March Windows 98 Shareware

This month we've selected a few gems from the mountain of graphics applications available.

All reviews were carried out under Windows 98. Any observations about Windows 95 or NT compatibility are based on statements made by the respective developers.

By David Nourse

An attractive user interface makes it very easy to use: each element has its own screen that previews most of the available templates and provides a directory requester for viewing the rest. You can display any template at full size by clicking on it, and customise it using well-designed dialog screens to set colour, size and texture, and text and shadow where applicable.

The text dialog gives rapid access to any installed font in normal, bold or italic style and includes an aspect ratio control for interesting variations on conventional shapes. The shadow and colour dialogs have a simple mode, which is essentially point and click, and an advanced mode for much more precise control (for example, the shadow dialog has sliders for aspect ratio, darkness and blur).

The save dialog includes a browser preview, and again has an advanced mode, which provides many options for optimising graphics for the Web. In order to get a consistent look for your pages, WebStyle lets you save any element as part of a Theme, invaluable for maintaining sets of graphic elements and reusing colours and effects.

The registered version comes on CD-ROM with over a thousand templates -- a very slick package, ideal for the enthusiastic but graphically challenged Web author.

You can use a variety of common image formats: bitmap, JPEG, PCX, PNG and Targa. A program wizard allows you to quickly explore Repligator's capabilities: hitting F7 selects and applies a randomly selected XForm with random settings. You have the option of trying another XForm or generating more variations on the theme with F8, which makes random changes to the XForm settings.

A neat Sequence Overview gadget keeps track of your experiments and allows you to review them in thumbnail form. You can fine-tune your better efforts by going directly to the XForm settings: most XForms allow further refinements with three levels of anti-aliasing and the option of adjusting the way the program blends the transformed image with the original. There's also a Vignette option that displays the original image surrounded by an ellipse of the transformed version, and (in the registered version) an Advanced Selection control to change the colour characteristics utilised by the XForm algorithms.

All this power is accompanied by very good context-sensitive Help files, making Repligator an excellent tool whatever your level of image-processing expertise.

You'll probably find that some experimenting is necessary to get the output to bear much resemblance to your sources. Small tiles will produce the closest match to the outlines of the original, but make it a bit difficult to see much detail of their own source images.

If you'd like to do something very different with one of those painstakingly scanned images of family or friends, give Tyler a go -- the results may be interesting. 

Any part of an existing image can be used as a brush; brushes can be highly customised via a substantial menu of transformations, which include rotation, bending and shearing, and saved for future use. Developing complex creations is simplified by a multiple document interface that allows you to handle up to 10 images simultaneously.

For less artistic souls, Ultimate Paint's image filters offer an easy route to some striking transformations, most of which come with numerous options and plenty of scope for experiment. There's a useful effects browser which allows you to get a quick preview of each filter, and a few of the effects are very original, making this program well worth a look even if you already have stacks of Photoshop-compatible filters.

The next (considerably expanded) release of Ultimate Paint will be shareware: serious image-tweakers should await it with interest!

The program's greatest strength remains its ability to handle a great variety of file formats, including a couple from the Macintosh and Amiga stables. You can view practically anything available, and convert it to most formats with a high degree of control over conversion parameters, especially in reducing colour depth where necessary. There's a batch-processing mode for bulk conversions.

While this program isn't primarily an image-processor, it does an excellent job on common manipulations like rotation, colour adjustment and re-scaling. It also includes a reasonable set of image filters for retouching and special effects.

The package includes four separate utilities which are handy but not feature-laden: a wallpaper and screensaver changer; a wizard for creating animated GIF files; a basic screen capture tool; and a useful applet which retrieves icons, graphics, sound and text from Windows EXE, DLL and VBX files.

Graphics Workshop Professional deserves a close look, particularly if you're working with large collections of image files in a variety of formats.

The program could be improved in a couple of areas: there's no Help file, and you can only save images in the bulky Windows bitmap (BMP) format. It's not too difficult to work around these limitations, giving you a useful tool for producing some very weird and wonderful images.