The Help dialog sums up our thoughts on this turkey. Click image to embiggen.

Nolobe Software’s Iris is billed as the “ultimate image editor for Mac OS X,” which, depending on your point of view, is about as true as the statement, “Martians live among us.” This app is an all-out dud, offering very little reason for anyone to enlist it as a creative tool.

Iris is easy to download and install—and the app takes up very little disk space (7.5MB), which is great, but keep in mind that there are no demo files, no brush libraries, and no help files. That’s right, the version we tested included no documentation or help of any sort, which is surprising, given that Iris seems targeted to users who are just getting started with image editing.

Once you start working with Iris, the frustration comes up like acid reflux. Consider the simple operation of selecting a region from an image and duplicating it on the same layer. Virtually every bitmap editor since MacPaint has implemented the option-drag selection to “lift” the pixels of the selection and let you drag out a duplicate. Not Iris, though—you’ll need to copy your selection and paste it back, resulting in a new layer. OK, that works, now we’ll change the opacity of the new layer, except—oops!—there’s no opacity control for layers. You’re stuck with 100% opaque or nothing. This is completely unacceptable. Indeed, we have a hard time understanding how an app billed as having “advanced compositing” features could miss this essential feature. And don’t even think about asking where the layer masks, layer blend modes, and layer grouping come into the picture, because they’re not here either.

So what if you don’t care about layers? One of the most basic aspects of working with photographs is color correction—making skin tones look nice and healthy or removing overall cyan color casts from outdoor photos, for example. Iris has some of the expected color-correction tools, but they just don’t work. Levels, which is the most powerful tool in Iris, is totally broken—it makes some of the most bizarre and totally incorrect color shifts we’ve ever seen. It’s utterly useless, and that’s really bad news when you consider that it’s the most capable color-correction tool the app has to offer.

There’s such a long list of other hiccups and hair balls in Iris, it boggles the mind. We opened a 10-megapixel image and found that the app slowed to a crawl. And when we clicked the icon to toggle a single layer (of a two-layer image) on and off, there was a 6-second lag on a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM. We had several problems with layers—the ability to move a layer, for example, frequently vanished. After applying a filter to a layer, the filter effect would disappear the instant we tried to move the layer. Paintbrushes stopped painting after a few minutes, and screen redraw nightmares were common. We just had to wonder, did anyone actually test this thing before it was released?
 

It’s hard to come up with any good reason for Nolobe to have released Iris to the world in its current state. While it’s easy to use, it often doesn’t work properly, and it doesn’t even offer any solid ways to enhance or work with images. There is absolutely no reason to even bother downloading the demo—it’ll just make you nuts. Better luck next time, Nolobe

COMPANY: Nolobe
CONTACT: www.nolobe.com
PRICE: $79
REQUIREMENTS: OS 10.5
Easy to use—the parts that work, at least.
Buggy, slow layers. Virtually useless color-correction tools. Screen redraw problems. No documentation.