The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
ixlaArtist 1.3
Bernadette Houghton
 bernieh@iaccess.com.au

ixlaArtist (iART) is one of the most enticing image-editing programs I've seen. Not only does it have a beguilingly attractive interface and an excellent video tutorial, its developers have struck a good balance between user-friendliness and power for non-graphics professionals.

iART is packaged with 5000 royalty-free photos and 1000 clip art images that you are free to use as you wish. By default, it saves it own files in Adobe Photoshop 2.5 format, but also reads and writes a large range of other graphic file formats. If you have a TWAIN-supported scanner or digital camera, you'll also be able to retrieve images directly into iART.

The interface

If you're new to image-editing programs, the best way to learn iART is to do the tutorial, which presents half a dozen topics in simple, straightforward steps. If you're already familiar with image-editing programs, you'll be able to jump straight in. The interface is very attractive, with large, colourful icons, and screen clutter kept to a minimum. There is a toolbar that displays a few standard Windows commands, a Toolbox that offers a range of tools for viewing and manipulating images and an unobtrusive Colors palette offering a selection of colours. An Inspector displays user-controlled parameters for the active tool and does away with the need for endless dialog boxes. The menu bar offers a few additional commands, but iART is fairly simply structured; most tools and commands are only a click or two away, and simple slider controls are the norm.

Selection tools

If you want to work on only part of your image, you'll first need to select (mask) the area so your changes are confined to that part. iART offers several selection tools, including Ellipse, PolyLine, Freehand, Rectangle, Lines, Shapes, Magic Wand (which selects adjoining colours within a specified tolerance level) and Text. Most tools serve double duty as drawing tools, meaning there are fewer tools to learn and less screen clutter. Before you use each tool, you indicate in the Inspector whether you wish to create a selection (this is the default), a filled area or a floating selection with fill. While this usually works very well, you can't easily create borders around your shapes. It can be done, but takes some messing around.

By using various mouse buttons and keyboard keys while creating a selection (or filled area), you can create multiple selections, adjust existing selections, and even move and rotate selections. This feature is particularly handy, as you can perform a whole series of commands in a single series of mouse movements - move a selection, resize it, move it again, then rotate it, for instance. You can choose to smooth jagged edges of your selections, contract or expand them by a pre-defined number of pixels, or grow them to include similar colours. If you 'float' selections, you can make them transparent and manipulate them without affecting the underlying image.

Retouching tools

Retouch tools available in the Toolbox include:

  • Clone, which duplicates part of the image
  • Adjust, which adjusts the colour balance, saturation and brightness according to the HSB colour model
  • Exposure, which paints the image darker or lighter
  • Focus, which sharpens or blurs the image
  • Vacuum, which removes dust and scratches.
T here is also an Effects tool that allows you to paint certain effects onto your image. For most tools, you can control the transparency and the style of the brush, as well as a few tool-specific properties.

A few image manipulation commands are available on the menu bar, including (among others) Negate, Threshold and Brightness/ Contrast. Applying these commands is mostly a matter of moving slider controls until you achieve the effect you want. There are different dialog boxes for each effect, and you can usually preview the results instantly on the image itself.


Figure 1. Using a variety of selection tools. Current tool is Magic Wand


Figure 2. Using the Clone tool

Brush tools

Natural brush tools include Airbrush, Brush, Calligraphy, Crayon, Eraser, Pencil, Pen and Smudge. Most tools offer several variants; for example, Crayon offers a choice of Wax Crayon, Chalk or Charcoal. For each brush, you can control some nib properties and the colour of the paint, although not the transparency. You can control transparency, however, for custom brushes and for the Bucket and Gradient Fill tools. You can't save custom brushes, but the Gradient Fill tool, in particular, offers several graduation patterns and a high level of flexibility.

Special effects

iART offers 31 special effects, among them Blur, Lighting, Shake, 3D Distortion and Ripple. You can add further effects by using third-party plug-ins that conform to the Adobe PhotoShop standard. As with the retouch tools, you apply special effects by manipulating slider controls. Once again, you can usually preview the results instantly, either on the image itself or - this time - in a preview window on the dialog box. The preview window shows only a very small portion of the image, but you can pan around it to get a better view, and the results appear almost instantly. The Color Balance tool also includes By Example thumbnails, with different colour settings applied to each thumbnail.


Figure 3. Applying the Perturbing special effect

 

 

 


Figure 4. Adjusting the colour balance

I've always found applying special effects the most frustrating aspect of image-editing programs, since they take so much time and processing power. As far as speed goes, on my 486DX2-66 iART is quite slow at applying special effects, but is certainly no worse than other image-editing programs.

Output control

iART allows you to adjust the Profile, Matching and Calibration for your input and output devices and monitor. Unfortunately, neither the online manual nor the user manual explain what these - or the available options - mean. Colour models supported include Bilevel, Grayscale, Indexed, RGB, Lab, CYMK and HSB. You can create custom palettes, and save them for later use. When the time comes to output your work, you can print colour separations, negative images, and various crop, registration and calibration marks.

Optimising ixlaArtist

iART supports unlimited Undo levels, but in practice you'll find that you're constrained by the amount of free disk space in your system, and by the speed at which iART runs - the more Undo levels you nominate, the slower iART will operate. Apart from tweaking the number of Undo levels, you can select certain options to speed up screen redraws, and reserve a nominated percentage of your RAM for iART's sole use. iART supports up to four scratch disks or directories, so you may be able to squeeze out further performance by using your fastest disks as the primary scratch disks.


Figure 5. Using the text editor


Figure 6. Setting system preferences

Assessment

iART's developers have succeeded very well in striking a balance between ease of use and power for those with modest graphic needs. All the tools are easily accessible, there are enough of them to allow you to achieve some eye-catching effects, but not too many to be overwhelming. The tutorial does an excellent job of showing you how to use the program and the dazzling interface is a bonus.

As for the negatives, there are some of course, but you can easily work around many of them. For instance, precise text placement is tricky - but you can easily adjust it with the arrow keys; you can't save masks, but you can copy and paste them into another document for temporary storage. There are a few negatives not so easily overcome. For example, the status bar is a let down - it is located on the title bar, and operates only for first-level menu items; layer support is non-existent, although you can "float" a single object above the page (but keep in mind that iART is aimed at non-graphics professionals). However, my biggest quibble with iART is that - like all graphics programs - it needs to run on a very fast machine.

If you need an image-editing program without all the whiz-bang features of the high-end graphic programs and have at least a Pentium, I highly recommend ixlaArtist.

Reprinted from the February 1998 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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