Microsoft Photo Editing Software: Its All About Design And Expression
Microsoft Corporation has software solutions in almost all categories. In the area of image manipulation, the company was a bit behind with only the rudimentary MS Paint and Microsoft Office Picture Editor. Recently,a new Microsoft photo editing software was released as a part of the Microsoft Expression product family. The product was released to manufacturing on April 30, 2007
The software is christened Microsoft Expression Design and it is based on the code base of Creative House Expression. In 2003, Microsoft Corporation acquired Creative House. They software was initially a vector graphics editor but Microsoft made wide changes to it adding a number of raster image editing functions. Today it is a comprehensive image and graphics manipulation solution. The software can easily handle almost all kinds of images.
The main reason behind the change was because Microsoft has ported the source code to the Windows Presentation Foundation. The new software can not run natively on Windows. The user needs to install the Dot Net Framework 3.0 if he wants to use Microsoft Expression Design. While Creative House had versions for Windows as well a OS X, now that the code has been ported to WPF, it is impossible to run it on OS X as the Aqua of OS X and Windows Presentation Foundation have nothing in common.
The software was released as a testing beta version under the codename, Microsoft Acrylic. Subsequently the software was named Expression Graphic Designer. In December 2006, the company decided to give the present name to the software. Within four moths, the software was declared as gold and released to manufacturing. The solution improves greatly above almost all other image manipulation solutions ever released by the company. This is the first time that Microsoft has seriously entered the area which is dominated by Corel and Adobe, which after its acquisition of Macromedia, has become king of the hill in graphics and image manipulation software market. Microsoft has decided to be liberal for a change and the company allows users to try the solution before they make purchase decisions. The solution is available as a 60 day trial version to everyone who has Windows Live ID. Your regular Hotmail email id can be used because it is the same thing with a fancy name. The solution is available for Microsoft's Windows XP and the new generation of Widows called the Windows Vista. You have to get the Dot Net Framework 3.0 if you have Windows XP. Since Windows Vista is designed to natively support Windows Presentation Foundation it is recommended to download this version in case you have a choice. This Microsoft photo editing software is just 44.3 MB download. Add around 50 MB for Dot Net Framework and the total size of the trial version is still under a 100 Megabytes. It is recommended that you make full use of the trial run before you take out your credit card to buy the solution.
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