*** From the Archives ***
This article is from August 11, 2004, and is no longer current.
Plug-Ins and XTensions: Photoshop Texturizers, InDesign Analyzers, QuarkXPress Indexers
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Each month Design Tools Monthly reviews some of the best plug-ins and XTensions on the market. Most of the mentioned products can be purchased through The PowerXChange.
- Free eCommerce
www.ebuttonz.com has a free plug-in for Dreamweaver that lets you add a shopping cart and secure payment processing to your website. It’s fully customizable and even calculates postage. The free version does include advertising, which you can remove for a $150 upgrade fee. Other upgrade options include stock control, affiliates, passwords, registration, and online payments in multiple currencies.
- InDesign Workspace Manager
Teacup Software’s Workspace Manager CS ($60) is an efficiency-enhancing plug-in for InDesign CS that detects what type of page object is active and automatically loads palette arrangements appropriate for that object.
- Digital GEM Removes Blemishes
Kodak’s Digital GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-in ($100) is a remarkable filter for Photoshop that lets you remove blemishes, spots, wrinkles, shadows and film grain to an entire image or a selection. It works with 8-bit and 16-bit images, and magically preserves details such as hair, eyelashes and eyebrows. Their website shows hideous examples, but the technology works. You can download a trial version to test it for yourself.
- See Surface & Shadow Detail
Reindeer Graphics’ Adaptive Equalization is a free plug-in for Photoshop 5.5 or later (Mac OS 9 or X), that effectively increases the visibility of small surface marks and shadow detail in images, while preserving color information.
- Eye Candy 5
Alien Skin’s Eye Candy 5: Textures ($99) is a plug-in for Photoshop and Fireworks in Mac OS X that adds 10 texture generators that can be used to create backgrounds of any size, as well as seamless tiles. It includes hundreds of presets for instant effects, has huge previews that show all layers, and supports 16-bit RGB, CMYK and other image modes.
Textures include: Animal Fur, Woven textiles, Reptile Skin, Stone Wall, Brick Wall, Metal Diamond Plate, Wood, Marble, and more. See these impressive effects at www.alienskin.com.
One great feature: the effects are “resolution independent” within an application — when you apply an effect to an image at one resolution, you can apply it at another resolution and it looks the same. This is great for experimenting, because you can play with a low-res version, then apply your final choice to a high-res version.
Upgrades from Eye Candy 4000 cost $49.
Alien Skin
QuarkXPress
- Tag Colors, Pictures and Text Styles
Gluon’s SpecTackler ($199) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that places a description of the fonts, pictures, colors and style sheets used in a document directly on the page, complete with arrows pointing to where they are used. Any text that has been manually changed to be different from the original style sheet is also noted. It can also create a summary of all style sheets in the document and place it on the pasteboard, making it easy to see exactly how the document was constructed. It also lists all colors and pictures, and can automatically place picture information either onto or below pictures.
For InDesign, try Triple Triangle’s Spec Cubed ($199). It automatically creates annotations for all the items in a document. It can be used to inspect or quickly preflight a document, or create a specification sheet for future documents. Another Triple Triangle plug-in, Slug Cubed ($199), creates slugs containing almost any data you could want: creator, modifier, dates, times, fonts & colors used, color spaces, size, trim, bleed, etc.
Gluon
Triple Triangle
- Rename Pictures in QuarkXPress
Badia’s LinkRenamer 1.0 ($100) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that lets you rename any or all pictures in a QuarkXPress document. LinkRenamer changes the actual file names in the Finder and then updates them in QuarkXPress. You can batch-rename subsets of pictures, based on their original names, file format, document page, etc., replacing words, adding serial numbers or extensions, etc. It’s an extremely powerful way to standardize the names of pictures in a project.
- Better Indexes in QuarkXPress
Vision’s Edge’s IndeXTension ($99) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that allows you to mark words or phrases in a document, and then generate an index from those marked words. Faster and more advanced than the indexing feature built into QuarkXPress, IndeXTension lets you mark all occurrences of an entry at once, or load a list of keywords for automatic marking. It recognizes proper names and titles and alphabetizes them appropriately.
Vision’s Edge
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