A world of creativity at your fingertips

By WILL BARKER

There's nothing more exciting than peeling the vacuum wrap off a couple of brand new imaging suites. But before you groan, awaiting yet another in-depth review of 3D Studio Max or Adobe Photoshop v1.2.6.7.004, the two programs we have here are for the everyday user - you and I.

You don't need a diploma in geekology to figure them out, yet the results are often striking and impressively detailed. Anyway, without further ado, let's take a look at Microsoft's two latest - Greetings and Picture It.

Microsoft Greetings

From Microsoft's Home Publishing label comes Greetings, an idea that's been tried many times before, but has succeeded on very few. With that in mind, I was a bit aprehensive after installing the product on the hard drive, but as it happens, Greetings gently nudged away my misgivings, instead offering a fairly easy-to-use interface to kick things off.

I say fairly easy, because newbies to the personal computer may have difficulties, especially considering no manual is included in the package. But on the flip-side, you can create a plethora of eye-catching greeting cards, postcards, business cards, labels, stickers, albums and the list goes on. To call it comprehensive would be a bit of an understatement.

To back up all the creative templates on offer, the program also includes some 12,000 images, 500 animated or 'moving' pictures and about 120 fonts.

To create a greeting card, you can simply pick one of the ready made examples and change the text. Alternatively, you may decide to indulge your creative side, moving images, changing borders and adding dynamic imagery to spruce up the look. Using the old 'trial and error' method, I was comfortably editing templates with the skill of, umm, a very skilled individual. You can add your own images too, and this can include photos, if you wish.

Once you've finished creating your personal and unique cards, you can send them to others in a number of ways. The more traditional method of sending a card through the post is a good option - simply print the card and send it off. And if you don't have a printer - shame on you! They're so cheap nowadays, it costs more to buy an ink refill cartridge...

Other ways of sending greeting cards include via the Internet, using email or a similar protocol, which is the preferred method - ease of use, cost effectiveness and such.

At the end of the day, the cards appear very professional and it must be said that while not a AAA product, it does have its merits. It's easy to use, the end results are very pleasing to the eye and fact that there are so many variables, allowing for literally millions of different cards, means that this program will never outgrow its usefulness.

This collaboration between Microsoft and professional card gurus, Madison Park Greetings, is a great tool to both let your creativity run wild and save money on buying paper cards. I give it three and a half wombats out of five.

Website: Microsoft Greetings
Price: $59.95
Available: Now

Microsoft Picture It

Coming in behind Greetings is the plainly titled Picture It, a program that has much in common with the above, only it caters for a much wider array of subjects, not just greeting and business cards.

In fact, I'd almost go as far as to say this is an alltogether better product, thanks to its mind-boggling amount of images - 175,000 of them to be precise.

Looking for all the world like Greetings, with a very similar interface, budding imagists can invent the following:

• multimedia greetings
• recipe cards
• invitations
• calendars
• newsletters
• video labels
• signs/flyers
• stickers
• masks
• gift boxes
• tags
• party hast

The list just keeps going and due to its sheer size, Picture It is well worth the price of admission based on this alone. It's huge!

Like Greetings, there are a number of templates to work from or modify, depending on your skill level/mood. Actually, there are thousands of them. 13,000 in fact. Due to the fairly straightforward interface, such masses of information and data are easy to sift through and find, so finding and using something specific never becomes a chore.

Essentially a fully-blown picture publishing suite, this title offers many online features, most of them very cool, but also very costly. You can log onto Microsoft's site and upload collages or single images or photos and have them print them out on tee-shirts, as photo prints, on mousepads, mugs, puzzles and even clocks.

Perhaps more suited to advanced or more courageous users, Picture It offers a plethora of interesting tools, allowing you to really mess around with images. You can fiddle with the usuals, like tint, brightness and red-eye reduction for photos, but there are also more advanced tools. Using these you can change photos into line-art or pencil sketches that look like -- well, digitised pencil sketches. You can distort the images, give them a third dimension (as in 3D) and add backgrounds and so forth. Truly, there is a lot to do in this massive product.

If you have a lot of photos, or simply love tooling around with desktop publishing, then this is well worth checking out. You can easily organise and alter photos, store albums and create innovative new designs. Highly recommended. I give it four out of five wombies.

Website: Microsoft Picture It
Price: $79.95
Available: Now