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This is a pretty bold statement, especially in light of Microsoft selling off Expression Media. They claim they’re committed to photography but yet get rid of one powerful app and bolster the features of another, which very people are probably using. I’m all about free apps, but I don’t know anyone who is using the Live Photo Gallery. There’s a lot of mixed messages coming out of those Redmond guys these days.

Microsoft highlights the following capabilities of its new Windows Live Photo Gallery:

• Auto Adjust - one click that fine-tunes exposure, color balance, angle, and sharpness
• Retouch - remove blemishes, or even entire people
• Batch Editing - do same action to a number of photos at once
• Photo Fuse -  use similar photos to create a perfect picture (eyes closed example)
• Sharing - the ability to publish your photos directly to social media sites, online storage locations, and send via email or chat
• Sync - the ability to have all of your files on the go, as well as synched across all of your PCs
• Slide Shows – in a few clicks, create and share slide shows with transitions and visual effects

Microsoft: Windows is better for photos than a Mac, hands down

I actually find this pretty disappointing since Expression Media was originally iView Media Pro which Microsoft bought just a few years back. Of course the big concern was what MS would do with the product once they had it. Ironically, a lot of people (myself included) felt MS would do more harm to the app than good. Arguably, that’s exactly what’s happened. Hopefully it will have a good home now.

Microsoft has sold its Expression Media digital-asset-management application to digital-photography vendor Phase One for an undisclosed amount.

Starting May 25, Phase One is handling customer support and future development for Expression Media. Microsoft will continue to offer support for Expression Media retail customers for the next 90 days, officials said.

Another thing that’s unusual is that Microsoft is still stating they’re making competitor products to Adobe’s photography offerings. Quite some time ago they touted there would be a Photoshop equivalent, which of course never materialized. Now, Microsoft is claiming they will have a Lightroom competitor. I won’t hold my breath waiting for that one to appear.

Let’s see, Microsoft’s JPG killer didn’t take off. They’re PDF killer didn’t take off. They’re Flash killer hasn’t made much of a dent. And now they ditched the last of their photography apps. Microsoft has struck out against Adobe a couple of times and now they’re selling off one photo app with grand plans to launch another? Certainly makes me want to buy what they’re offering! Stable, very stable.

Further, Lightroom is on version 3 and has been incredibly successful from day one. It gained a massive and loyal following while it was still in beta and continues to be incredibly successful. I’m a huge fan of it and considering how well it’s been received and I can’t even conceive of a product Microsoft could offer that would best it in features and usability. I really think Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree here.

Microsoft is continuing to make investments in the professional photography space. Microsoft’s FUSE Labs is working on SmartFlow — a competitor to Adobe Lightroom that will include social-networking hooks.

Microsoft sells off one of its Expression products

The new Paint Shop Pro X3 is actually pretty nice to work with even though for the most part it’s the same as the previous version. There are a couple of things that I’m not really sold on though. First, the new text layer is more awkward than the previous way of doing things. It is a little more desktop publishing like in how you just type onto the image rather than into a dialog box, but selecting and making changes to that text after it’s been written is a little clunky to me. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong, but trying to reselect that text and then edit it again seems to take a bunch of different clicks in a bunch of different places. So far, I like how it used to work.

Second, I’m not sure if it’s a configuration issue or just how PSP does things, but it basically uses the tablet like a mouse. I guess I need to configure the brush variance, but most of the time it just acts like a pointer and doesn’t offer the functionality I would have thought. I did hook it up to a machine with Painter 11 and it behaved in a completely different manner, much more like I would expect. Like I said, maybe it’s a config issue.

The Express Lab looks somewhat interesting, but not sure that’s going to be something I use.

Overall it’s pretty good, but there are still quite a few features I haven’t used yet. The extractor tool is something that looks very interesting. I’m curious to see how it works.