Picture Window Pro 3.1: The Photographer's Photo Editor

Photoshop 7 is a fine, if sometimes cumbersome, product for editing digital photographs, but have you ever wished for something that would load faster, use fewer system resources, and fully edit 16-bit-per-channel images as well as being cheaper to own and upgrade? Meet Picture Window Pro, one of the least known but most powerful Windows photo editors.

Picture Window Pro 3.1, from Digital Light & Color (www.dl-c.com), is the creation of Jonathan Sachs, co-founder of Lotus Corp and author of the original Lotus 1-2-3. Sachs, a keen photographer, wanted an editor designed specifically for digital photographs without extraneous graphic arts features. Not finding one on the market, he wrote his own.

The result is a feature-rich product with a unique personality and workflow. Lean, fast, and relatively inexpensive ($89.95US for Picture Window Pro and $49.95 for Picture Window), PWP is described as being "written by photographers for photographers." Which means that PWP dispenses with features used primarily by advertising and print shops, such as four-colour separations, duotones, tritones, and CMYK editing. It focuses instead on features such as colour balancing, perspective correction, barrel-distortion correction, chromatic aberration correction, tiled printing, and the usual panoply of photographic necessities--cropping, sizing, curve adjusting, levelling, dodging, burning, masking, spotting, blurring and sharpening.

When you initialize PWP, the first thing you notice is that it pops onto the screen instantly, ready for use. Photoshop 7, in contrast, is leisurely about loading.

The next thing you notice is that PWP bears almost no resemblance to Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or PhotoImpact. It doesn't walk, act or quack like Photoshop. There are no layers. Instead, there are transformations. Transformations are the heart and soul of PWP--its essential paradigm. A low-cost Photoshop clone it ain't. It has its own head space and its own integrity.

Transformations

Every action you perform in PWP creates a transformation: a new copy of the image created by the action you've performed. The previous version of the image remains on screen allowing side-by-side comparisons. This is arguably a more natural way to view changes than Photoshop's preview button.

When you perform a complex series of steps, every step generates its own transformation. Any transformation can be saved as a separate file or interim steps can simply be clicked away without saving. Needless to say this method of working takes some getting used to and probably contributes more than anything else to PWP's low profile among digital photographers. It may be too different for comfort if you are already accustomed to working in layers, but bear in mind it's really a matter of style, not substance. PWP, via transformations, gets you to the same end results.

The additional features of the Pro version of Picture Window are monitor calibration software (included), full support for ICC colour profiles, full 16-bit-per-channel editing for 16-bit B&W and 48-bit colour images, specialized colour correction transformations (incorporating the Color Mechanic engine which is available separately as a plugin for Photoshop), chromatic aberration transformation, and match reference transformations based on the image of a test target such as MacBeth Color Checker or Kodak grey scale.

The PWP website maintains a discussion forum where Jonathan Sachs and other forum members answer questions about the use of the product. Sachs also responds to product suggestions and provides insights into what new features will be included in future releases. He has revealed that the next release, version 3.5, will likely contain a denoising and sharpening function equivalent to Neat Image and NIK Sharpener.

Although there are, to the best of my knowledge, no books on how to use Picture Window Pro, there is excellent documentation online. The Digital Light & Color site itself offers a series of tutorials and white papers (worth reading even if you're not using the product). In addition, the noted landscape photographer Norman Koren has published several in-depth PWP tutorials on his outstanding photography website www.normankoren.com.

Overall this amazingly fast, versatile, low-cost but fully-functional digital image editor is as good, for what it does, as anything on the market. If you are willing to adjust to a non-Photoshop paradigm, eschewing layers, plugins and scripting, it may be just the photo editor you've been looking for. You can download a 30-day evaluation copy of PWP from the DL-C website.

Copyright © 2003 Gene Wilburn

Gene Wilburn is a Toronto-based writer and photographer. He can be reached at gene@wilburn.ca