Software Review of:
Auto F/X Studio Pro 2.0 
Bundle 

This is not a program for the fainthearted. The 11 programs all have different interfaces and have to be learned one by one. Because the software is intended to work with many different primary applications, the instructions are deliberately vague. I confess that after several days of messing with the program I couldn’t get it all to work. For experienced designers who are comfortable with all of the features of their software, this bundle can make their lives easier. If you are still struggling to learn how to use your software, your time would be more productively spent becoming more adept your core program rather than trying to learn 11 new programs. In other words, if layers, masks, channels and paths are still mysteries to you, master all that first.

The retail price is $199.99.The company claims that if sold separately it would cost $1,250. After having spent several days experimenting with this bundle, my overall assessment is that at less than $20 a program it’s well worth owning. The need for some of the programs have become less compelling by having their features incorporated into later version of Photoshop. The need for WebVise and Universal animations, for example, dropped dramatically when Photoshop started packaging Image Ready with their software. 

Everything on the disks works with both PCs and MacIntosh computers. The system requirements are modest: Windows 95/98/NT 3.0.1 - 4.0 or higher, Windows 2000 Pro/Server/ME; minimum 32 MB RAM/64 MB recommended; storage space 100 MB or more in disk space on your startup drive; CD drive. You will also need a copy of Adobe Photpshop 3.0 – 6.0, or a program compatible with Photoshop filters. 

Let’s look at what’s in the box: 

Special Effects Tools
This group of design tools creates interesting visual effects.

Typo/Graphic Edges
Typo/Graphic Edges is a set of 340 filters that can be used to distress type and add other interesting effects. These filters are generally used with large display type and can give a gritty, hand drawn, rough, weathered or antique feel to the type. I took the word TYPE and applied a different edge to each letter. The actual number of permutations is endless, because in each filter you can adjust the vertical and horizontal effects, warp the effect, flip it, rotate it, and even apply more than one effect to the same letter. 

Although the name of the filter set implies that they are only for type, they can just as easily be applied to any flat area of color to make the edges look distressed. The manual includes a full catalog of the effects, plus several creative examples of how they can be used.

Ultimate Texture Collection
This is a collection of more than 3,000 textures, both seamless and full size, plus lighting tiles. If all you got was texture patterns, this would be a good deal but the real pearl in this pile is the program. Filling an area with a texture is complicated in Photoshop. I have to read the help file every time I do it. (If anyone is panting for the instructions, you have to open up the graphic that you want to use as a pattern fill. Select the entire pattern or the area that you wish to use as a fill. Go to Edit/Define Pattern. The selection will then be defined as your pattern. Click on the paint bucket, then use the options window to make “pattern” the default. Click the bucket on the area you want filled. If it looks bad, start over.)

The Ultimate Texture Collection automates this process. You pick your texture and the area is filled. If the pattern would look better bigger or smaller, adjust it with the little slider. Change the color. Add a lighting effect. I adore this utility! 

Photo/Graphic Patterns
It took me a while to figure out the difference between textures and patterns. Textures are used to fill in a blank area. These patterns superimpose a semi-transparent pattern over an image to make it appear that that graphic was printed on marble, wood, metal, paper or any one of thousands of patterns. 

Photoshop comes with its own integral utility, which it calls a texturizer but does the same thing as the thing that Auto F/X calls a pattern. However, the Photoshop texture/patterns have to be in a .PSD format. Stock texture/patterns don’t come in that flavor, so it would mean doing a format conversion every time you wanted to experiment. 

Photo/Graphic Patterns, in addition to including a huge library of patterns, automates the process for you. This is another winner.

Page/Edges
This program is intended to put a decorative edge on an entire page. The manual doesn’t give any clear examples of how the effect could be used, so I am still a bit fuzzy on the concept. It would be useful if the company’s Web site had some examples of finished projects. The disk includes several hundred edges.

When I glommed onto this software in Tim’s pile o’ disks I thought that this program was the one that put distressed and decorative edges on the edges of photographs. It’s not. The Auto F/X program that does that is called Photo/Graphic Edges. However, not being one to let my creativity be stifled by the company line, I tried it on photos anyway. Some of the filters worked well, some didn’t. 

Photo/Graphic Frames
This was one of the programs that I couldn’t get to work correctly. According to the manual, each one of the frames (think of them as picture frames) has a clipping path applied to it. You are supposed to go to the paths palette where the manual indicated that the selection should say “path.” In my experiments, the selection is “mask” and sometimes “mask” and “silo.” The frames are nice ones. I’ll keep trying to figure out how to use them. There are 240 frames, each 300 dpi, contained on two disks.

Web Design Tools
Although I’m calling this group of programs Web Design tools they would probably be just as useful for someone using graphics in a presentation program such as Powerpoint. 

Universal Rasterizer
This useful little utility program takes a document that you created in a desktop publishing program and converts it into an image that can be edited in graphics software. It installs as a printer driver, and works with virtually any program; I tried it with Adobe Pagemaker and Microsoft Word. When your document is completed, open your layout program’s print menu. Universal Rasterizer will appear as a print option. Click on “print,” and instead of sending the file to your printer, it will convert it to a graphic and save it on your hard drive.

Why would you want to do this? To give you a real life example, I designed an ad using Pagemaker. The magazine wanted it as a TIF file. Impasse! It looked like my only option was to redo the whole thing in Photoshop, a half-day job. With the Rasterizer, I could convert my Pagemaker file to a TIF file in a matter of minutes. 

That’s the theory at least. When this real example cropped up I was playing around with Adobe InDesign, which includes a similar utility. I did the conversion, but the rasterization process rendered the type fuzzy and the graphics, which were delicate, completely broke down. The same thing happened with this program. It is just not acceptable for printing, at least fine detail. It looks great on a computer screen, though, so I could envision using it on a Web page. 

Just so you don’t lose sleep over my advertising project, the magazine agreed to accept an Adobe Acrobat file so I was spared the extra work.

WebVise Hybrid Colors
In the 256-color palette, there are 216 colors that are identical on PC and MacIntosh computers. These are known as the “Web-safe” colors that won’t shift or dither when displayed in an Internet Web browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. Web designers concerned about color fidelity have two options: they can stick to the limited palette of 216 colors or they can create hybrid colors. Hybrid colors are constructed on the same general picture as a half-tone photograph. The human eye blends dots together. In a half tone, dots close together create a dark or black space while dots further apart appear as shades of gray. In a hybrid color, alternating pixels of two different colors are blended together by the human eye to create a third color. Although it is composed of Web-safe colors and therefore won’t shift, it is perceived as being a different color that is technically off the chart. 

This can be done manually but that is a long and tedious process, only worth the trouble if a precise color match is of high importance, for example, in a corporate logo. There are Web-safe color fills available. I received several hundred on a CD that came with the book Coloring Web Graphics by Linda Weinman and Bruce Heavin.

This utility program makes the process of using hybrid colors a snap. Just select the color area of your graphic that you want to color, open WebVise Hybrid Colors and select from hundreds of new colors. At normal size it looks like one solid color.

This tool is very similar to the WebVise AutoF/X Optimized Dithering engine that comes in WebVise Totality, which was also included in this software bundle. 

WebVise Totality
This is the gem of the bundle’s Internet utilities. WebVise, like Adobe’s Image Ready, optimizes graphics for use on the Web. As Web designers know, graphics require a trade off between high quality and download speed. There are compression tricks to use on both GIF and JPG format graphics to make them smaller with out making them ugly, but they can be time consuming and rely heavily on trial and error. WebVise allows you to use convenient sliders to make your images smaller. You can flip back and forth between the two formats, preview the results and tweak them. You can batch process a bunch of graphics — a superb feature if you are working with a bunch of digital photos or a dozen navigational buttons. As I indicated above, there is also an interactive color picker/hybridizer, which ensures you select Web safe colors. The program includes a very simple utility to make image maps (making different parts of a graphic clickable to send you to a different URL. Finally, WebVise includes a digital watermarking system t help you protect your original graphics.

When it was first released, WebVise was on the cutting edge. It still does an excellent job, but since Adobe incorporated Image Ready into Photoshop 5.5 and PaintShop Pro version 6 added an optimization utility, it’s a nice to have extra program rather than a must-have tool. 

Universal AnimatorThe universal animator takes a series of images and makes it into an animated GIF that can be used with Web pages and presentation software such as Powerpoint. A similar utility is bundled with Adobe Photoshop’s Image Ready, and PaintShop Pro comes bundled with Animation Shop. This program is unique because it can create animations from any program, even Microsoft Word (although why anyone would want to do that I don’t know . . .) I tried it, but I like the Image Ready and Animation Shop utilities better. If you don’t have either one of those, this will fit the bill. 

The Studio Pro 2.0 Bundle is available from Auto F/X. You can reach them on the Web at <www.autofx.com>, at (205) 980-0056 or by writing 31 Inverness Center Parkway, Suite 270, Birmingham, AL 35242. It retails for $1,99.95.