Stone Design, the original Mac OS X software house with over 19 years of experience, today announced immediate availability of iMaginator 2.0, a free upgrade of its powerful image processing application. iMaginator provides an intuitive and easy to use interface for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)’s Core Image technology, giving both home users and graphics professionals instant access to over 108 effects, transitions, and filters. With iMaginator, users can layer images, paint and text, and apply, modify, and re-order multiple effects to achieve subtle enhancements or astounding artistic results from any photo or image. Crop, scale, rotate, flip, skew, change exposure and brighten images in real time, and then save processed images as industry-standard TIFF or JPEG files, and even create QuickTime movies showing the effects changing over time.
According to Stone Design CEO and chief software architect Andrew Stone, “iMaginator 2.0 is supercharged and adds painting and erasing on as many layers as you want. It’s a free upgrade for current users and everyone should download it and give it a spin. Given its modest price point, infinite expandability, and ease of use, we believe that iMaginator should be in the toolbox of everyone who uses images in Mac OS X, whether for print publications, websites or photo albums.”
“Innovative Tiger technologies like Core Image and Spotlight make it the best platform for anyone working with digital images,” said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “Stone Design have done a great job with iMaginator and we’re thrilled they continue to deliver creative applications for Mac OS X users.”
iMaginator 2.0 is twice as fast as the original release by using OpenGL and CoreImage directly. Paint can be applied on any number of layers with any size square or round brush. It can erase the image or be blended in 20 different ways to achieve stunning results. Many new effects chains have been added to the Library, including the winners of the iMaginator Contest. The crop rectangle can be set exactly, and moved by holding down the option key. Additionally, several important bug fixes make the product extremely stable.
Developers working with Tiger for INTEL can also run iMaginator as it ships with a universal binary that runs on Power PC as well as INTEL hardware.
Incorporates Latest Technologies
iMaginator takes any Core Image “Image Unit” and automatically creates an interface for accessing the unit’s options. It will load and display all of the Image Units that are provided with Tiger, including blurs, color adjustments, distortions, styles, compositing effects, edge sharpeners and transitions, as well as any custom image units provided by third parties. In addition, it comes with nine custom plug-ins from Stone Design, including Mask by Color, Oval Mask, Crop Fade Mask, Make Transparent, Colorize, Fun Mirror, Grayscale and Polka Dots.
iMaginator can fit into a professional workflow, with both built-in batch processing and Applescriptability. Sequences of effects with set parameters, known as an “Effects Chain”, can be saved and re-used with the drag and drop Library. iMaginator incorporates Spotlight technology for instant searching on user-supplied keywords and image and effect names. iMaginator is a LinkBack server: iMaginator images copied and pasted into a LinkBack client (like Stone Design’s flagship page layout and web authoring application, Create®) can be easily modified in iMaginator, with saved changes appearing instantly in the LInkBack client document.
Inexpensive and Shipping Now
Stone continues, “You don’t need to be a pro to make eye-popping graphics. Download and try iMaginator at full strength for 14 days free, and you’ll be amazed at what you can do to spice up your pictures. There are image apps that cost over 10 times as much, but they certainly don’t have that many more features. At only $49, with Free Upgrades For Life, it’s a must-have piece of software!” For more information, visit stone.com/iMaginator/
About Stone Design
Stone Design Corp, founded in 1984 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was the first developer to ship a product for NeXT hardware in 1989. With a mission to develop low cost, 100% Macintosh OS X native applications that are a joy to use, Stone Design has shipped over a dozen design and productivity applications for Macintosh OS X including Stone Studio, Create®, PhotoToWeb®, PStill™, TimeEqualsMoney™, SliceAndDice™, and StampInStone™.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on July 12, 2005
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
