Microsoft acquired the intellectual property rights and full U.S. trade registration from RomTech, later renamed eGames, and released Version 1.0 of the application in September 1996.
Borrowing from the wizard user interface concepts of Microsoft Publisher, Picture It!
It was the first consumer imaging program to enable sprite creation, leveraging alpha masking (a concept published by Alvy Ray Smith, founder of Pixar, in 1978) while running on an 8 MB RAM Pentium computer.
was significantly changed, expanded with more advanced editing features and rebranded as Microsoft Digital Image with the home publishing features removed and a focus exclusively on photo editing.
Digital Image was also eventually discontinued in 2006 after the release of Windows Vista.