The digital darkroom - includes related articles on Fauve Matisse and Fractal Design Painter and on image-editing features in Windows 95 - review of four image-processing programs: Corel Photo-Paint 5 Plus, CPI's Image-In Color Professional, Micrografx' Picture Publisher and Adobe Photoshop - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1995 by William Harrel

Problem: You need to to combine a couple of images for an ad you're creating. Or you want to spruce up a presentation with a photograph, only to find out the colors in the photo clash with the background of your presentation.you have neither the time to look for nor the money to hire a designer. What should you do?

Solution: Fire up an image editing program.

But wait - aren't these programs extremely difficult to learn and use?

It's true that some image editors are configured like gigantic mazes of intricate, esoteric features that the average computer user will never use. But such basic procedures as converting a photograph from color to grayscale, resizing, cropping, color correction, and so on aren't that hard to master. In some cases, they're done for you automatically. And three of the package reviewed here - Photoshop, Picture Publisher, an Photo-Paint 5 Plus - have made notable progress in making image editing easy for the average businessperson who only occasionally works with graphics.

OK, but don't these packages require machine with more muscle than the one sitting on your desk? Not necessarily. Today's midrange computers - 48 PCs or Macintosh Quadras with 8MB of RAM and 16-bit display - are probably more than adequate for about 90 percent of your image editing tasks.

Ready, Set, Edit! Image editors should perform well in several key areas: photo retouching, creative effects, professional output and color matching, image management, and file conversion (changing a TIFF to a PCX, for instance).

The capabilities of the four products in this review vary in all categories. Some, such as Photoshop and Picture Publisher, cater to the high-end digital designer. In addition to an impressive array of photo touch-up tools, they boast elaborate hardware calibration routines that allow closer color matching among computer displays, scanners, and printing presses. The more economy-minded programs, such as Image-In Color Professional, concentrate more on the basics.

Most people don't create images from scratch in an image editor. Instead, they retouch scanned images or ones created in an illustration package such as Adobe Illustrator. Crucial to the retouching process is flexibility in selecting portions of an image. Usually, selections are determined by color or area. A selected area is called a mask. All the programs reviewed here provide several masking options, including magic wands that select all touching areas of the same or similar colors, and offer different ways to select rectangular, circular, and irregularly shaped areas.

The image editors that are most easy to use do certain editing and enhancing tasks for you. Some packages automatically sharpen an image, remove spots, change color values, and adjust contrast and brightness levels. And some automatically apply such special effects as embossing, add lighting attributes, or distort an image to appear as though it has been warped, windblown, or color washed.

Though touch-up tools, creative effects, and tutorials are important, the ability to layer objects can make or break an image editor. Layering keeps individual objects separate, allowing you to edit, move, and delete them at will. All the programs we reviewed use some form of object layering. In most, the objects themselves automatically become separate layers. Photoshop, the most unabashedly professional-level package reviewed here, achieves a similar result by using an overlay metaphor, which simulates the clear acetate overlays used in conventional layout environments.

Testing, Testing... To evaluate these programs, we created a poster design intended for use in an advertisement. We scanned in several images, adjusted tonality, touched up flaws, altered areas with special-effect filters, added text with drop shadows, blended feathered edges of separate images together, selected portions of other images, and used them in the main image (via object layering).

All four packages performed or replicated most of the effects in our test image. Given that all the packages provide much more power than you're likely to need, we recommend basing your choice on price and ease of use.

Image-In Color

Professional

Rating: * * 1/2

WIN

Sometimes you have to look in the shadows to find something worthwhile. Image-in Color Professional is a powerful image editor that can hold its own with any of the packages reviewed here. But it sits quietly in the background, seldom gaining much attention in the desktop publishing and design arena.

The problem is that many of the program's features are also tucked into the background. Image-In Color can do just about anything you need it to do, but you often have to dig through layers of menus to get to the features you want. Not everything in this program makes sense, either.

For example, Image-In Color converted the background of our test image to grayscale without a hitch. But when we tried to convert it back to CMYK to add the magenta tint, the command for doing so was grayed out, meaning we couldn't select it. Finally, with the aid of CPI's technical support, we were able to remove the color from the image to simulate a grayscale effect, which eliminated having to convert it back and forth.