Digital image

A digital image is a numeric representation of (normally binary) a two-dimensional image. Depending on whether the image resolution is fixed, it may be of vector or raster type. By itself, the term "digital image" usually refers to raster images or bitmapped images.

Raster

Raster images have a finite set of digital values, called picture elements or pixels. The digital image contains a fixed number of rows and columns of pixels. Pixels are the smallest individual element in an image, holding antiquated values that represent the brightness of a given color at any specific point.

Typically, the pixels are stored in computer memory as a raster image or raster map, a two-dimensional array of small integers. These values are often transmitted or stored in a compressed form.

Raster images can be created by a variety of input devices and techniques, such as digital cameras, scanners, coordinate-measuring machines, seismographic profiling, airborne radar, and more. They can also be synthesized from arbitrary non-image data, such as mathematical functions or three-dimensional geometric models; the latter being a major sub-area of computer graphics. The field of digital image processing is the study of algorithms for their transformation.

Microsoft Digital Image

Microsoft Digital Image was a digital image editing program created by Microsoft. It was a successor to Microsoft Picture It!.

Microsoft Digital Image came in three different editions: Digital Image Standard, which offered tools for editing images, Digital Image Suite, which added Digital Image Library for organizing images and Digital Image Suite Plus, which included tools from Digital Image Suite and the video editing tools of Pinnacle Studio. Digital Image had support for Adobe Photoshop plugins. Later versions also included Photo Story 3.1.

The latest version of this product was Digital Image 2006. This version had native support for Raw camera formats from Canon (.CRW) and Nikon (.NEF) On 19 September 2006, Microsoft released an "anniversary edition" which offered Windows Vista compatibility, removed raw support, added support for Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata.

The software product was generally well received and praised for its ease of use.

On 15 June 2007, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Digital Image suite would be discontinued because most of the feature set in the Digital Image suite of applications had been integrated into newer Microsoft titles and services, including Windows Photo Gallery.