Tools to use, tools to choose:The following are unsolicited,
unpaid opinions.
These are my opinions, but you may adopt them. |
||
Images — Creation & Editing |
Metacreations |
Painter. Painter 5 is the software that most of these images are created in. Even a Dragon needs tools. Painter’s “Natural Media” paradigm gives you texture and transparency in a truly intuitive way. Painter is an art supply store in a box. Kai’s Power Tools: Software to play with. KPT is a plug in for adjusting and taking your image further. “Spheroid” creator, “glass lens” effect, and many more, all wrapped up in the last word in interfaces. Like getting a collection of alien devices to play with. |
| Adobe |
Photoshop: the grand master of image editors. Pricey, but worth it. Will take time to master, but is particularly intuitive if you have darkroom experience. PageMaker: The page layout tool of professionals. A rock solid product — an absolute classic. Acrobat: Reader, Distiller, Exchange — the Acrobat suite is the way to go for portable, platform independant documents. |
|
| Macromedia |
Dreamweaver, now the HTML editor choice of dragons. They said that no one could make a WYSIWYG HTML editor that didn’t drive the hand-coders crazy. They were wrong. This is it. A first class product. Comes bundled with Allaire’s Home Site on the PC — a solid HTML-only editor for those items that Dreamweaver doesn't do well, such as massive search and replace. |
|
Image Refinement |
Auto f/x | Webvise
Totality: A very handy
tool, convert to, and optimize, jpegs and gifs. Watermarking without bloated
file sizes. Works in batch mode. Works as plug-in or standalone.
Graphic Edges: This is a fun toy. Now you too can quickly and easily do all those ragged and torn edges that have become popular. Guess what? A few minutes of fiddling, and you can do better. Here’s a slide show using the “negative edge” effect, of our trip to Oshkosh. Warning, only serious airplane fans will appreciate more than two or three slides here. |
Plug-ins |
|
Their Four Seasons plug-in is a real treat, and works with Painter, PhotoShop, and other plug-in compatible programs. Some samples are:. Inspection, Sunset Rattle, Bird in Tree 3, Dragon Dreams of Home, Wings for Sunrise. |
| Ulead |
The Particle Effects is great fun, floating bubbles and starry effects. Easy to overuse, but what the hey, it's only disk space. Nature Gem, Nature Gem Triangle Ulead makes a great gif animation tool too. |
|
| The Blade Pro plugin does some lovely effects. Unfortunately, getting it to work with Painter is tricky. Best to use in Photoshop and then open the image in Painter. ’Course, maybe it’s just my configuration. Your milage may differ. | ||
Utilities |
Kent’s Internet | Need to rename a whack of files? Remove all the spaces in the filenames before you ftp them to the server? Rname-it is your tool. That's all it does, but it does it WELL. And cheap too! Note: I’ve not had success with this site lately. Not sure if that is a permanent problem. |
| WinZip | What can I say. WinZip is the classic compression utility. No one should be without it, and few people are. However, more people should pay for it! | |
| Papyrus Software | Visual Multi-Tool is another HTML text editor, with killer multi-file search and replace features. A few drawbacks, such as a limit to size of the text that can be searched on or replaced. But very useful, nevertheless. | |
Software Sources |
The Ultimate Collection of Windows Software. A great source for shareware. | |
|
|
||
