In 1942, Isaac Asimov began writing the stories that became the Foundation series of books. The series arc centered around the prophetic wisdom and visionary thinking of the mathematician Hari Seldon. Using his formulas of psychohistory, he was able to predict far into the future on a galaxy-wide scale. He predicted massive change, but also he set out a roadmap to ease that change towards a better future. One aspect of his science was that the predictions only worked on a massive scale, while it could not predict isolated or local events.
I have often thought of Hari Seldon when thinking about Steve Jobs. Like Seldon, Jobs has predicted the future and set up a road map for a better world through his inventions and those of his company, Apple, Inc. Like Seldon’s theories, Jobs’ and Apple’s vision are on a scale that far exceeds any individual, city, or country.
Steve Jobs couldn’t predict whether one person or another would prefer an Android phone, or other brand, to an iPhone, or why someone would gravitate towards Windows vs. Apple’s Macintosh.
But in the grander scheme of bettering humanity, Jobs has re-invented how people interact with devices, in order to become more interactive between other people. The computer and the internet are no longer tools at the end of a computer mouse and on a desktop screen. They have taken on the form and substance of our own lifestyle. The iPhone and iPad have become indispensible to anyone that has acquired one.
Now, with the iPhone 4s and Siri, Jobs has again taken us to the next step in his vision of our evolution, with artificial intelligence at the core. No matter that Steve Jobs didn’t invent Siri, he understands how pieces of the puzzle fit into his master plan.
With Hari Seldon in mind, I have no doubt that Steve Jobs has left Apple with a guide for the future, far into the future – likely past my lifetime and well into the era of my children. The boundaries of his vision, if there were any, were grand indeed.
Posted by Steve Weinrebe
The Fall/Winter schedule for Adobe Creative Suite classes is now listed at ImagingRandR.com. Upcoming classes include Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Captivate, and Flash. Advanced Photoshop and Camera Raw classes are offered as well.
New to the Imaging R & R schedule is jQuery, a one day class in advanced scripting language. And speaking of advanced classes, Imaging R & R has added an iPad Mobile App Development class that is geared towards students with experience in computer programming and who want to learn the popular new techniques for creating mobile Apps for the iPad and iPhone.
A few years after writing about Xara Xtreme in my book Irreverent Photo Tools for Digital Photographers
, I have taken a look at Xara’s new Photo & Graphic Designer 7 software package and found a power house worth of tools for photographers – all in an $89 Windows (only) software package.
While Photo & Graphic Designer 7 provides users with both vector and pixel editing capabilities I’ll concentrate on the features that will appeal to photographers. And before you read any further, if you want to draw a comparison to competing photo editing software, I’ll say up front that Photo & Graphic Designer 7 has a few features that I have not seen elsewhere, and some features that work more smoothly than in any other image editor package on the market.
When you launch Photo & Graphic Designer 7 the user is presented with a somewhat complex though intuitive interface (all four sides of the workspace, surrounding the image area, have tools, tabs, menus or options). Still I would have fumbled around if not for the excellent videos that are easily accessible from the welcome screen and from Photo & Graphic Designer 7′s Help menu.
First I’ll cover some of my favorite features that photographers will enjoy, then I will list a few notable odds and ends.
1) Content-aware Zoom
Like Adobe Photoshop, Photo & Graphic Designer 7 features a Content Aware feature called Content-aware Photo Resize. However Photo & Graphic Designer 7 offers another image editing option using the content aware algorithm, Content-aware Zoom. This feature allows the user to drag a slider above the image window, in the options area, to zoom into the image. This works differently than cropping to zoom, because all the image content is still in the image area, only scaled as if the user were using a zoom lens. This can have better or worse effect on an image than the user might like, but Xara has given us the ability to create a mask to protect portions of the image so that when you do the zoom those portions aren’t affected. As you’ll see in the screen shots below, I have zoomed into the photo of the little girl and it really looks like I was using a longer focal length lens. However first I used the masking feature to tell Photo & Graphic Designer 7 what portion of the image I wanted to protect.
After creating the mask and choosing Content-aware photo resize from the Photo tools list in the toolbar, the user needs to click the Prepare button above the image window. Photo & Graphic Designer 7 prepares the image for scaling and the user can then use grab-arrows to scale in any direction, or drag the Zoom slider in the options above the image. Like I mentioned, Content-aware Zoom has some limitations, but it is a great feature and as you can see, can work very well with the right mask guiding it.
2) Perspective Correction
Unlike Photoshop’s Perspective Crop feature in its crop tool, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7′s Perspective correction feature is fully automatic. Just click the Perspective correction tool in the pop-out of photo tools in Photo & Graphic Designer 7′s toolbar, and the Perspective correction tool determines straight lines in the image and corrects the perspective, see screen shots below.
As you can see in the screen shots the Perspective Correction feature crops the image in order to accommodate the new shape of the image after correction, so the user will have to decide if this is suitable. However one nice benefit of Xara’s Photo & Graphic Designer 7 Content-aware photo resize feature is that it will automatically scale out the image canvas so that, for this image of a stained glass window for instance, the user could drag it out to be more of a square without first creating a new canvas size as you would have to do in Photoshop.
3) Easy as pie 3D Extrusions
Like Xara Extreme before, and now with Photo & Graphic Designer 7, I marvel at the ability to click on a 2D object and simply drag it out to extrude it into a 3D object. This is so much simpler to use than Photoshop’s Repoussé feature that I would recommend gravitating to Photo & Graphic Designer 7 if for this feature alone.
Once you click on a photo or on some text, simply click and drag on it with the 3D tool and the text turns into a fluid 3D object. Sliders in the options above the image let the user change the Extrude depth or the roundness of the bevel. You can then simply drag color chips from the bottom of the screen onto the extrusion to color the sides. Bravo for Xara to take a feature that other programs make so complex, and turning into an intuitive, easy to use, creative tool.
4) Easy patterns with the Fill Tool
One of my most misses programs from years ago created kaleidoscopic patterns from images. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 includes a tool called the Fill Tool which allows, through a pop-up menu in the options area, to adjust a Single tile, Repeating tile, or Repeat inverted tiles. A widget appears in the image and the user drags the widget handles to create patterns of varying sizes and angles. This offers photographers and designers beautiful pattern backgrounds, and creative art in itself, with the swipe of the mouse. See below, and the first screen shot in this review.
5) Create Panorama feature
Panoramas are nothing new to image editing and in recent years the technology has migrated from high end image editing programs to iPhone apps. What I like about Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7′s Create Panorama feature is that it doesn’t result in a weird projection model, bowing out edges or leaving large areas with no image content. The only con I can see is that the user needs to order the images as they would be in the panorama first, as opposed to the algorithm figure that part out on its own. However the final result, below, is just what I would be looking for in the final panorama with no cropping needed.
More notable features
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 includes a large toolbox of features that any user – photographer, designer, student, or photo-enthusiast – would appreciate, including:
- Automatic saves
- A color editor that includes multiple color editing models in the same panel
- A Levels adjustment that has a point curve built right into it.
- Multiple Undo’s (I just love pressing Ctrl-Z over and over, or clicking the back arrow button). The default is 10 revisions total, with saves every 10 minutes.
- A Screen Capture utility in the Utilities menu
- Easy drag-out drop shadow creation with the Shadow Tool
- Excellent built-in prepare-for-web features including a full featured Web Properties panel (Links, Mouse-over options, etc.)
A few caveats
While working with Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7, I did run into a few workflow features or snags I found bothersome. Nothing more in quantity than I’d find in any image editor, but I’ll list some caveats here:
- The auto save feature has an annoying pop-up by default. However you can turn all pop-ups off from the Help menu, so there is an easy workaround as soon as you discover it.
- Perspective correction resulted in less than satisfactory results with an image that had reverse keystoning. In other words the photo was shot looking down at buildings so they bowed inwards towards the bottom of the image, and the result was not a less-than-corrected image.
- In the Content-aware photo resize feature, I craved a scrubby cursor for adjusting the Zoom slider to make fine adjustments, and really would appreciate scrubby cursors for all sliders and fields.
- The Zoom Tool doesn’t have the most intuitive way to zoom out. It is easy to zoom in, but it took me a while to figure out that holding the Shift key turned the Zoom Tool into zoom-out. Otherwise I could find no dedicated zoom-out tool, other than choosing zoom percentages, or Fit to page.
- Lack of more upfront color management features for the print designer, though Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7′s strong suit certainly appears to be web design.
Conclusion
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 is largely geared towards pixel and vector image editing for the web. There are strong tools throughout for integrating images for web design, and all that you need to create stunning graphics is here. I can’t speak to the designer oriented elements in Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7, but once again Xara impresses with a full featured image editor with some fantastic tools that go beyond simple photo editing. The ability to create 3D type effects with exceptional simplicity, Content-aware photo zooming, intuitively simple panoramas that don’t need cropping or straightening, tiled patterns, and more – all make the selling price a drop in the bucket compared to the incredible wealth of tools you receive with Photo & Graphic Designer 7.
Posted by Steve Weinrebe
I read this compelling statement by Jim Jannard on the Red User forum: “You can extract “Getty worthy” still images from an EPIC motion stream.” I’m usually all ears when Jim Jannard makes a compelling statement, but I don’t see the Epic listed on Getty Images’ approved camera list for contributors. Getty is extremely picky (an understatement) over the cameras and the quality of images they accept, but any chip as large as the EPIC’s should be approved – I would think.
On the flip side though, Getty’s video stock division is equally picky and I don’t believe they allow any still camera that currently shoots video as the source of motion stock imagery.
Posted by Steve Weinrebe
Adobe’s new CS5.5 creative suite products have only been out for a short while and we have them installed on our workstations at Imaging R & R. But what’s amazing me is how fast people seem to be adopting the new Suite. We’ve already run classes in Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Captivate for students who are working with version CS5.5 back at their company.
Not that there is any substantive difference in Photoshop or Illustrator from CS5, but wait till the next group of InDesign students get a load of ePubs! In the immortal words of Don Ameche, “Things change.”
Posted by Steve Weinrebe
