Perfect Portrait 1 is a huge timesaver for portrait photographers. It automatically identifies faces and features, and with a press of a button, eyes become whiter and clearer, teeth become whiter, lips have greater definition, wrinkles are softened, and shine and blemishes are reduced. In addition, color casts can be improved, based on the ethnicity of each face in the photo.

Age- and gender-specific presets give you a headstart for many common problems. Then, sliders let you adjust every improvement, and manual tools let you paint away stray hairs, blemishes, and wrinkles. (Wacom tablet features are supported.) When you find a combination of settings that work, you can save them as your own preset for use on other photos. I found the presets to be tremendously useful, requiring only a few tweaks of the sliders to get my ideal result.

Brushes let you fine-tune the auto-generated masks for face, eyes, and mouth, which is essential for some photos. Unfortunately, undoing a brush stroke requires multiple presses of Command-Z (PC: Ctrl-Z), and you cannot save your masks for future adjustment. I recommend using the auto-mask feature on photos you show your clients, and fine-tuning the masks for your final candidates.

Perfect Portrait works either as a standalone program or as a plug-in to Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, or Apple’s Aperture. In Photoshop, it can be applied as a smart filter for later editing—otherwise it adds a new layer. In Lightroom and Aperture, adjustments can be applied to multiple images at once.

Company: onOne Software
Price: $99.95
Web: www.ononesoftware.com
Rating: 3.5
Hot: Instant fixes for many photos; adjusts skin color by ethnicity
Not: Interface requires Flash, which causes delays

NoiseControl 1 is a plug-in for Photoshop and compatible programs (both Mac and Windows) that’s remarkably effective at reducing image noise while keeping edge details and natural grain. It can also sharpen a noisy image without increasing noise, and even add simulated film grain to an image to make it appear more natural.

While discerning photographers may use NoiseControl’s advanced controls, its two-button Easy mode works well on most images. The Auto Sample button finds a flat area in the image and samples the noise there to remove the noise from all areas. The Auto Preset button uses the EXIF camera and ISO data built into your photo to take a guess at what to remove. I found both to be remarkably effective.

You can even create custom presets for your camera by shooting a series of photos at various ISO settings, adjusting them in NoiseControl, and then saving the result. (Investing a little time in this process will save tons of time later.) To batch process images, include NoiseControl in a Photoshop action; to apply NoiseControl nondestructively, just convert your image to a smart object first.

NoiseControl is very fast, both in previewing and in applying the result. You can zoom into the preview and resize the preview window as large as you need it. Helpfully, you can even preview just the noise to be removed. Unfortunately, in testing on my Mac, I ran into two interface problems: the Split View feature—helpful for seeing a before and after view—wouldn’t turn off, and I couldn’t resize the Preview Limit rectangle as described. The Plugin Site is working on these issues and may have fixed these problems by the time you read this.

Company: The Plugin Site
Price: $49.95
Web: http://thepluginsite.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Fast, effective, and automatic; advanced controls
Not: Interface glitches reduce efficiency

The text-handling tools in Photoshop are mostly adequate, assuming you know which fonts you want to use and have them activated. But what if you’re exploring and you want to try combinations of fonts that aren’t currently active, and maybe get a little advice on which of your hundreds or thousands of fonts complement each other? Or maybe you’re almost happy with a font choice but want to see others like it? That’s where TypeDNA comes in.

TypeDNA has several features that make it worth far more than its $39 price. It’s a capable font-management utility, with all the basic features of any font manager: you can group fonts into sets, see detailed information, view character sets, flip through font samples, view by font foundry, see only serif or sans-serif fonts, etc. However, if you prefer to use a different font management utility, TypeDNA will work alongside it.

What makes TypeDNA unique is that it analyzes the shapes and other details of all your fonts so it can suggest alternatives and combinations. I was pleased by its suggestions. It also adds a panel to Photoshop CS5, InDesign CS5, and Illustrator CS5 that helps you explore, activate, and apply your fonts. It also adds unique features: you can apply an inactive font to a selected text object or group, or create a new type layer using the text and font currently selected in TypeDNA. It can also show you which fonts are used in the current document and the current selection.

For a greater sense of what TypeDNA can do, check out their interactive demo at their website (www.typedna.com/fontmanager), which lets you step through every feature by clicking the forward and back buttons at the bottom of the page.

Company: TypeDNA
Price: $39
Web: www.typedna.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Recommends font alternatives; affordable font manager
Not: Requires Adobe AIR, Flex, and Flash to function

Pantone also added two new tools to the swatch books. At the end of each book is an index of colors by number that tells you the page and row where you’ll find each color. Also at the back is a swatch of color that lets you know if your current lighting conditions are suitable for judging color—if the top half isn’t identical to the bottom half, then the lighting is skewing the perception of color.

The swatch books are printed using current standards on coated and uncoated stock. Registering your swatch book online lets you download PANTONE COLOR MANAGER software, which automatically updates your design software with the newest Pantone colors and provides unique tools to work with colors. The COLOR MANAGER works with the Adobe Creative Suite applications, QuarkXPress, and Corel software. (The PLUS colors are already included with current versions of these apps so you can begin using them right away.)

The PLUS Series replaces the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM but uses the same 14 Basic Color Inks. It complements Pantone’s Goe System and uses a new set of base inks.

Swatch books and chip books are available individually and in sets. If your work involves specifying colors, both you and your clients will enjoy the new colors in the PLUS Series.

Company: Pantone LLC
Price: $69 and up
Web: www.pantone.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Hot new colors; logical color arrangement; ColorChecker
Not: Detracts attention from Pantone’s superior Goe System

Of course, there are many kinds of publishers and publications. While a simple PDF is sufficient for many purposes, once a publisher requires features beyond bookmarks and hyperlinks, a technical line is drawn—one that usually requires the advanced skills of an Acrobat or Flash expert.

eMagCreator 1.1 aims to put these powerful features into the hands of average knowledgeable workers, as well as to speed production of eMags by design and publishing professionals. The eMagCreator approach involves a standalone application for Mac and Windows that you use to convert your existing PDF into a rich-media, interactive Flash document. That document may then be viewed in a Web browser with the Adobe Flash plug-in installed, or as a standalone interactive document on a hard drive or file server. (Users of the Flashless iPhones and iPads may be satisfied by a parallel version of the eMag that doesn’t use Flash, but the eMag is stripped of its interactivity and rich media. At press time, this feature was in beta.)

Once you’ve chosen your existing PDF to be made into an eMag, there are three ways to proceed. The quickest is to use a template that adds a surrounding background and navigation bar to your PDF, then publishes it as a SWF (Flash) file. Your readers will see your PDF on a standardized background and color scheme, with navigation buttons and the ability to flip the pages back and forth.

For more control when creating your eMag, you can use a step-by-step wizard to assign appearances, choose navigation buttons, and more. But for the most control, you’ll want to use the Toolbox to either build an eMag from pieces, or to add content to an eMag created by one of the simpler methods.

You can then make important edits and add hyperlinks to page areas by dragging them—URLs, mail links, and custom FTP links are supported. You can also add animated effects to page elements, including mouseover behaviors for hyperlinks and tooltips, and choose whether to allow printing of pages.

eMagCreator is offered in three versions: QuickMag ($699 plus Service Pack; tested), Lifetime ($2,400 plus Service pack), and Enterprise (from $4,500).The annual Service Pack fee costs $899 for the Pro version, and $1,099 for the Reseller version. The two higher versions include an online eMag Studio Portal that gives you live reader statistics to share with your clients (or not). You can see a graph of each eMag’s viewership compared to others and, within an eMag, you can see which pages were viewed and zoomed into the most, what readers have searched for, which links were activated, how often the eMag was forwarded to other readers, etc.

And that one feature, in my opinion, is the biggest reason to use this product. Yes, being able to standardize the appearance of your eMag documents for your corporate identity is important. Allowing average workers to create eMags is empowering and valuable. But tracking user actions can dramatically improve the direction of a publication and increase its revenue by understanding reader response to its editorial and advertising content.—Jay Nelson

Company: Papeer North America Inc.
Price: $699 (plus Service Pack)
Web: www.emagcreator.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Reader statistics tracking; ease of use
Not: Processor overhead for Flash; iPhone and iPad support; annual fee

The Digimarc for Images 4 plug-in for Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (Windows only) embeds your own unique copyright information invisibly, then their Web crawling service constantly looks for watermarked images on websites, and reports the results back to the owner. You can even have the plug-in generate a unique watermark for each instance of an image, including copies, so you can track the source of an illegally copied image—this is often used for “leak detection” when an image is given to one person or channel and is then copied.

Digimarc 4 can be identified even if the image is cropped or scaled. In fact, Digimarc claims that the watermark persists when an image is scaled down to 25% of its original size (and sometimes smaller), or when cropped down to 256×256 pixels.

To assist visitors to your website, a plug-in is available for Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer that displays a small D on all images protected with Digimarc’s watermarking. When a user clicks the D, information about the owner of the image pops up. The company is working on a plug-in for Windows Firefox, but no promises are being made about supporting Macintosh browsers.

Version 4 addresses concerns about image quality from users of previous versions. Its new Chroma technology uses an understanding of human visual perception to apply a different amount of marking to various areas of an image. You can compare examples of the old and new technologies at www.smartimage.us—to my eye, the Chroma images have less noise in flat areas, and are crisper overall.

If you’re a budding watermarker, check out the Digimarc website; it’s loaded with helpful resources. Concerned about your images being used without permission on a webpage? Digimarc is an effective solution.—Jay Nelson

Company: Digimarc Corporation
Price: Starting at $49 (Basic)
Website: www.digimarc.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Web crawler; less impact on images
Not: No 64-bit support; browser plug-in Windows only

The Digimarc for Images 4 plug-in for Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (Windows only) embeds your own unique copyright information invisibly, then their Web crawling service constantly looks for watermarked images on websites, and reports the results back to the owner. You can even have the plug-in generate a unique watermark for each instance of an image, including copies, so you can track the source of an illegally copied image—this is often used for “leak detection” when an image is given to one person or channel and is then copied.

Digimarc 4 can be identified even if the image is cropped or scaled. In fact, Digimarc claims that the watermark persists when an image is scaled down to 25% of its original size (and sometimes smaller), or when cropped down to 256×256 pixels.

To assist visitors to your website, a plug-in is available for Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer that displays a small D on all images protected with Digimarc’s watermarking. When a user clicks the D, information about the owner of the image pops up. The company is working on a plug-in for Windows Firefox, but no promises are being made about supporting Macintosh browsers.

Version 4 addresses concerns about image quality from users of previous versions. Its new Chroma technology uses an understanding of human visual perception to apply a different amount of marking to various areas of an image. You can compare examples of the old and new technologies at www.smartimage.us—to my eye, the Chroma images have less noise in flat areas, and are crisper overall.

If you’re a budding watermarker, check out the Digimarc website; it’s loaded with helpful resources. Concerned about your images being used without permission on a webpage? Digimarc is an effective solution.—Jay Nelson

Company: Digimarc Corporation
Price: Starting at $49 (Basic)
Web: www.digimarc.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Web crawler; less impact on images
Not: No 64-bit support; browser plug-in Windows only

Adobe InDesign CS5 represents a major step forward in usability and adds substantial new features for creating and exporting interactive documents and eBooks.

If you’re a longtime InDesign user, you’ll appreciate Adobe’s focus on making this version more efficient for common tasks. For example, you can now use the Selection tool to make common adjustments to page objects such as aligning, distributing, rotating, resizing, repositioning, cropping, and scaling frames and frame content. Previously, these tasks required switching tools. It’s now easier to select objects within groups, apply rounded corners to frames and adjust their radius, and so on. And at last, a new Auto-Fit feature keeps the relationship between an object and its frame consistent as you resize the frame.

Beginners, or even seasoned users who are new to using a specific tool, will appreciate the new Tool Hints panel, which tells you the basic function of each tool and how the tool’s behavior will change if you hold down modifier keys.

As you might expect, Adobe also added completely new features—features that may change the way you work. For example, when laying out pages you can now have multiple page sizes in one document. Not only is this more convenient than keeping several document files for one project but it also makes it much easier to maintain consistency across those documents (in spelling, styles, colors, etc.).

The Layers panel has been completely redesigned, now functioning much like the ones in Photoshop and Illustrator—you can create Layer groups, select all the objects on a layer, move objects from one layer to another, and so on.

Producing text-heavy documents is much easier in InDesign CS5. Paragraphs may now span multiple columns in a text frame, a terrific help for headlines and subheads. InDesign can now automatically balance columns of text for you and keep them balanced as you edit the text. And InDesign now tracks changes to text, by user, and lets you use the Story Editor to accept or reject changes. (This feature also integrates with Adobe InCopy!)

There are also new tricks for laying out pages: You can drag out a grid of picture frames or threaded text frames and adjust the number of rows and columns on the fly. The new Gap tool lets you drag the white space between multiple objects to adjust their spacing and size. And InDesign can now create and format captions for graphic frames, based on the metadata in the graphic file.

Adobe Bridge, which is included with InDesign, has also been enhanced. It now lets you preview individual pages within an InDesign document, browse its assets, convert InDesign pages to JPEG, output to PDF with watermarks, and rename files in batches. And the new Mini Bridge panel lets you work with Bridge assets directly within InDesign.

Output providers, or anyone who receives files from others, will be thrilled that InDesign CS5 now automatically activates the fonts it finds inside the Document Fonts folder—the same folder that InDesign creates during the File>Package process. This one feature will save a ton of time and headaches for many users. Another timesaver: You can continue to work on a document while a PDF is being generated from it.

Following the success of the Flash tools in QuarkXPress—leapfrogging them, in fact—InDesign CS5 now lets you include complex interactivity, animation, FLV video, and MP3 audio files within InDesign documents. When you import a movie, you can now scrub through it to find a good “poster” frame to display when the movie isn’t playing. InDesign CS5 includes the same motion presets used in Flash Professional, to make it easier to animate objects on the page. You can also create multistate buttons to control interactivity and build a slide show within a single object on a page. A new Preview panel shows the result of your interactive elements without having to export the file to SWF—a valuable timesaver.

If you do need to hand your project off to a developer using Flash Professional, more of your InDesign work is maintained, including layers, typography, threaded text frames, multistate objects, and placed video and audio files. But if all you need is one animation from your page, InDesign can export that animation to SWF for use anywhere that supports the Adobe Flash Player. (Which wouldn’t include any of Apple’s mobile devices.)

Electronic publications are quickly rising in popularity, and InDesign CS5 has enhanced support for letting you export in the popular EPUB format to create eBooks. When creating eBooks, you can assign a reading order based on document structure, use prebuilt CSS to format it, add chapter breaks for a better electronic reading experience, and subset fonts to be included with the book. If you know your book is going to be read by someone using Adobe Digital Editions (an application for Macs and PCs) you can also include all the interactivity, animation, sound, and video that you added to your InDesign document.

Dreamweaver support is mildly improved: When exporting to Dreamweaver, you can now control the order in which page content is placed on the webpage, and InDesign now generates CSS definitions that more closely match the text in InDesign.

InDesign CS5 also integrates with Adobe CS Review, a new online service that lets you share documents for online review within InDesign, and lets you import or export text to Adobe Buzzword, Adobe’s online word processing tool. (Adobe CS Review is free for a limited time when you register your CS5 product, and then will only be available as a subscription service.)

Overall, this is a substantial upgrade for users of any previous version of InDesign. CS4 users will appreciate the more fluid behavior of tools, the new page layout and text-handling tools, and its more complete integration with Bridge. The new Flash authoring tools should excite any professional user, as it opens up vast new opportunities to provide new services to clients, and it also potentially reduces the frustration inherent in handing off your designs to a Flash developer.—Jay Nelson

Company: Adobe Systems Incorporated
Price: $699 (Upgrade: $199)
Web: www.adobe.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Multiple page sizes; Flash and EPUB authoring; efficiency
Not: Dreamweaver integration; for-pay review service

GridIron Software’s Flow cannot be fully explained in this amount of space—it’s too vast and too valuable. Instead, I’ll tell you what it does and what it’s good for. In my testing, it works as promised, and beyond.

Flow is a “visual workflow manager” that keeps track of the relationships between all the files you use and gives you access to that data whenever you need it. You need Flow because even though applications such as InDesign and Illustrator remember the locations of the pictures and other assets you place into each document, they can’t keep track of every document that uses an individual asset. For example, if you create a logo, image, animation, movie, sound, etc., and then use it in 245 documents, only Flow can tell you which documents use that asset—even if it was exported to a PDF or PowerPoint file, or rendered to a movie. Without Flow, how could you possibly update every document that uses a specific logo or image?

Flow keeps track of every file placed within every other file, and every exported file generated by a file. And every version. So, it can answer the question, “Where did we get the text that was placed into the InDesign document that created the PDF I’m looking at right now?” It can even show you all the other PDFs that were generated from that InDesign document, and all the assets within those PDFs. It also keeps copies of files every time you save, so you can recover files from several revisions back. Of course, you have control over how many older files it saves to prevent your hard drives from filling up.

Flow tracks the time you spend actually using each application. Because it also tracks the relationships between files, it knows how much time you’ve spent on an entire project—automatically. You can manually or automatically export this data to any database or spreadsheet for billing calculations.

It’s almost universal: Flow works with every common creative app, including the Adobe Creative Suite, video- and sound-editing applications from Adobe and Apple, Microsoft Office, 3D apps, AutoCAD, CorelDRAW, Painter, text files, and any other file you choose to associate with a project—just drag it onto another document in Flow’s map to connect them. Version 1 doesn’t track QuarkXPress or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom files, but GridIron promises to support them soon. It works on Mac OS X 10.5 and above, and Windows XP or Vista.

Given its complexity, Flow’s interface is as simple as I could imagine. The main Map window displays a flowchart that connects all the documents a file is related to. If you click a connected file, the map changes to show all the connections for that file. You can then click any file to open it.

There’s an optional floating Dashboard window that keeps track of files you move (or delete!) that are being used by other documents. This display updates in real time as you move files around on your hard drive. You can also display a similar window in any CS3 or CS4 application as you work on documents. This window shows all the assets that depend on the current file, all the versions of that file, time spent working on that file, etc.

Amazingly, workgroups can even share a Map so that everyone sees changes to all the files in a project as they’re made. For $133 per member of your workgroup, Flow will quickly repay you many times over.
—Jay Nelson

Company: GridIron Software
Price: $299
Web: www.gridironsoftware.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Completely new solution to a timeless problem
Not: Doesn’t yet support Lightroom or QuarkXPress

The Scale tool in InDesign is fine for resizing selected objects on a page. But when you need to resize an entire document, especially one with multiple pages or to a vastly different shape, you need an industrial-strength tool—one that has some intelligence built in. That’s the purpose of ProScale ID, a plug-in for InDesign CS–CS4 that lets you resize a multipage document with control over what gets scaled, and how.

ProScale ID allows you to nonproportionally scale all the pages of a document, including the text, while maintaining line and stroke widths. In many cases, you can use it to resize an ad to a new shape, and the result is 90% done. I used it to resize a multipage book chapter to a new page size with a different aspect ratio than the original. The result required some resizing of the text, but all the frames were in perfect position.

There’s a useful Fit To menu for common sizes such as A4, A5, business card, CD cover, banner ad, 1/3 page, 1/2 page, letter size, tabloid size, etc. It’s great for converting letter-size to A4, and its Bleed preset is useful when you suddenly need to include the bleed area inside the document page. If you often resize documents to the same dimensions, you can save your settings as a preset.

Now for the problems: ProScale adds a tool to the Toolbox that I couldn’t make work, but it duplicates the InDesign Scale tool, so you can ignore it. Also, saving a preset can be a challenge because the Save button is grayed out until you temporarily click the Default button.

If you need to resize a book, ProScale will pay for itself in the first use. If you often resize ads and other collateral material, it will save you lots of time and energy.—Jay Nelson

BEFORE

AFTER

Company: GLUON, Inc.
Price: $149
Web: www.gluon.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Saves time when resizing complex or multipage documents
Not: Toolbox tool is useless; saving presets has interface glitch