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Adobe Photoshop Elements 6

David Biedny — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:09:52 -0500

The Guided Edit mode gives you a column of options for easy editing.

Photoshop Elements has long played the role of little brother, with a streamlined interface and toolset designed for amateur photographers, hobbyists, and anyone who doesn’t need all of Photoshop’s advanced functionality—or $649 price tag. At $90, Elements 6 is a tremendous bargain, and head and shoulders above previous versions.

This is the first Universal binary version of Elements, and the performance boost on Intel Macs closely mirrors that of Photoshop CS3—it boots quickly and generally feels smooth and responsive. We also ran it on a G4 Titanium PowerBook and a Dual Power Mac G5 with respectable speeds. While Adobe claims that Elements can run with 512MB of RAM (1GB is recommended), we found that the program sometimes crashed on our PowerBook, which has 1GB of RAM, but never on our MacBook Pro or Power Mac G5, with 3GB and 2GB of RAM, respectively. We suggest downloading the trial version to see how it performs on your machine.

Elements’ three primary modes—Edit, Create, and Share—are designated by tabs in the upper-right. Edit is the main event, with redesigned icons in the main tool palette and a contextual Options bar at the top of the screen. The excellent Guided Edit mode offers up a single screen of editing options to make things even easier.

Much of what you would ever want in Photoshop is here, from the Healing and Spot Healing brushes to the Rubber Stamp and Cloning tools, with only a few compromises for the most serious image-editing tasks. Elements even has some fun features not found in Photoshop, such as the Cookie Cutter tool, which uses a library of shapes to create pseudo-layer masking effects, such as a cropping a picture of your sweetheart inside of a heart or a star. The Red Eye Removal tool automatically found the red eyes of the baby in our test image, without us having to make a selection, and amazingly, did a far better job than the red-eye tool in Photoshop CS3.

The Layers palette in Elements 6 delivers most of the same functionality as in Photoshop CS3, including all of the blending modes, layer style effects, and gradient and tinting layers. The big omission is true layer masking for more challenging compositing tasks. The Quick Selection tool is here, but Elements lacks even a single alpha channel or QuickMask slot.

The new Color Curves control is like a light version of Curves (Photoshop’s single most useful color correction tool)—it’s useful, but not implemented as a nondestructive adjustment layer, like Levels. Elements also packs enhancement tools for automatically addressing color cast and skin tone corrections, and handy new black-and-white conversion tools. Image sharpening is much improved with the new Unsharp Mask tool and a scaled-down version of Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen filter. RAW files are properly handled through a scaled-down version of Adobe Camera Raw, and they come in with either 8 or 16 bits of color depth, with many of Elements’ tools now working in 16-bit color mode.

Photomerge Faces and Group Shot let you create composite images from multiple source photos, mixing up facial features and the best takes of your group’s heads, respectively. You’ll want to put a little forethought into getting the most from these additions, but they’re fun to experiment with, and they produce fantastic results. All of Photoshop’s filters are here (including Liquefy), but we’d love to see a plug-in for tapping into Mac OS X’s Core Image effects.

The Create panel has tools for creating photo books, image collages, Web galleries, and PDF slideshows—all are very easy to use and yield attractive results. There’s also a nice selection of prefab frames, backgrounds, and text effects for whipping up instant cards, DVD cases, and other useful layouts. Share mode lets you email photos, burn CDs or DVDs, and directly order prints of your images.

The bottom line. Photoshop Elements 6 is an amazing value—it’s pretty much everything that a point-and-shoot photographer would want in an image editor, and possibly more than they’ll ever need.

COMPANY: Adobe

CONTACT: www.adobe.com

PRICE: $89.99, $69.99 upgrade

REQUIREMENTS: G4 or faster or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4.8 or later, 512MB RAM, 1GB free disk space

Extensive toolset. Easy guided-editing mode. Photomerge Faces and Group Shot are cool. Low price. Universal binary.

A little flaky in low-RAM situations. No layer masks. Where are Core Image effects?

e frontier Poser 7

David Biedny — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 17:38:28 -0500

Adding an amused expression in Poser 7 is as easy as making people walk the walk.

For animators who can't stomach the idea of spending thousands of dollars on software, Poser 7 is the ideal choice. Poser is all about designing and editing 3D figures, and version 7 ships with some new human models (named Simon and Sydney) as well as a slew of third-party forms, including an eagle, a wolf, a crab, a cockroach, and not one, but two alien beings. There are enough sentient life forms here for just about any 3D creative endeavor.

The overall look and feel of Poser hasn't changed much, which is comforting to longtime users (are loyal Poser users called Posers?). Even better, if you're running it on an Intel Mac or a multiprocessor PowerPC Mac, you'll see significant performance improvements in Poser 7. The performance boost is especially important given the app's new rendering capabilities, including HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) support for the IBL (Image Based Lighting), which takes render quality to a whole new level of realism. On a quad-processor PowerPC Mac, you're looking at a speed boost of two to three times over previous rendering times. Working with complex hair and cloth simulations also benefits from the multithreaded support.

Texture handling is faster than ever in Poser 7, and the texture size limitation of previous versions (1,000 by 1,000 pixels) has been bumped up to 4,096 by 4,096 pixels. This is critical for delivering more detailed renderings of human faces, a key aspect of typical Poser usage.

Three-dimensional figures are more fun when they move, and Poser 7 includes some great additions for animators. Animation Layers significantly facilitate the creation of complex moves by blending different types of character motion into one coherent whole. Let's say you create a run effect with the Walk Designer and then decide that it should end with a crouching effect and a snap of the head to one side. Animation Layers let you create each of these distinct motions by themselves, and then blend them together to create a larger, more complex set of movements that constitute a complete animated sequence. You can make changes to an individual animation layer, though the degree of control is no different than in previous versions; it's the blending/morphing between the discrete animation layers that's new. Then there are the new Morph Targets Creation tools, common in the world of high-end character animation, which are used for creating dynamic facial animation and exerting absolute control over how the surface of skin appears as limbs bend and move. Together, these two features make it possible for Poser 7 users to create much more subtle and realistic animations.

We were a little less thrilled with the Talk Designer, which is supposed to ease the tedious, complex task of creating convincing lip-synching of talking characters. When you import an audio file, Poser automatically creates custom morph animation of the character's lips. An additional feature lets you import a text file transcription of the spoken dialog, to assist in the analysis and accuracy of the final lip animation. While this sounds phenomenal in theory, the practical results of the process leave something to be desired, and require extensive manual tweaking in order to get even partially believable synchronization between the lips and the sound.

Besides these major new features in Poser 7, there are a couple of interface and workflow additions that have been long overdue. Up to 100 levels of Undo are now available, a critical feature that longtime Poser fans have been clamoring for. There's also a Duplicate command for cloning objects in a scene.

The bottom line. At just $250, the sheer value proposition of Poser can't be beat. It's a true bargain of a 3D creature factory.

COMPANY: e frontier
CONTACT: www.e-frontier.com
PRICE: $249.99, $129.99 upgrade from version 4 and higher
REQUIREMENTS: 700MHz G4 or later or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, 512MB RAM, 1GB hard disk space, OpenGL enabled graphics card
Animation layers assist in creating complex animation. Performance boost for Intel and multiprocessor Macs. 100 undos. Amazing price. Universal binary.
Talk Designer needs work. Learning curve still significant

Live Interior 3D 1.1: First Look

Rik Myslewski — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:50:33 -0500

After mucking about with this app's controls and spelunking in its less-than-helpful manual, you might be able to create some nifty 3D interior scenes. Patience, as they say, is a virtue.

"First Looks" - as opposed to full-scale, rated reviews - such as this one of BeLight Software's Live Interior 3D, are a bit of a conundrum. By definition, they're more a recounting of first impressions than a presentation of well-researched analysis: plug in a peripheral and fire it up or install a piece of software and launch it, then see how well it behaves without poring over each and every word in the manual.

We're Mac lovers - manuals are, for us, a last resort. When taking software out for a test drive, we expect it to be easy to figure out (discoverable, in user-interface design terms), and that it should offer built-in assistance when things are a bit confusing. When software fails these simple introductory duties ... well ... we're willing to grudingly dig into the manual for help - but that manual had better be easy to navigate, clearly written, and be able to answer our questions both promptly and correctly.

This interior-design app fails these First Look tests on all accounts. Its controls don't provide the simple feedback you'd expect, its capabilities are difficult to understand without delving into the manual, the manual itself is poorly written, and even with the manual's help things simply don't work as they should - or maybe they do, but the manual is so opaque that it's difficult to figure out how to accomplish what you want to do.

Live Interior 3D's box proudly states that "Creating a new or remodeling your current interior has never been so easy or intuitive." Since I have two rooms in my home that I'm interested in remodeling - my elder daughter is leaving the proverbial nest - this sounded like an app that was worth the investment of a couple of hours of my time.

I first measured the nooks, crannies, windows, and doors of those rooms, then used those measurements to create a floor plan in Live Interior 3D's 2D View. Easier said than done. A lot easier, due to the app's poor feedback on wall length and placement.

I dutifully left space for doors, then discovered on page 34 of the manual that I needn't have bothered - the app will cut door, window, and niche openings for you out of existing walls. A nice touch. I then added a door between my two rooms, choosing from the library of architectural elements between a door labeled HIT 03 and one labled KUP 04. Therre must be a difference between these two doors, but poor ignorant me wasn't giving any aid as to how to distinguish an HIT door from a KUP door - and the manual didn't help. (A Google search turned up a few references to these door types - including others labeled TOP, OPO, SO, and more - but I'm still in the architectural dark.)

More trouble began after I added the door, when I discovered that it swung opposite the way I expected it to. Now, it being Gay Pride Weekend here in San Francisco, I certainly took no personal offense at the door swinging its own way, but I did want it to match the one currently separating my two rooms - and after about an hour of messing about in the app and digging through the manual, I still couldn't get the door to open the way I wanted it to. I gave up - after all, this is just a First Look, not a full review.

It seems that this is the dialog I should use to create a door that swings in the direction opposite to the one provided in Live Interior 3D's library, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to save changes. Can you?

Next I launched Live Interior's 3D view to, uh, view my handiwork, then decided to add some furniture from Live Interior's library. As one of my planned rooms is to be an office, I was disappointed to discover that when I typed "desk" or "desks" into the library's search box, I got a grand total of zero elements to choose from. I did a bit better with "shelves," though not a lot. After choosing a shelf unit from the small selection offered, I added it to my room and was then disappinted to find out that no matter how I "glued" it to the wall, changing its measurements made it come unglued. Sigh...

I then played around with lighting and discovered that even the tiniest amount of luminosity blew out my 3D view in nuclear-powered brightness, but after dialing my lights waaaay down, the 3D lighting effects were quite nice. I then tried "walking" around my rooms, but quickly plopped through walls and got lost outside my rooms, staring at the grass or at the sky - I wish there were a "return home" toggle. Oh, and I still don't know how to open a door, or even if it can be done - and the manual's no help.

Then I gave up.

See that wall with the "X" selection indicator? I wasted a good 45 minutes trying to change its color to match the other light-colored ones, only to discover that I couldn't - it's in shade, y'see. It would have been nice to have been told up-front.

If this were a true review, of course, I'd read every page of the manual, try each and every control, talk with the folks at BeLight Software, and wrestle this app into full submission so that I could completely and fairly evaulate it not only on its own merits, but also against its competition. But this isn't a true review; it's merely an "I just wasted about four hours of my precious weekend on this app" First Look.

And, to be honest, it's going to be my last look. Oh, that remodeling job of mine? Back to the drawing board. The real one. With paper and pencils.

Sketchup Pro 6

Helmut Kobler — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:31:25 -0500

Creating basic 3D objects is easy in SketchUp, but creating detailed, realistic models still takes a little practice.

Google and 3D software - sounds like an odd couple, doesn't it? But with Google's SketchUp Pro 6, you don't have to have Pixar-class skills to build just about anything in 3D. SketchUp Pro 6 doesn't have the steep learning curve found in heavy-duty 3D software such as Autodesk's Maya and Maxon's Cinema 4D. Then again, it doesn't have all the power (or the huge price tag) of a full-fledged 3D package either. But SketchUp Pro 6 is perfect for creating quick conceptual designs of everything from new products to buildings and room interiors.

SketchUp Pro stands out because it's a very intuitive modeler. You can quickly draw standard shapes like rectangles or circles and arcs, or draw with a freehand tool. When you first sketch a shape, it appears as a flat 2D object. Selecting the Push/Pull tool and clicking and dragging on the shape gives it 3D depth (for instance, a 2D rectangle suddenly rises to become the form of a building). You can move shapes around, extend and shorten them, rotate them on any axis, and group them together. Snap-to properties, end-point detection, visual grids, and a tape measure tool help you line things up and get proportions right.

To take your models beyond mere blueprints, you can color their segments with the Paint Bucket tool, or apply one of more than 100 material textures - for example, red bricks in a wall, certain style of shingles for a rooftop, or grass and pavement on the ground. SketchUp Pro can also cast shadows according to the time of day you set. A simple animation tool lets you take snapshots of a scene from different viewpoints and then animate the world from one view to another. It's not so easy to create a precise 3D walkthrough of an environment (say, a house), but the tool works well for simple 3D flybys.

No other software makes 3D so easy, but SketchUp Pro still has a learning curve if you want to create models that go beyond simple block or cylindrical shapes. For best results, you should expect to go through Google's online tutorials and then put in several hours of trial and error. Fortunately, if you don't develop your own modeling chops, you can always connect to Google's 3D Warehouse and download hundreds of existing models that other SketchUp users have posted. The site is well stocked with scores of models for buildings, trees, cars, furniture, and people, so you can put together complex scenes without doing a stitch of modeling yourself.

Google also offers a free version of SketchUp, which includes the modeling and animation features. It's fun to play with for a while, but if you have real work to do, you'll want the extra features of the $495 SketchUp Pro. For starters, the Pro version includes a Layout application that lets you present your work on custom-designed presentation boards that can incorporate 2D artwork and photos you import, and that can be printed or saved as a PDF file. You can also export models into many 3D file formats (to import into other 3D programs), or as vector-based 2D images. Pro also lets you build or match a model to a reference photo, and texture models with photos, so you can make billboards, murals, and other signage. You can add 3D text in Pro too.

The bottom line. In the future, we'd love the ability to set up precise 3D walkthrough animations, along with support for posable 3D characters (perfect for making quick storyboards). But even without these improvements, SketchUp Pro is already a dream for architects, interior designers, and conceptual designers who want to build in 3D without the extreme complexity of most 3D apps.

COMPANY: Google
CONTACT: www.sketchup.com
PRICE: $495
REQUIREMENTS: 400MHz G4 or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later, 128MB RAM, 80MB disk space
Intuitive modeling tools. Free models via 3D Warehouse. Relatively inexpensive. Universal binary.
Simplistic animation features.

Adobe Illustrator CS3

Tom Geller — Thu, 17 May 2007 19:24:59 -0500

Wonder what your graphic would look like in metallic colors? Illustrator CS3 knows.

Graphic artists who rely on Adobe Illustrator for their daily bread will be pleased with Illustrator CS3 (also known as version 13.0.0), which adds numerous small features throughout the application and a few whiz-bang winners. As with other members of the CS3 family, Illustrator also changes the appearance of palettes, now called "panels," in ways that are sure to be controversial. But overall, it's an excellent update to the last professional vector-based drawing application left standing.

Illustrator is aimed primarily at working graphics-arts professionals and has never been terribly friendly to new users. Even after you learn how to control Bézier curves, Illustrator's dizzying jargon and panoply of options can send a neophyte running from the room - or at least toward a simpler drawing application, such as Lineform or Intaglio. However, several improvements ease the way: Document setup is simplified in a templatelike system, Internet-based instructional videos are a couple of clicks away (by way of Adobe Bridge), and hints from online experts appear in a floating palette - er, we mean panel. Selecting anchor points in complex documents used to require a microscope and the dexterity of a surgeon. Now they light up when you mouse over them - or not, if you change that setting in the new Selection and Anchor Display preferences. Also new is an Eraser tool borrowed from Photoshop and Flash, giving bitmaplike control over your vector graphics. Finally, some frequently used features have been brought to the fore, such as the Select Similar Objects tool in the Control panel, which was formerly just called Same and hidden under the Select menu.

Illustrator's changes go beyond usability, and the most eye-catching new feature is Live Color. In the Live Color window, all the colors used in a document are charted on a color wheel. You can alter each color individually, or (here's the amazing part) move them all at once in a way that maintains their harmonic relationship to one another. In either case, Illustrator updates your artwork while you muck around, giving you new, kaleidoscopic views of your creation. The end result is color combinations that automatically make sense and look good, even after radical changes. For those with poor color sense, Live Color can also suggest color-theory-based configurations and provides color-wheel models ranging from the straightforward (Bright) to the whimsical (Ice Cream).

Illustrator also has important changes in how it interacts with other applications in Creative Suite 3 - the most notable being its interaction with Flash, which Adobe acquired when it bought Macromedia in 2005. In truth, many of these improvements - such as the ability to reliably preserve gradients, Symbol properties, and characteristics of interactive text - would be considered bug fixes if the two apps had a common lineage. But they don't, and so getting them to work together so well in CS3 represents an impressive feat of engineering.

Now for the controversy. The new Illustrator has minimized the size of all the palettes - d'oh, we mean panels - and stuck them in a dock to reveal significantly more of the artboard. That's good. And enhancements to the Control panel (formerly the Control Bar) further clear the way. But these panels and their controls seem to be getting smaller and smaller with every new release, presenting difficulties for the new or vision-impaired user. Fortunately, you can save multiple workspaces once you've figured out what's best for you, and the old-school CS2 workspace is one of the preprogrammed choices.

The bottom line. In a sense, Adobe shot itself in the foot by producing such good recent versions of Illustrator: Most users won't have a pressing need to upgrade unless they design for mobile devices or use Flash. But nearly everyone will enjoy Live Color, the improved interface, and numerous other small improvements that make Illustrator CS3 a skilled performer.

COMPANY: Adobe
CONTACT: www.adobe.com
PRICE: $599 à la carte, $199 upgrade, available in five CS3 bundles ($1,199 to $2,499)
REQUIREMENTS: G4 or faster or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4.8 or later, 512MB RAM, 2.5GB disk space
Color exploration easy with Live Color. Usability improvements. Flash integration greatly improved. Universal binary.
Interface can be overwhelming and obscure.

Lineform 1.2.5

Tom Geller — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:52:45 -0500

Fancy script or chicken scratch - Lineform handles both.

Lineform is the yin to EazyDraw's yang, replacing the latter's mind-bending complexity with a Zen-like simplicity. But although its tools appear spare at first, Lineform packs a lot of functionality into them, and it's much better than EazyDraw at imitating the interface conventions of other drawing apps. The tools do pretty much what you expect, although figuring out how to perform complex operations may take some experimentation. For example, there was no documentation on how to join the endpoints of two objects - a fairly simple and common task in other apps. (A visit to Lineform's online forum got us a quick and thorough response.)

Lineform's bare-bones interface makes knowing key-command equivalents especially useful. Fortunately, the app often provides several methods of doing something: There are three ways to edit anchor points on a line, for example. Your first few minutes with Lineform might lead you to feel that it's underpowered, but stick with it. The power's there, it's just not always obvious.

Once you've gotten used to it, Lineform can truly sing in an artist's hands. The 16 artistic strokes immediately give the simplest line drawings an air of handcrafted warmth, while the giant collection of Core Image effects (which require Mac OS 10.4 or later) is simply dazzling. We also found that the minimal controls created a sort of psychological tabula rasa that forced us to concentrate on the artwork, undistracted by the app's twiddly bits.

The bottom line. If you have an artistic bent, Lineform can help you express yourself.

COMPANY: Freeverse
CONTACT: www.freeverse.com
PRICE: $79.95
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later
Elegant interface. Screen space well used. Responsive. Universal binary.
Highest filter resolution is 300 dpi. Some features are hard to find. Incomplete documentation.

Intaglio 2.9.4

Tom Geller — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:43:43 -0500

A glowing pig? Intaglio uses Core Image to make it possible.

Intaglio occupies a happy medium between EazyDraw's obsessive detail and Lineform's übersimplicity. Of the three, Intaglio looks and acts the most like other Mac drawing programs you probably already know. Easing the transition even further are the app's well-illustrated documentation, AppleScript support, and substantial collection of sample drawings, clipping libraries, and scripts.

Of the three, we found Intaglio to be the easiest to learn, and it provides a few features that are missing from the others (such as a layer-based slideshow and separate ColorSync settings for RGB and CMYK). Controls for various functions are sufficient for most purposes while not being excessive, and you can find them more or less where you expect them to be. While Intaglio lacks many of the oddball features found in EazyDraw, it's hard to find features in Lineform that are missing from Intaglio. (Most notably, Intaglio has the same huge collection of Core Image effects as Lineform does.)

Our gripes about Intaglio are fairly minor: You can't fill an object with text, for example, and some functions (such as free transformations) are quicker in Lineform, requiring a Control key instead of a menu selection for access. But these are mere quibbles, made up for by Intaglio's greater depth and overall ease of use.

The bottom line. For general illustration tasks and ease of use, Intaglio sets the pace among non-professional drawing tools.

CONTENTS: Purgatory Design
CONTACT: www.purgatorydesign.com
PRICE: $89
REQUIREMENTS: PowerPC: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, QuickTime 7.0 or later. Intel: Mac OS 10.4.7 or later.
Excellent documentation. Slideshow feature. Includes sample AppleScripts. Universal binary.

Not enough keyboard commands.

EazyDraw 2.1.3

Tom Geller — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 18:44:45 -0500

EazyDraw is not for those with short attention spans.

EazyDraw marches to its own beat, and the drummer is playing modern jazz. Practically everything about it seems created anew: palettes, available tools, help text, ways of selecting and combining objects. On one hand, this inventiveness gives EazyDraw some unexpectedly useful capabilities, such as a large set of tools that automatically show measurements between points. On the other, its interface is so unfamiliar that it's likely to leave all but the most dedicated users scratching their heads in bewilderment, especially at first. The company told us that it's "not designed for the professional graphic artist," but rather to "have some fun, or get a job done, without a big hassle." That may be the case after some training, but EazyDraw's learning curve is nothing to sneeze at.

EazyDraw seems built with the philosophy that more is more, its tool palettes easily filling the screen. And each palette carries dozens of tools - the Charting palette is champion with 54. That's no reason to knock EazyDraw, of course. Illustrator has 25 palettes accessible under the Window menu alone, not even counting the dozens of Libraries. But much of EazyDraw's completeness struck us as obsessive overkill. Why, for example, does the manual (which costs an extra $29.05 printed or $10 digital) require two of its 378 pages to explain how to enter the registration key? Do we really need three tools on the main tool palette to draw a rectangle? Why would anyone ever want to zoom in to a 48,000 percent view?

The upshot of EazyDraw's excess is that it provides a mind-spinningly high level of access to many settings, along with unique tools that may greatly simplify the lives of some users. EazyDraw would be well exploited by engineers, as it includes tools for flowcharting and for technical and architectural drawing. But it also takes an engineer's mind to muster the persistence needed to access much of the app's power, while simpler tasks are harder than they need to be.

The bottom line. It may require a bit of work to master, but EazyDraw's potent powers make the investment worth it.

COMPANY: Dekorra Optics
CONTACT: www.eazydraw.com
PRICE: $95 download, $115 boxed, $20 nine-month license, various other purchase options available
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4.3 or later
Huge collection of unique tools. Extreme detail possible. Includes tutorial documents. Universal binary.
Unconventional interface. Long-winded documentation. User manual costs extra.