August 2001
Transcription
August 2001
n double-click august 2001 Executive Contact List Please feel free to contact any of the following individuals if you have comments or questions relating to Macintosh Users East or Macintosh computing in general. Position/Name Phone# Mac Evangelist Bruce Cameron Hm: (905) 983-9205 Orono Email: [email protected] Past President Hugh Amos Bus: (905) 683-4760 Ajax Hm: (905) 683-4320 Meeting Coordinators Mark Fenton Jim Foster Hm: (905) 430-8234 Email: [email protected] Hm: (905) 432-0921 Courtice Email: [email protected] Treasurer Hm: (905) 683-3214 Ajax Membership Chairman Doug Kettle BBS Administrator Jim Foster Hm: (905) 432-0921 Courtice Email: [email protected] MaUsE BBS - The Source(905) 404-9874 ....56k Courtice Special Events Chris Greaves (705) 887-2508 Fenelon Falls Email: [email protected] Executive at Large John Field Hm:905-885-8718 Mary McCarthy Photoshop 6 is Adobe’s professional answer to all your image editing questions. If it can’t be done in the latest version of Photoshop, it probably can’t be done. But Photoshop 6 is not the sole provider of magic when it comes to working with images and pictures. There are dozens of alternative programs and utilities that you can use to work with your images. In this issue we’ll look at some of the “cheap & cheerful” alternatives that the amateur photographer can use to rework photos. Some are freeware, some shareware, and some commercial products, but each of them just might be all you really need to do everything your situation requires. And remember: before there was Photoshop version 6 there were Photoshop versions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 that obviously worked just fine for somebody. The Macintosh software auctions like eBay are an excellent place to pick up earlier versions of programs that are possibly even better for your system than the latest versions, and a lot cheaper, too. When I went on the internet and searched “Macintosh image editing software” I got dozens and dozens of potential programs. I could have picked any ten for this issue, but I chose a random selection of the old and the new. I hope you like them. They are all different from the usual fare and there is something for everyone among them. Greeter/Blithe Spirit Macintosh Users East [MaUsE] P.O. Box 30530, Oshawa Centre P.O. Oshawa, Ontario, L1J 8L8 Canada MaUsE Message Line: 905-433-0777 Double Click Double Click Editor Hm: (905) 576-2097 Oshawa Michael Shaw Email: [email protected] [email protected] FAX: 905-576-5527 Printing & Distribution Hm: (905) 683-3214 Ajax Doug Kettle Cover Design Sean Murphy From the Editor Contents PhotoFlash...Pg. 3 Digital Darkroom...Pg. 5 PhotoSoap...Pg. 7 Graphic Converter...Pg. 8 Rainbow Painter...Pg. 10 PhotoGenetics...Pg.11 Smoothie...Pg. 13 Compositor...Page 15 BME...Page 16 Image Viewer...Page 17 Photoshop 2.5.1...Page 18 MacWorld Expo...Pg. 20 Apple PhotoFlash 2 Jjust think of it: no Photoshop 6. What are you going to do ? With digital photography just itching to get into your life and take over your Mac if you don’t have some heavy duty photo editing software you are going to be left behind. You need the heavy hitting power of Adobe Photoshop. Or do you ? I’d like to suggest that the latest version of Photoshop 6.0, powerful enough for the most demanding and ambitious professional, is perhaps more than the rest of us, the stay-at-home strictly amateur point-and-shoot shutterbugs, really need. Or can handle. At the risk of committing blasphemy I’d like to suggest a half-dozen or so alternatives to the Adobe product. I’ll bet most of you have never heard of PhotoFlash, Apple's own photo-enhancement and cataloging program. While it doesn't offer the image-editing power of Adobe Photoshop, it does provide the basic tools you need to enhance, resize, and retouch images acquired from a scanner or digital camera and then organize those images for placement in desktop publishing programs like this. With the release of version 2.0, Apple vastly improved the program's cataloging features, added support for the Apple QuickTake 100 and 150 digital cameras. PhotoFlash handles images saved in PICT, TIFF, JPEG, Photo CD, EPS, and DCS file formats. (It can also read native Photoshop files but can't save files in that format.) You can easily convert files from one type to another, employing any of several file-compression options. The program's image-enhancement tools cover the basics: brightness, contrast, overall exposure, and color balance. But PhotoFlash doesn't include tools for editing individual color channels, creating masks, or applying sophisticated special effects. (The program does support many of Photoshop's plug-in filters, but it's not compatible with some of the more powerful distortion filters.) The 14 tools on PhotoFlash's tool palette include a variety of standard selection tools, as well as tools for cropping, resizing, rotating, blurring, and sharpening. Two unique tools are DeDust, which automatically removes specks in otherwise solid fields of color, and DeScratch, which removes thin scratches that might mar a scanned image. Predictably, it's sometimes difficult for PhotoFlash to distinguish between genuine hairline scratches and normal portions of Word 6.0, and FileMaker Pro 2.1 layouts. To record a new script, you simply click on the Record button located on the floating script palette, perform a series of actions, and then save the script. PhotoFlash doesn't have the image processing capabilities of Photoshop but it also costs a whole lot less. It handles all the basic image-enhancement tasks a casual desktop publisher is likely to need and provides a simple, uncluttered interface for organizing images, improving their general appearance, and placing them in other programs. a complex image, so these tools must be used with caution. Fortunately, you can fine-tune their sensitivity using the Enhance dialog box. This box works very similar to the Daystar Charger Photoshop accelerator, but without requiring Photoshop. With the Enhance features you can use sliders to apply changes to a small portion of your complete image and the box changes to provide the appropriate controls for: •Adjust Colors •Balance and Exposure •Brightness and Contrast •Blur •Sharpen •Remove Dust •Remove Scratches One of PhotoFlash's real strengths is its extensive support of AppleScript. PhotoFlash comes with several useful scripts that automate the program's functions and integrate it with other applications. Scripts can place an image in QuarkXPress, PageMaker 5.0, Persuasion 3.0, PhotoFlash includes cataloging features that let you quickly organize groups of images in searchable catalogs. Images are displayed as thumbnails and can be sorted by file name or date. You can add an image to a catalog simply by dragging the image's icon onto an open catalog window. PhotoFlash can catalog the contents of an entire disk by scanning the disk for images and adding to the catalog each one that it finds. You can search catalogs by file name or by a specific string of caption text, and PhotoFlash will create a new catalog containing images that meet the search criteria. Version 2.0 also allows you to search by sketch-you draw a crude thumbnail using a few basic painting tools, and PhotoFlash will find images that roughly match your sketch. In addition, you can search for an image by similarity; choose an image, and PhotoFlash will automatically select any other images that match it in basic color and composition. Digital Darkroom 1.2 Here’s another likely candidate. A search for Digital Darkroom from MicroFrontier will get you to a program that will amaze you. Aimed at novices with basic image-editing needs, MicroFrontier's Digital Darkroom has a simple interface, a basic tool set, and a few automaticcorrection features. Digital Darkroom's simple tools are contained in a single floating palette. Along with the usual complement of tools, the palette includes a gradient tool and a basic text tool but no graphics primitives such as circles or squares. You make selections by using marquee, magic-wand, and lasso tools that prove adequate for simple touch-ups and basic compositing; Digital Darkroom lacks the ability to feather selections to create smoother editing transitions. An Option button lets you change the brush tool's size and shape and the line tool's width. Unfortunately, the eraser is limited to an unchangeable square, so erasing is difficult in tight areas. Additionally, Digital Darkroom's lack of smudge and blur tools makes it nearly impossible to do smooth, seamless touch-ups. Digital Darkroom supports Photoshop plug-ins, including Acquire modules, which allow you to import graphics directly from scanners and digital cameras. For color correction, Digital Darkroom provides a Brightness and Contrast filter as well as a Color Variations tool. Free of complicated levels or curves dialog boxes, Digital Darkroom's color correction is easy to use. For each filter, the current selection is shown, sur- rounded by swatches of variations. Clicking on a variation updates the center swatch and provides a new group of choices. The program's AutoMagic menu provides automatic correction and editing features. The menu's Auto Enhance feature does a good job of equalizing the tonal range of an image; the Red Eye and Scratch Removal filters also prove useful. Although the program includes a virtual-memory scheme that makes it possible to edit large images, Digital Darkroom's performance can be a bit sluggish, even on a speedy modern Mac. Kai's Photo Soap This program has many features you'd expect in an entry-level image-editing program, plus a few extras. But befitting the Kai in its title (after Kai Krause, chief design officer for MetaCreations), the program implements these features in a most unconventional manner. In Kai's view, retouching a photo should be as intuitive as adjusting the brightness on your TV set. That means dumping the traditional menu bars and dialog boxes found in ordinary software, and replacing them with colorful push-button gadgets that would look more at home in a stereo system. If you're accustomed to more-conventional graphics programseven one as simple as Adobe's PhotoDeluxeyou'll find this approach hinders your productivity, but the target audience of graphics novices will love it. When you run Soap, the familiar Macintosh interface transforms into a brave new "MetaWorld." This will be a familiar event for users of other Meta Creations programs like Bryce. It's a fun place where the tools and controls are works of interactive art. For starters, Soap's features are organized into seven virtual rooms, plus a Map Room that helps you navigate to other rooms. In these rooms, you can modify hue and saturation, crop and rotate photos, open images in various formats, fix exposure automatically, adjust brightness and contrast, add backgrounds and objects, erase scratches, soften textures, and fix red-eye problems. You can apply most of these effects to the entire image or to selected portions. Although the program lacks conventional selection tools, it compensates by including brushes that let you paint effects into the portion of the image you want to modify. Inexperienced users will probably find this approach more intuitive than using a lasso or magic wand, but Soap's lack of selection tools precludes simple cut-and-paste operations. Soap also lacks support for Adobe Photoshop plug-ins, a curious omission on the part of the company that brought us Kai's Power Tools. Soap's amusing interface presents the features in a seemingly logical manner. But you may find yourself bogged down as you go from room to room to access different tools. The irony of Soap's interface is that experts and novices will find it equally baffling if they dive in before reading the mercifully short manual. Such productivity may be less important to graphics novices than to their professional counterparts, but in one respect Soap falls short even as a consumer product: when you run the software, it takes over your entire system. Even the menu bar disappears, blocking access to the Apple menu and other open apps. You can restore the menu bar, but only through a poorly documented keyboard shortcut or a control that appears in some of the rooms. Anticipate hunting through the program and manual to get your Mac back. Graphic Converter I can honestly say that even with Photoshop on my Mac I tend to reach for Graphic Converter at some point during the preparation of every edition of the Double Click. All of the images in this article about image editing software went through Graphic Converter either on their way from PICTs and GIFs to JPEGs or from the QuickTake camera file format to PICTs. From the Picture menu seen at right, it is possible to call up control windows to change most of the common features of any picture: resolution, size, and number of colours. Using the tools in the simple but powerful toolbar at left, I can crop elements from the pictures and make pixel by pixel repairs. As the name implies, Graphic Converter, although it has many other features to make working with pictures easier, is at its best when used to convert pictures from one format into another. The demands of different programs and platforms have spawned a plethora of file types for pictures and images, some popular and ubiquitous but many others of them are obscure or only used in specific instances. Graphic Converter can recognize and translate about 145 of them.: PICT, Startup-Screen, MacPaint, TIFF (uncompressed, packbits, CCITT3/4 and lzw), RIFF, PICS, 8BIM, 8BPS/PSD, JPEG/JFIF, GIF, PCX/SCR, GEMIMG/-XIMG, BMP (RLE compressed BMP's also), ICO/ICN, PIC (16 bit), FLI/FLC, TGA, MSP, PIC (PC Paint), SCX (ColoRIX), SHP, WPG, PBM/PGM/PPM, CGM (only binary), SUN , RLE, XBM, PM, IFF/LBM, PAC, Degas, TINY, NeoChrome, PIC (ATARI), SPU/SPC, GEMMetafile, Animated NeoChrome, Imagic, ImageLab/Print Technic, HP-GL/2, FITS, SGI, DL, XWD, WMF, Scitex-CT, DCX, KONTRON, Lotus-PIC, Dr. Halo, GRP, VFF, Apple IIgs, AMBER, TRS-80, VB HB600, ppat, QDV, CLP, IPLab, SOFTIMAGE, GATAN, CVG, MSX, PNG, ART, RAW, PSION, SIXEL, PCD, ST-X, ALIAS pix, MAG, VITRONIC, EPSF (with the help of EPStoPICT), Meteosat5, Sinclair QL, VPB, j6i, ASCII, ESM, CAM, PORST, Voxel, NIF, TIM, AFP, BLD, GFX, FAX3, SFW, BioRad, PSION 5, KDC (only PPC), QNT, JBI, DICOM, FAXstf, SKETCH, CALS, EletronicImage, X-Face, NASA RasterMetafile, Acorn Sprite, HSI-BUF, FlashPix (with QuickTime 4), ISS, RLA, VBM, HPI, CEL, WBMP, PGC, PGF. Once Graphic Converter reads and displays these images they can be cataloged, enhanced, and filtered using the commands from the picture and Effect menus and then saved in any of the following 45 image formats: PICT, Startup-Screen, MacPaint, TIFF (uncompressed, packbits and lzw), GIF, PCX, GEM-IMG/XIMG, BMP, IFF/LBM, TGA, PSD, JPEG/JFIF, HP-GL/2, EPSF, Movie (QuickTime), SUN, PICS, PICT in Resource, PBM/PGM/PPM, SGI, TRS-80, ppat, SOFTIMAGE, PNG, PSION, RAW, WMF, XWD, XBM, XPM, Clip, ASCII, PAC, ICO, RTF, VPB, Finder Icons, PSION 5, X-Face, ISS, CEL, WBMP, PGC. This all sounds very mechanical but what it all boils down to is that Graphic Converter is an allaround universal translator that allows you to make just about any image usable with just about any program. No matter where you get an image or what format it is stored in, Graphic Converter can usually fix it up so that it looks and works better with your software and looks better on your monitor and printer. While writing this article one of our MaUsE members showed up at the door with, among other things, a floppy disk with a Quark document on it that had a logo that he needed to use. It was the work of a minute to expand it in Quark and use the Shift Command 4 keyboard command to select it and turn it into a PICT file. From there I saved it back to the floppy four times, saving the file as a WBMP, JPEG/JFIF, GIF and PICT. Rainbow Painter Rainbow Painter is a unique painting and photo retouching program for the Macintosh. The unregistered version lets you try all features, with the exception of some effects and the export function. Any pictures you produce in the unregistered version are saved internally, and can be exported when you have registered. The interface is...well...weird. Maybe confusing would be a better word. Its certainly unlike anything else. Search it out on the internet and download the demo. All you need is any Power PC Mac and ten Megs of hard drive space. The main features of Rainbow Painter are: • Innovative design. • Unique user interface. • Let's you edit and view a picture in multiple windows simultaneously with individual magnifica• Up to 8 image layers with alpha/opacity channels. • More than 60 different effects and tools to use on your pictures. • Mask layer with special sets of tools and operations/effects. • Three different studios, where you may rearrange and add windows as you like. • Imports/exports Jpeg and PICT images, as well as a few other formats. • Misc. optimizations. • Info about site licenses added. Patience and time are required to master the intricacies of this program but the effort is well rewarded. Once you figure out the interface, understated as “unique” on the website, you will find this powerful image manipulation program well worth the effort. PhotoGenetics 2.0 At first glance, PhotoGenetics 2.0 looks almost exactly like the previous versions. They have tried to keep the new interface familiar, so that users accustomed to earlier versions will not be forced to start learning again with every upgrade. However, deep inside the program you will discover many of the changes. The documentation has also been updated to reflect the current version, in which you may read about all of the details of the upgrade. You will notice the biggest difference upon running an image evolution with the new version for the first time: optimizing images has become even easier and definitely faster as a result of the one-step evolution process with real-time preview. You are now able to see how your image will change, before you rate the image. The program will also detect color shifts automatically and try to correct them in the first steps of an image evolution. The image browser has been enhanced by a batch print function that prints any number of images in a user selectable size and automatically distributes the images sparingly across as many pages as are needed. Batch printing may include image processing (optimizing and dewarping) by use of genotypes and thus makes PhotoGenetics 2.0 a real photo production tool. The management of genotypes has been greatly enhanced. You may now store them in folders or subdirectories, and edit names and comments. The testing of genotypes with images has also been simplified by new functions in the genotypes list. EXIF information contained in some JPEG files will now be displayed in the image browser and preserved with the modified images. And Mac® users will now enjoy the same kind of image browser as users of the Windows® version. Additional image file formats are available through QuickTime® import and export. PhotoGenetics Add-ons are program extensions that may be purchased separately. Each Add-on provides a new evolution tool for a certain purpose. POWER CHARGE (1000691 Ontario Inc.) Toner Cartridge Remanufacturing and Imaging Supplies APRIL NABEEH Tel: (905) 433-1106 Fax: (905) 579-1469 FREE PICK UP & DELIVERY Smoothie Smoothie removes the jagged edges from pictures produced in your drawing and presentation applications using true subpixel anti-aliasing for superior results. It can be used to anti-alias single pictures, batch process many pictures, or even process an entire slide show for use in presentations as a Smoothie Slideshow or a QuickTime movie. Anti-aliasing is the central technology in Smoothie. The basic operation in anti-aliasing is to fill in the jagged edges between two colors with intermediate colors. Look closely at the before and after picture above to see the dramatic difference anti-aliasing makes for on screen graphics. Smoothie has a very useful batch processing facility. This allows you to process either a scrapbook file filled with pictures or a folder filled with PICT files. Output can be either a scrapbook file of pictures, a Smoothie Slideshow, or a QuickTime movie. Smoothie Slideshows are particularly useful when you are smoothing an on-screen presenta- tion created in programs like Persuasion and PowerPoint. For Smoothie to do its job, you need to create a vector picture, that is, one made up of lines, other graphics, and text. Smoothie will not smooth pictures containing only bitmaps. To control how Smoothie works, there is a main settings dialog. A picture of this is shown below: Smoothie lets you choose how many colors you want to use in your output. Usually, the more colors you use, the better the results. On the other hand, the more colors you use, the larger your pictures will be. Smoothie supports dithering. Dithering is a technique used to simulate more colors than are available in a picture. A picture containing 256 colors can look almost as good as one that uses thousands or millions of colors when dithering is used. Smoothie lets you scale your picture in one of two ways: either by a set percentage or to a specific size in pixels. Smoothie supports the Edition Manager (Publish and Subscribe). You can have Smoothie automatically publish the results are they are produced. You can also have Smoothie process new data that is published into Smoothie. These options make it easy to use Smoothie in the background while you tweak a picture in a foreground drawing application. Smoothie supports the use of QuickTime's image compressors to minimize the size of your final output. Smoothie is sold as shareware, which means you can use it and see if it is useful to you. If it is, they ask a $24.95 registration fee. Compositor 1.9 Compositor is a cool graphic utility program for creating art from images, and basic image editing. It has over 125 filter and channel effects variations built in, and can save and replay nearly all of your image editing actions. Compositor is fast, and gives great results while adding features that artists may fine lacking in any other program. It still has some limitations reflecting its youthful vintage, the main one being that it is a one canvas (image) at a time program right now. Use Import To Clipboard and Swap With Clipboard to work around that a bit for now. Compositor gives you all this for less than $20 currently. ($19) Special features and filters: • Apply Luminosity Map - Make a movie! • Apply Actions To QuickTime Movie • Import a QuickTime movie for playback (only) • Stars and Planets - drag one on over. • Luminous Edges filter • Find Edges filter upgraded to serious business • New Rude Beast filter • New Et Tu Beast filter • New Rude More blur filters • New Equalize kicks that histogram into shape • New Equalize All kicks that histogram into more shape • New Posterize makes those colors more challenged • New Swap Clipboard command • 13 New Paste compositing variations • Custom Kernel Filter Revamped to save and load settings • Blur menu revamped • 3 New Combo Filters • Soften Image filter • Son of Spazoid filter • Export QuickTime Image File • Easier Registration, plus URL Launchers added • Quick Tips in Help Menu • New Icons, more icons. • Many Bug fixes. "New Features vs. Bugs Added" Ratio reduced nicely. BME Don’t ask me what the name signifies. I don’t know. This program will definitely never be a threat to Photoshop but it more than makes up for what it lacks in complexity by being simply simple. The pallet of tools is the most basic imaginable with just five boxes to show the possible actions. There are only eight filter commands from the Effects menu but each calls up its own slider control panel to help you change your pictures and all of the effects are reversible with the “undo” command. This program has many of the most common and useful effects and filters presented in a very basic format. It is a great introduction to photo and image editing without the complexities and complications of layers and paths. Another big difference is the price: BME is free for anyone to download from the SoftLogik Publishing Corporation website. The program comes with a wonderful BME Guide application just like the Mac OS Help Guide that enables the user to learn the program by searching out topics as they are needed. Get it now before they change their minds and either pull the program entirely or start to sell it as shareware. Image Viewer This little gem will show a window like the one shown here below for any folder or drive you select. These little images are thumbnail shots of pictures that I keep in the Double Click “Pix in Case” folder just in case I need them sometime in the future. For any folder on your computer you can elect to see ALL of the graphical images, including all the screen shots on your hard drive. Even more amazing, the “Choose” button opens another window for the file in which you can view all of the images in a full-size slide-show. by pushing a arrow button you can begin a slide-show of all the images in rotation. You could do this with other programs but none as uncluttered as this one. This ability is especially good if your images are designated simply by a date stamp or a number or letter coding as they are in many photo CD and clip art collections. Alphanumeric is great for some things but a picture record of all your JPEGs, GIFs, and TIFs makes them a lot easier to catalog and find. Search for Image Viewer on the internet and try this one out. If you intend to have a lot of images or tend to lose track of the ones you already have this program is for you. Adobe Photoshop v 2.5.1 What to use if you don’t have the latest Photoshop ? Ironically, there’s always Photoshop. I just saw one of my favourite versions of Photoshop up for bids on eBay going for a song and a dance, There were copies of later versions as well, Photoshop v3, v4, v5, and v5.5 going for slightly more but version 2.5.1 is what I use and I find it totally adequate. Adequate! To be honest I find Photoshop 2.5.1 overwhelming with its power and complexity. The list below shows just the Photoshop filters that start with first three letters of the alphabet as they appear in my Quadra 950 Photoshop Filters menu pulldown. The magic of Photoshop resides in the Plug-ins folder in the Photoshop folder which holds the Adobe and third party resources (filters and plug-ins) that each extend the powers of the program. From various sources I have over a hundred addon bits and pieces. And just look at that Toolbar. Compare it with the almost laughable puny little 5-box toolbar in the article about BME. Photoshop has been the supreme photo editing software of choice for so long that every possible effect thought up by a user/programmer has made its way into public use as freeware, shareware or as a commercially available accessory. The list of things that you can do with even the oldest versions of Photoshop is truly amazing. Unlike many other programs that have been around a while the early Photoshop versions have not bloated beyond the RAM and hard drive capabilities of most of our older Macs. Another nice effect of the ubiquitous pervasion of Photoshop through its many incarnations is that even the hardware manufacturers have marketed specific accelerators for many Macs, like the older Nubus-based Mac models, aimed specifically at speeding up various professional Photoshop filters. I have acquired two of these for the two Nubus Macs that I run Photoshop on: I have the Daystar Charger Plus system and the Radius Nubus PhotoEngine. The Daystar Nubus Charger card in my Macintosh IIci kicks in ONLY when Photoshop is running and cues my logic board to pass on intensive filter and effect calculations to the two high-speed AT&T Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chips on the Daystar card. During accelerated computations the cursor turns into a little star to indicate activity. The Radius PhotoEngine card in my Quadra 950 has four fast DSP chips and works very similar to the Charger card except it works invisibly whenever Photoshop is active and speeds up the most processor-intensive filters and effects. For more neat programs get out and surf the ‘net. Thee’s lots of other free and cheap stuff waiting for you out there !! Our Boys Go To MacWorld As you can see from the pictures Bruce and Jim had another big week at Macworld in New York. You have to look closely to see them there in the croud.