Digital Innovations

An Unsung Software Hero
Mario Westphal develops, supports, and distributes the IMatch (www.photools.com) image management application. Its target audience is professional photographers, designers, photo agencies, libraries, and corporate photo departments, but many Shutterbug readers will find it useful for organizing photos by creating albums using categories and keywords. You can view, find, transform, re-name, and convert your images as well as edit and enhance your photos using built-in tools that include automatic redeye removal. There's a built-in Contact Sheet Builder and Batch Processor that works with raw images from digital cameras using embedded EXIF and IPTC data. Concerned about capacity? There's virtually no limit for the number of images in each image database. A beta version of the next generation will combine the strengths of the current version with a much friendlier and attractive user interface and is expected in a few months. I'll give you an update when I try it.

IMatch is a Windows-based image management application designed for professional photographers, designers, photo agencies, libraries, and corporate photo departments.

Picture Window
A reader recently asked why so many magazine writers were in love with Adobe's Photoshop when there were other, and he hinted better, alternatives such as Digital Light & Color's (www.dl-c.com) Picture Window that was created expressly for amateur photographers. Certainly the price is right for Windows users. At $89, Picture Window lets you open photographs, enhance them, and create high-quality output, multimedia presentations, or screen savers. Once images are acquired, you can crop; adjust brightness and contrast; dodge and burn; correct color balance; use filters, including custom, CC, or Wratten; and convert color images to black and white. Picture Window not only lets you do lots of stuff that you might do in a traditional wet darkroom but some you can't such as eliminating redeye, sharpening and unsharp masking, and creating album pages. This is a Windows-only (95/98/Me, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP) program, and its $49.99 Standard version is a good buy for the bargain hunter. Why not download the trial version and give Picture Window a test drive?

Digital Light & Color's Picture Window was created expressly for amateur photographers and lets you open photographs, enhance them with image-editing tools, and create high-quality prints, multimedia slide shows, or screen savers.

A Stitch In Time
Multi-threading is the simultaneous processing of more than one activity by a program or operating system. A multi-threaded process, such as the Mac OS X and Windows XP, lets you independently execute threads. Threads share the process, instructions, and most of the data. Any data change in one of the threads is simultaneously seen by the other threads. Cool, huh?