Aldus closes the Photoshop gap with the release of PhotoStyler 2.0
Howard Eglowstein
Ask anyone who does serious image processing on a personal computer: Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh has been the undisputed king of the image editors for quite some time. Aldus is hoping to dethrone the Mac/Photoshop environment with the latest release of PhotoStyler. Like the Windows version of Photoshop, PhotoStyler 2.0 gives you full control over your images, providing scanner and printer support, conversion to many output formats, and just about every image manipulation control you might want.
PhotoStyler went through much more than a face-lift going from version 1.1 to version 2.0. Most of the new features either improve the package's performance on large images or give you better control over the final outp
ut. Aldus's philosophy in making all these changes was to eliminate the trial-and-error work that often goes into editing. If you're working with a 25- or 50-MB image, you don't want to wait for the system to catch up while you scroll through the image. And if you're adjusting the color balance of a freshly scanned image, you don't want to watch an hourglass while the system calculates the effect on 25 MB of data.
A Sum of the Parts
The screen above shows a sample image from Corel's Professional Photos CD-ROM series. The model shot was part of an 18-MB Photo CD image. Loading the image into memory from a CD-ROM, especially an older standard-speed (150-Kbps) CD-ROM reader, takes quite a while.
PhotoStyler lets you crop out and just read part of an image as it loads, or you can select the Partial Edit feature. Partial Edit lets you select a region of the larger image to bring into memory while the rest of the image remains on disk. After making changes to this section, PhotoStyler puts it back
exactly where it came from.
The old days of zooming in and out on an image to see where you are or to find a particular spot are gone, too. The Image Navigator provides a thumbnail view of the entire image, with a small gray box showing the current window selection. Simply move the box to the area you're interested in or select a new zoom factor from the handy slider.
The idea of working with thumbnails and previews extends throughout the product. For most commands, you can choose to preview the effect on a small thumbnail before committing it to the whole image. The screen on page 138 shows the Color Balance tool applied to a digital image I shot with a Kodak DCS200 digital camera. The image on the left is the original photo as read from the camera. The other two boxes show the effects that two different settings have on the image.
There's a bit of yellow cast on the image because the sun was beginning to set. In Test 1 (center), I shifted the image slightly toward blue to correct for th
e yellow. That setting took too much warmth out of the old wooden railing, so I switched to Test 2 (right) and tried another version. This time I chose to have the correction apply only to the highlights and applied a bit more correction. The sample shows the screen just after updating Test 2. I could then preview the entire image or apply the change permanently.
Like Magic
PhotoStyler has some sophisticated new tools for selecting image areas. The editing in progress in the screen above shows one such tool enhancement--the magic wand. This feature, shared by most other image editors, lets you select a distance in color space and a point on the image and proceeds to select all adjacent pixels that lie within that color range. That works, but here I wanted to change the model's hazel eyes to blue. The center of her eye and the highlights were not green, but neutral in color. I wanted to select all the green portions without getting any of the dark gray.
The right side of the screen shows the e
ffect of putting the wand in hue-only mode. Instead of picking up any color that is more or less the same intensity, the hue wand requires that all pixels have the same basic color. The similarity adjustment takes care of selecting the range of green pixels.
The selected area in the photo is just the first selection. I then extended the selection to include some of the darker areas and used this as a mask to protect the white and center of the eyes from a paint-can fill. On the paint can, I used the hue-only fill and flooded the eyes with blue. The image on the left of the screen on page 137 shows the result. By contrast, Photoshop's wand uses only RGB color-space distance and doesn't have the flexibility of PhotoStyler's wand.
Device Support
Rather than trying to support every conceivable input device, PhotoStyler uses TWAIN, an industry-standard Windows driver, as its basis for scanner support. Using the Epson-supplied TWAIN driver, I had no trouble getting PhotoStyler to recognize my Epson
ES-300C scanner.
The only difficulty I had was in scanning large images. With the latest Epson TWAIN driver, PhotoStyler couldn't scan in any image much larger than 6 or 7 MB; the software reported that it couldn't allocate sufficient memory for the scanning process. I called Aldus's technical support and found that, because the product was so new, the company hadn't had a chance to test PhotoStyler with the Epson TWAIN driver that I was using (version 1.02E). Aldus is working with Epson on the problem. Scanning with other TWAIN sources is supposed to work just fine.
In the meantime, Epson owners will have to be content with smaller scans or use the proprietary Epson driver that came with PhotoStyler 1.1a. The older driver is available directly from Aldus if you don't have the older version of the program. Neither Photoshop nor Picture Publisher had any trouble scanning a 25-MB test image using Epson's TWAIN driver.
On the output side, PhotoStyler uses Kodak's Precision Color Management
System to match your screen to the intended output device. CMS installs as a Windows Control Panel to select your monitor, input device, and output device from a menu of known devices. PhotoStyler uses CMS to map all colors to your monitor for display and adjusts the color coming in from your scanner. To make sure you don't create something you can't print, CMS also changes your screen display to match the color gamut, or range, of your printer or print process.
Kodak's CMS is new and doesn't support many devices yet. My system configuration included a standard NEC MultiSync monitor, the Epson 300C scanner, and Kodak's ColorEase dye-sublimation printer. CMS supports neither my scanner nor my printer, and the monitor selection is limited to two standard phosphor types. More device support should be forthcoming from Kodak and device manufacturers as CMS becomes more of a standard.
If you're working on one output type but plan to use the images on a different type, the Soft Proof option lets you s
ee how the output will look. For example, you may be using a dye-sublimation printer but planning to use the images in a four-color printed brochure; Soft Proof adjusts the colors on your monitor to reflect how the image will appear after going through the printing process.
The Price of Power
There's a price to pay for this power, and I'm not just referring to the $795 retail price tag on the box. I did this review on a seriously hopped-up 33-MHz 486 with 24 MB of RAM, a 24-bit display card, and about 1 GB of disk space. The 486 was poky handling images larger than 10 MB, and PhotoStyler didn't like editing images much larger than physical free memory.
Aldus recommends at least 8 MB and a 33-MHz 486, but for serious editing work you'll want the biggest, fastest machine you can get. I ended up clearing space on a 340-MB SCSI drive to make room for PhotoStyler's temporary files.
To be fair, Photoshop claims to run on any 486 with 8 MB of RAM, but Photoshop and PhotoStyler ran at about th
e same speed on my machine. If I were planning to use either package for serious prepress image editing, I'd want at least a 50-MHz 486DX or 66-MHz 486DX2 machine with 32 MB of RAM and a huge hard drive.
This review also pointed out one reason the Mac is still the most popular image-editing environment: Windows isn't very good at handling big programs. Several times, I got unrepeatable, unrecoverable memory errors and protection faults. I checked with Photoshop users and found that my experience wasn't that unusual. For my tastes, Windows simply isn't stable enough to use as a primary image-editing platform. I've been using PhotoStyler 1.1 since it came out, to scan images with my Epson scanner, but these are usually small enough (less than 1 or 2 MB) to save often.
PhotoStyler 2.0 is a major improvement over 1.1. The emphasis is on providing powerful tools to get you to the right part of the image and make the right changes the first time, without time-consuming trial and error. I'm a registere
d user of 1.1, and I was planning to abandon PhotoStyler for Adobe Photoshop, but now I probably won't. If you've got the iron to run it, PhotoStyler 2.0 is a world-class image-editing/retouching package.
The Facts
PhotoStyler 2.0 $795
Aldus Corp.
411 First Ave. S
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 628-2320
fax: (206) 343-3360
Photostyler Performance
PhotoStyler 2.0 performs admirably against Photoshop on the Windows platform. All tests were run on a 33-MHz 486 machine with 24 MB of RAM. A dedicated 340-MB SCSI drive stored the images and provided virtual memory swap space. PhotoStyler ran with Windows' virtual memory enabled; Photoshop generally runs faster if you disable Windows' virtual memory and allow Photoshop to handle the virtual memory itself. Both test images were uncompressed TIFF files. Times are in minutes:seconds.
LOAD SHARPEN SAVE LOAD SHARPEN
6-MB FILE 6-MB
FILE 6-MB FILE 26-MB FILE 26-MB FILE
Photoshop 2.5 0:22 0:20 0:21 3:36 5:39
PhotoStyler 2.0 0:14 0:27 0:19 1:38 5:53
Screen: PhotoStyler 2.0 showing multiple document windows, the Image Navigator (for moving quickly around large images), and the enhanced magic wand selection. The image is from Corel's Professional Photos CD-ROM series sampler.
Screen: An example of PhotoStyler's preview windows. For most effects, PhotoStyler displays the original image and two practice or test areas. You apply the effect to these thumbnails to see what the final effect will be when you apply it to the entire image. Having two test areas lets you compare two possible effect settings.
Howard Eglowstein is a testing editor for the BYTE Lab. You can contact him on the Internet or BIX at
heglowstein@bix.com
.
PhotoStyler Fights Back
