Review

Created: April, 2000

NuWave Technology's
Picture Wizard 2000

By Brian Chick, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

If you are a novice to digital image manipulation, Picture Wizard 2000 can help you doctor digital photos without much of a learning curve -- as long as your needs are very simple.

Picture Wizard makes it easy to improve the look of previously scanned photos. Just hit the magic red Auto Fix button and Picture Wizard adjusts color, contrast and highlights to make your picture look better and bolder.

You can adjust these levels individually, but Auto Fix does as good a job as this program can afford. Other basic functions include crop, rotate and zoom.

You can also use this program with your scanner to do batch processing (adjust several photos at once). The product description on Picture Wizard's Web site notes that you can use it to grab and fix photos while you surf the Web. Tests of this function demonstrated very little alteration in the images grabbed, however.

They were already as good as they were going to get. Give an award to the first person to find a practical use for this function and avoid getting sued for copyright violation. The feature that might set this program apart from others is its ability to "enhance" streaming video files. It's impossible to know what dictionary was used when the product description was written, but test results indicate that the definition of "enhance" must have been to "make choppy and pixilated."

Several different files were tested, using samples that ranged from cartoons to basketball highlights. The only differences noticed between the original and the "enhanced" version was the addition of randomly appearing giant colored spots and a notable choppy quality. Picture Wizard's promotional material makes it sound as if NUWAVE Technologies invented a better wheel. Don't believe it

This is no Adobe Photoshop or Corel Photopaint; it offers only basic features to improve the quality of your images. There are better programs that do a lot more and do it better, for the same price, or for free.

Many scanners come with a better program. A demo can be downloaded from www.picturewizard.com but it allows you to edit only half of your image. The full version is $19.95 US ($30 Canadian).

Reviewer's rating: 2 / 5
Comments: Picture Wizard 2000 has limited capabilities for doctoring digital images. It performs at a level somewhere between poor and tolerable.
Minimum system requirements: A 486 processor or better, Windows 95/98/2000 or NT. NUWAVE says no minimum RAM or hard disk space is required, which is almost right: it takes up less than a megabyte (a not-so-hopping 807 KB) on your hard drive. We ran it using 32 MB of RAM, which is probably 16 times what it requires.

More info: http://www.picturewizard.com

Price: $19.95 US, $30 Canadian