. The control can be used to make subtle changes -- like deepen sky colors or bring out certain features. It can also be used to introduce wild false color effects.

Level: This transformation makes it easy to quickly level an image by simply drawing a horizontal or vertical line on your image.

Channel Mixer: This transformation gives you greater control over conversion of color images to B+W. It is now an additional option in the Monochrome transformation.

Light Falloff and Lens Distortion: These transformation have been totally revised for greater accuracy.

Color Balance: This transformation has been improved. It has an automatic mode for use in workflows, has a better curves feature and can accept up to seven points across the tonality range. The 7-point mode allows you to include a gray scale in your image and get extremely accurate color balance across the entire tonal range. (See the newly revised Color Balance white paper for details.)

High Dynamic Range: The Stack Images transformation for handling high dynamic range lighting with bracketed exposures has been enhanced. You can now adjust each of the images individually before stacking them. You can also save curves, making applying the transformation repeatedly much easier. (See the updated Stack Images white paper for details.)

Special Effects: Conformal Mapping lets you distort images for interesting abstract effects. Drop Shadow allows creating a variety of shadow effects.

Blink: Blink has been extended to allow comparison of more than two images.

Automation Features

Settings of most transformations are now automatically saved as you work. This new History feature gives you many new opportunities in how you edit your images. Here are some of the options:

• Redo a previous transformation and then automatically re-apply all subsequent changes.
• Edit similar images automatically by applying a workflow you developed for one image to as many others as you like.
• Save the workflow as a sidecar file of the original image. You will have the option to apply the workflow when you next open the image.
• Open the workflow in a workflow window and operate on it as you would any other workflow.

New Widgets: Many more transformations are now available as widgets. New 5.0 widgets includes Raw Conversion, most special effects transformations, Match Reference, Color Correction, Warp, Two-Zone and Three-Zone Adjustments and others.

New Raw Workflow

The Raw processor has been entirely rewritten. The new dialog now gives you much more control over the conversion process. The raw dialog is tabbed. Tabs are dedicated to controls for Color, Exposure/Brightness/Contrast, Sharpening and Noise Reduction and Image Properties.

• Color controls give you several alternate ways to balance the image. You can use white balance settings, use a probe to choose a balance point in the image or use temperature and tint controls. A color histogram is displayed for guidance.
• Brightness contols include exposure, shadow, midtone, and highlght brightness, dynamic range and gamma.
• Advanced features like highlight recovery, noise reduction, and bad pixel repair are included. Sharpen is available. The images below show how highlight recovery can be used to correct flash burn. Note the difference in the histograms.
• Settings are saved in a sidecar file that is stored along with the raw image. Sidecar files are standard PW workflow files so they are easily applied to other raw images to automate raw conversion.

System Requirements:

• Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7, Windows NT5 and Window 2000.