Digital Light & Color

Today, I saw for the first time, a published advertisement for Picture Window Pro in a photo magazine. It was in Shutterbug and featured a photo by frequent forum poster Maciej Tomczak (congratulations) and highlighted a PWP attribute that makes it well suited for his needs as a world traveling photographer.

The highlighted feature is PWP's efficient construction (coding) which gives it a very small storage footprint. That permits it to be carried on a small USB storage device ("thumb drive") so you can carry your photo editing capability with you and use it on a borrowed computer wherever you may be.

In that respect, I wonder if it is used while still on the portable storage device which entails the CPU talking to the USB device or whether PWP is "installed" on the computer's hard drive before use. If the former, are there any special techniques and protocols for most efficient use? If the latter, are there any copyright issues involved in using the software, potentially, on multiple computers?

I can't answer your questions, but I'm glad to learn there's some marketing going on. PWP should be more known than it is.

Doug, I've PWP installed on a USB. When I switch to a computer that has not seen PWP yet and run the programme off the USB, it brings up a registration/30day trial screen. I pick the trial and use PWP normally. Typically there are no issues - the only one that I remember having a few times was running workflow on a lot of images, which required increasing virtual memory size (you may need administrator's privileges to do that) - it doesn't happen often.

I remember Kiril mentioning experimenting with a 'stealth/portable' mode of the programme (having local .ini file instead of registry entires?). While such feature could have been neat, it doesn't seem to make that much of a practical difference. Cheers!

Forgot to mention: calibrating various monitors is probably the most difficult part of such guerrilla modus operandi. The best I can advise is to use test image to get the gamma (or even an angle of the LCD!) about right, use some common sense to judge the colour tints (not easy), and then try to use PWP readouts and histograms to verify what the screen shows. Another ad hoc technique is to do the best you can using the above, make a test print, and than use Monitor Curves on the same computer/screen to try to fix the errors...

To use Picture Window via a USB drive, install Picture Window to the drive rather than the usual c:\Program Files.

You can now plug the USB drive to other computers and run PWP from the USB drive. Since PWP was not originally installed on that computer, there will be a few differences. For one, PWP will not appear in the Start/Programs menu and will not have a shortcut on the desktop. (Instead, you start it by double-clicking on the pw50.exe file on the USB drive.)

When PWP runs, it will start in its default mode. In this mode it will run as a demo version with all preferences set to their defaults. Also, PWP will not be registered as the default application for opening image files. Other than such differences, PWP operation is indistinguishable from when it is installed normally.

If you need to run PWP just a few times on a given machine, it is probably easiest to just run it as is. If you plan to run it more regularly, you can manually create a shortcut on the desktop, register it with your serial number, set preferences as needed, etc.

Kiril

p.s. We did investigate saving preferences to the USB drive. However, many of the preferences are file-related and thus specific to a particular machine, making that unfeasible.

I think this is true, but I'm not sure: if I don't have administrator's privileges (but have access to the Internet) and try to install PWP setup.exe, I may not be able to do that? If I don't have a USB stick on me with the PWP installed previously, I may be out of luck on this machine. Would it be a good idea to have a ZIP file with installed PWP available in the dl-c download section as well?