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 Scripts for InDesign
At Adobe’s Studio Exchange Web site, InDesign users are sharing useful scripts they’ve written. We’ve included some favorites in this month’s Software Closet (available to subscribers of Design Tools Monthly — for sample software downloads click here). To explore on your own, go to https://share.studio.adobe.com/.
- Cluster Items in InDesign
Woodwing Software’s Smart Layout ($499) is a plug-in for InDesign that lets you organize your stories by invisibly grouping headlines, introductions, body text, and other elements into a conceptual “Article.” You can then easily format new text, or export structured XML.
The PowerXChange.
Woodwing Software
Photoshop
- Eliminate JPEG Artifacts
Asiva JPEG Deblocker ($49) is an advanced plug-in for Photoshop 5.5 and above that smoothes the pixel blocks in images that had previously been compressed with JPEG compression. This allows you to use filters and make other adjustments that would otherwise accentuate these JPEG artifacts.
- Image Doctor
Alien Skin’s Image Doctor ($129) is a plug-in for Photoshop 5.5 or above that intelligently removes blemishes, objects, and JPEG compression artifacts, either throughout an image, or within a selection. We used it to remove a scratch, a wire, an unknown bright spot, and a person, with impressive results. We also successfully removed artifacts from a JPEG-compressed image. Image Doctor can be invaluable when all you have is a JPEG for your print project. Try it free for 30 days. For Mac OS 9 or X.
- Best Re-focuser
To fix blurry parts of images, including motion blur, Charles Maurer recommends Acclaim Software’s FocusMagic 3 ($45), a plug-in for Photoshop 4 and above. Their website shows excellent examples of how FocusMagic is superior to Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask for reclaiming detail in photos that are out of focus or have motion blur. (Source: TidBITS#748/27-Sep-04)Acclaim Software - Realistic Focus Tools for Photoshop
Andromeda’s VariFocus Filter ($47) is a plug-in for Photoshop 5.5 and above that lets you vary an image’s depth of field, sharpening the focus on a foreground object while defocusing the background.Andromeda Software - A Remarkable Perspective Filter
Andromeda’s Perspective Filter ($44) is a plug-in for Photoshop 5.5 and above that lets you rotate a flat image in 3D space to create that “served on a platter” look, or create perspective. But this is no gimmick. It’s a professional tool with an advanced software engine behind it. You can “tilt”, “swing” and “zoom” the virtual camera to control depth-of-field on the image plane. The interface is intuitive, and the results are stunning.Andromeda Software
QuarkXPress- VTools 6.0
Vision’s Edge’s VTools 6.0 ($59) is a collection of useful features for QuarkXPress 6. It can resize a picture or text box to its content; remove sequences of duplicated characters such as space-space; display the character, word and line count of a story; convert Spot to Process colors; add user-defined page sizes & layouts to the File > New dialog box; change the text rotation, text skew, baseline shift and horizontal scale; copy text and paragraph attributes and apply them to other text; and change the case of selected text (ALL CAPS, Word Caps, etc.).
- VTools 6.0
- Drag Pictures Into QuarkXPress
Gluon’s DragIn ($59) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that does two things: It lets you drag picture files from the Desktop onto a QuarkXPress document page; and it can automatically create a QuarkXPress catalog of pictures from multiple picture files. If you drag one picture file from your desktop onto a QuarkXPress document page, it creates a picture box and fills it with your picture. If you drag several picture files onto the document page, it creates as many boxes and pages as necessary to accommodate the pictures. You have complete control over box size, and whether it optionally labels each text box with the file name, size, resolution, creator and type. In addition, you can drag a picture from a Web page onto a QuarkXPress document page, and it downloads the picture to the folder containing the document, then imports the picture. -
Gluon
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This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on November 3, 2004
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