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This article is from February 10, 2006, and is no longer current.

Plug-Ins and XTensions: Helpers for Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and InDesign

This article courtesy of Design Tools Monthly. For a free sample of the printed newsletter, email [email protected].


Colorize Easily
Akvis Coloriage ($97) is a plug-in for Photoshop that dramatically simplifies colorizing black and white photos or replacing colors in color photos. It includes color swatches that help you select realistic colors for common items such as skin, sky, and foliage. To use it, you simply brush on the color — Coloriage recognizes object borders and tailors the new color to the grayscale tones of the original picture. It’s also useful to colorize hand-sketched drawings and to previsualize architectural color changes. After download and installation, it works for 10 days before requiring payment.


Coloriage can add color to grayscale images or replace colors in color images.

 
10,000 Brushes
Abneil Software’s Brushes collection for Photoshop ($30) includes nearly 10,000 brushes for Photoshop, including: Pens, Pencils, Crayons, Markers, Fur, Gel, Noise, Paint Splatter, and many more. There is also a free sampler set for your evaluation.
Gallery Frames
Human Software’s ClassicFrames ($40 per volume or $199 for all nine volumes) is a plug-in for Photoshop that lets you create highly detailed picture frames and complex, textured mattes. Many are photorealistic replicas of real-world frames, from contemporary to baroque. To accommodate varying picture shapes, each frame’s parts can be combined to make new borders, without leaving Step and Repeat artifacts. They can also be layered to create new frame designs. Their latest release, volume 9, contains 75 old-world wooden frames, both rectangular and oval.
Quick Labels for Pictures in QuarkXPress
Vision’s Edge’s Nametag ($49) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 3, 4, 5 or 6 that helps you quickly identify graphics used on each page. It places a text box near every picture in a document, then fills the text box with information about the picture. Nametag also can quickly remove these text boxes.
Keep Image Attributes when Replacing in QuarkXPress
QuarkXPress has a frustrating inability to remember any attributes you’ve applied to a picture box when you replace the picture in the picture box. For example, when replacing a low-res version of a picture with a high-res version, any offset and scaling values you applied to the original box are lost.
Two free XTensions solve that problem. For QuarkXPress 6, try Badia’s ReplaceInPlace. For QuarkXPress 4 and 5, there’s Markzware’s PictAttributes XT.
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, and more, and replace words, add serial numbers or extensions, etc. It’s an extremely powerful way to standardize the names of pictures in a project.
Automatic Folds and Crops
Gluon’s Cropster 6 ($99) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6, and a plug-in for Adobe InDesign, that automatically sets up complex, one- or two-sided folding and trimming mechanicals, with crop marks and guides for bleed, trim, safety, folds and gutters. It even creates dimension arrows around the perimeter so that proofreaders can easily see if specifications were followed. You type in the measurements you need, and Cropster creates the document. Later, you can change the measurements, and Cropster rearranges the marks and arrows. You can also save frequently-used measurements as presets, and control the appearance and spacing of all marks.
Image Effects in InDesign
RogueSheep’s Magma Effects ($50) is an image effects plug-in for InDesign CS and CS2. Magma Effects uses Tiger’s Core Image technology to apply nondestructive filters and effects in real time to the images in your InDesign documents. Mac OS X 10.4 includes more than 100 effects such as glass distortion, blur, and halo. If you’ve installed third-party Core Image filters, they’re available as well.
Save Table Text Formatting When Reimporting
PDS Associates’ PopTabFmClip ($24.95) is a script for InDesign CS and above that lets you import new data into an existing table without losing the formatting of the text in the existing table. Instead, it copies the formatting of each cell’s text onto the new text.


This article courtesy of and copyrighted by Design Tools Monthly. For a free sample of the printed newsletter, email [email protected].
 

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