![]() ![]() This is somewhat similar to the icon previews in iPhoto's edit mode, or the visual "tabs" in NetNewsWire. It conveniently shows an icon preview of every open image, and makes switching to a particular one a snap. The "Documents" bar along the bottom is an interesting interface element. Layers, predictably, keeps track of all your layers. Colors is for setting colors (obviously), and there are a variety of models, including Grayscale, RGB, CMYK, and HSB, all with alpha transparency. The crop tool-which incidentally has a nice "rule of thirds" preview grid-has a "Constrain to" pop-up menu that I found non-functional. The options are pretty straightforward, and for the most part, I had no difficulty adjusting them as needed. Options gives context-sensitve options for whatever tool is currently selected. The "Inspectors," or basically non-moveable palettes, include Options on top, Colors in the middle, and Layers taking up the remaining space. Advertisementįoreboding: "Help isn't available for Iris." The keyboard shortcuts for selecting a particular tool are also hidden in this menu the first press selects the tool, and subsequent presses will select the next tool in the list if the particular tool has alternates. For instance, the rectangle shape tool hides the round rectangle, ellipse, polygon, and line tools. ![]() There are no tool tips nor any indicator that you can do this, but if you click and hold on some of the tools, you get a pop-out menu of related tools. For instance, at first glance, I could find no elliptical selection tool. What you may notice is that some tools seem missing from the toolbar. The "Toolbar" uses easily-recognizable icons and includes all of the now-common image editing tools. ![]() All three can be independently hidden to create more working space for the current image when desired. Iris instead uses a single window approach, with fixed toolbar on the left, fixed documents bar on the bottom, and fixed inspectors on the right. Acorn tackled this by relying on a single inspector for most controls, while Pixelmator decided to make all the palettes into translucent, HUD-style controls. Photoshop is notorious for suffering from palette-itis, to the point that recent versions include an entire menu for managing the workspace. Iris uses a clean-and mostly serviceable-one-window interface.įirst let's take a look at the interface. However, the program suffers from some problematic screen redraw issues, some interface quirks, and color and tone correction tools that are nearly impossible to use. ![]() Nolobe, the same company that develops the well-known FTP client Interarchy, bills Iris as "the ultimate image editor for Mac OS X," and it purportedly "provides a powerful, intuitive, and easy to use solution for all your photo editing needs." While it includes many of the features common to image editors, including image correction tools, layers, filters, selection tools, shapes, and more, the most differentiating feature is its iLife-like one-window interface. Therefore, it was with perplexed curiosity that I downloaded and tried out Nolobe's $79 Iris, released just this week. Though Adobe has since then shipped an Intel-compatible version of Photoshop Elements-which includes the most commonly used features of Photoshop-for an affordable $99, Pixelmator and Acorn both offer a price advantage at $59 and $49 respectively. These apps, most notably Pixelmator and Acorn, run natively on Intel hardware and leverage Mac OS X's Core Image library to run image filters via your Mac's GPU. Since late last year, several image editing apps have been released to fill the space between the complex, expensive Adobe Photoshop and simple, (mostly) free iPhoto. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |