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Archive for the ‘Graphics Software’ Category

Corel is having a massive Back to School sale where you can grab software for up to 70% off. For example, you can get the venerable Corel Paint Shop Pro X3 Ultimate for a mere $19.99. The price starts off at a paltry $24.99, but you can use the coupon “SAVEME20” to take another 20% off and get the price down to $19.99. After you have Paint Shop Pro X3 Ultimate in the cart just use “SAVEME20” to drop the price even more. But, you need to hurry, the sale ends August 19th at Midnight. This is a massive amount of software so get to it.

Corel Paint Shop Pro X# Ultimate includes all the following:

• An updated version of PaintShop Photo® Pro X3, version X3.2, delivers superior performance
• Corel® KPT® Collection – 24 creative plug-in filters for powerful photo effects. $99 value
• Corel® Painter™ Essentials 4 – sketch, paint and transform your photos into digital paintings. $99 value
• WinZip® 14.5 Pro – the world’s #1 compression software. $49 value
• Magic Bullet PhotoLooks 1.1 – realistic photo lighting effects.$199 value

Key Features:

• An updated version of PaintShop Photo Pro, version X3.2, for superior performance
• Speed and performance – work faster with optimization for multi-core processors
• RAW Lab – get full RAW support, including the latest camera formats
• Easy batch processing – edit one photo, apply changes to many others
• Advanced editing tools – Smart Carver™, Vibrancy, Local Tone Mapping
• HD video – create simple movies and HD slideshows in minutes
• More sharing options – email, print, back up on disc, send directly to Facebook®, Flickr® and YouTube™

Get everything you need to create fantastic photos, amazing photo effects and stunning digital paintings with Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 Ultimate—your complete photo-editing software collection. This special value package offers more than $400 worth of creative extras, including Corel® KPT® Collection, 24 plug-in filters that let you quickly create incredible photo effects, and Corel® Painter™ Essentials 4, the digital art studio that lets you sketch, draw and turn your photos into paintings and Magic Bullet PhotoLooks 1.1, realistic photo lighting effects.

Shop at Corel.com

I’ve only been using PagePlus X5 for a little over a week, but in that time I think I’ve touched most of the major features and I can honestly say I’m really impressed. It almost pains me to make a comparison to Microsoft Publisher but PagePlus seem to have a lot of the ease of use of Publisher but also the power and precision of the big apps like InDesign. But unlike InDesign, the layout and menu structure of PagePlus makes sense. If you want to insert something you go to the Insert menu. If you want to format something you go to the Format menu. It seems half the battle of the other apps is just understanding their quirky methodology. PagePlus follows a more conventional word processor approach.

Formatting text, like making a drop cap is very easy. PagePlus understand what it means to make one so you don’t have to get sidetracked with making the frame yourself. But, it does offer a full of array of choices should you wish to fine tune the appearance.

The same is true for adding images. You simply drag the image into place and the text will flow around it. However, you get plenty of options to control the text flow, spacing, rotation of the image and lots of other options.

Plus it handles Microsoft Word documents with ease. And you don’t have to hold down special keys or wait for the planets to align so you can get text to flow across multiple pages. PagePlus is smart enough to know it needs to flow the text so it does it.

I mentioned before it has a similar look and feel to Corel Draw. The difference is, PagePlus can actually handle putting books together. Using the BookPlus feature you combine multiple PagePlus documents into a single file which can then be printed or exported to PDF. I created a 50 page book complete with images and was able to edit, format and put it all together without any glitches. My questions were answered by the well written help file so I didn’t have to resort to a 1,000 page manual or hours of searching and then manual work.

My first project was merely a test run but it went very smoothly. I think PagePlus is a real gem among the desktop publishing apps out there. It has all the features I’m looking for, it’s actually usable out of the box, and I don’t think you’ll find a better app for even twice the price.

I’m not a web developer by any means. I can’t take a web editor with a blank page and create something wondrous and magical. It’s fairly rare for me to create anything wondrous or magical regardless of whether or not a web editor is involved. I can edit page elements once they’ve been created, but starting from scratch isn’t something I do well. Unless you count making pages that say "Hello World"

on them. I’m champion at that.

But anyway, with the new release of Artisteer 3.0 not only does it allow for the creation of blog themes but you can use it as an actual web page design tool. I had a simple project in mind so I thought I would give Artisteer a try and see how it faired. I wanted to create several static pages that all linked together through a very simple Nav menu just under a banner. Its layout would be very similar to this blog in that it had a header, a nav menu and then the content. The content would be laid out in a table. It sounded pretty simple. And no hissing it as using a table this way. It’s the simplest way.

As far as the design goes, Artisteer worked wonderfully well. I was able to pick a nice design, set the layout, remove the sidebar, customize the banner, set up my menu, and create lots of interlinked pages within just a few minutes. I even created the table on the page and got the layout set. Quite frankly I wish all HTML tools were this quick and easy.

If I was going to stick with just entering some text and a graphic here and there things would have worked out quite nicely. However, I had lots of graphics to add and currently there is no drag and drop operation into Artisteer. This means I had to select each cell, go through the menus to insert a picture and then scroll to find the file. All very doable but extremely slow. So slow in fact that after the structure of the page was made there was no point in continuing with Artisteer. The layout was simple but it didn’t allow for my repetitive actions. Even though Artisteer offers the ability to directly edit the code I really felt this had put the brakes on. Hopefully that gets changed in the future since I think there is a lot of potential in using Artiseer this way. Being able to have that level of freedom and control to create pages is really quite exciting. It’s not quite drag and drop, but you don’t have to enter the code yourself to make something happen.

But once I was out of Artisteer I loaded the completed pages into Expression Web and Rapid PHP 2010 to make my final edits. Unfortunately Rapid PHP doesn’t allow drag and drop of images either so that brought its use to a halt. Into Expression Web I went and the drag and drop worked very well.

However, the code behind the page was an overwhelming jumble of syntax. The sheer volume of definitions was staggering! And even though the page looked good in the browser, when loaded into the editor it was nearly impossible to work with. I couldn’t tell which way was up and spent quite a bit of time just deciphering all the injected Artisteer tags.

I did finally tame the code beast and was soon back on track adding my images and linking files together. With the amount of time I spent sifting through the code I’m not sure I actually saved myself any time. The page looks good, but once you jump out of Artisteer editing your work may be beyond the scope of most casual designers.

I think I have a handle on how Artisteer works its magic so the next time I have a project like this it shouldn’t take nearly as long to start editing. In fact, I’m still editing those same pages and they don’t look nearly as daunting as they did originally. However, I would love to see Artisteer expand the HTML portion of this app. It’s still in the "Preview" stage so they have plenty of time to keep working. They’ve made huge strides and if they can add a few more features like drag and drop and a decent HTML editor within the app itself I think they will have a top notch web design tool for the casual web designer. If nothing else using Artisteer gives you a really nice framework in just mere moments. You can create the layout, select the colors and choose fonts without having to write all the code and stylesheets by hand.

There is a lot to like, but just keep in mind that if you have to edit the code manually you’re going to need to take it slow and easy so you don’t get lost in there.