Most printers are familiar with FlightCheck, a standalone preflight application; however, with less-experienced users doing more work in-house, the need for proper preflight – a checklist of inspection points that must meet certain criteria – increases every day. Designers and production artists have always used checklists to make sure something important wasn’t overlooked, but FlightCheck was the first software to automate the process.

FlightCheck Professional 6.8 has a large array of customizable settings, and supports many native applications, including QuarkXPress 9, InDesign CS5.5, Illustrator CS5.5, Photoshop CS5.5, and PDF files (up to Acrobat X). Plus, if you have the software installed (not always a requirement), FlightCheck can run you through the native files to fix the problem(s), and then it collects the job with all linked graphics and fonts – even fonts activated with most font managers. Settings (Ground Controls) for native files and PDFs can be customized and shared with other users and you could probably ask the printer for a copy of the settings (password-protected to prevent unwanted modifications). The list of available options for inspection is too extensive to cover here, but a 30-day demo and documentation is available online.

Although Photoshop InDesign CS4 (and later) has a decent built-in preflight, it doesn’t include such features as advanced inspection of linked graphics; separate settings for small text and rules as black-only or color; and there’s no in-between flag – InDesign check items are either OK or Error. Acrobat Pro has built-in preflight to fix minor issues with PDFs, but most printers have to deal with native files once in a while. And Acrobat only catches problems late in the production cycle. Granted, the combination of InDesign and Acrobat can catch most problems, if set up properly. If you’re using QuarkXPress, Illustrator, or Photoshop, you have fewer options for preflight, although QuarkXPress has Job Jackets. lllustrator doesn’t have built-in font and linked-graphic collection, and Photoshop can’t collect fonts, although Illustrator and Photoshop can Save As a PDF to embed the fonts/graphics.

One major problem I have with FlightCheck Professional 6.8 is that it’s Mac only. When FlightCheck first appeared, Macintosh computers dominated the print industry, but many corporations today are doing in-house marketing and advertising, and I’d guess it’s a 50/50 split between Mac and Windows. The older FlightCheck Windows version is nowhere to be found on Markzware’s website – although they did say that updating the Windows version was being looked into this year.

The only other problem I found with FlightCheck Professional 6.8 is that the floating windows are not enlargeable. They can be hard to read on a high-resolution monitor.

Why do you need to spend $400 to check your files after you just spent a grand for design software? Well, as stated above, InDesign’s preflight isn’t comprehensive, QuarkXPress – Job Jackets are hard to set up, and other programs don’t have built-in preflight or collection. Perhaps the real questions should be: How much time is lost fixing problems found at the printer?; or, How much money (and time) is wasted from jobs being reprinted?

Printers dealing strictly with PDF files could stay with Acrobat to preflight files but customers would have to fix the errors, causing delays in schedules or they could just run the jobs as GIGO (garbage-in-garbage-out); neither of which makes for repeat business. FlightCheck Professional 6.8, used early and often during the production cycle, could pay for itself by catching one major problem in a reasonably sized print job.

Note: I should disclose that I’m an authorized trainer for Markzware FlightCheck but that just means I think it’s a good product!

Company: Markzware
Price: $399 (Upgrade: $99)
Web: www.markzware.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Checks PDF and native files
Not: No comparable Windows version

Beauty in a box? Believe it or not, here’s an interesting program that really allows you to do complete makeovers on your images with the click of a button and Intensity sliders. Perfect365 allows you to see results quickly with standard tricks such as face reshaping, teeth whitening, and blemish removal. But it’s really more, so let’s take a look.

Some cool features in Perfect365 make this a fun and creative tool. Options allow you to apply colored contacts and one-click styles let you select from templates that include Natural, Red Lips, and Cat Eyes, to name a few. The Enhancements panel is where you can choose from categories such as: Skin, to remove blemishes, circles, whiten skin, apply foundation, etc.; Face, to slim the face, lift cheeks, or enhance the nose; Eyes, to apply eyeliners, colored contacts, color, and brighten; and Mouth to deepen smiles, add lipstick, and whiten teeth. With the tools and parameters, there’s no limit what you can do to your images! You may use this more for photos of women at first but when you get used to it, you’ll find plenty of uses for photos of men, as well.

This isn’t going to replace your favorite editing program for your professional work but I think this is one of the best programs for quick results, and the control and capabilities provide a wide range of options for your images. The ability to export at full resolution is also a huge plus for those who need to keep the budget in check while being able to print at full resolution.

Company: ArcSoft Inc.
Price: Free download
Web: www.arcsoft.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Ease of use; quick results; one-click makeover
Not:

It’s finally here! When I heard that the new version of Vue xStream was ready, I was very curious to see what the folks at e-on software had come up with to make the computer graphics crowd take notice and buy this latest version. I was skeptical—to say the least—as new releases are coming out far more frequently for our favorite programs, some of which are definitely not worth the upgrade costs vs. the new feature benefits, for sure. I do have to state here that e-on software does not fall into that category and I’m not disappointed with the latest release of Vue 10 xStream, which has quite a few new features that make it an upgrade worthy of investing in.

e-on software has packed in many new features in this version, so let’s get right to it! Vue has been tagged by many as landscaping software, but it really is much more robust than that. Vue can render landscapes, vegetation, architectural visualization, photorealistic animations, and anything that can take advantage of the software’s photorealistic lighting and rendering. And on top of that, Vue 10 xStream gives professional computer graphic artists the capability of creating and rendering stunning environments in Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, and Softimage! The possibilities are endless. We’ve seen the results in movies such as Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean, to name just a few.

Now for the cool new features that have me (as well as many others) very excited. One of them is the new Roads tools, which is based on the new Spline technology. It offers a built-in road construction tool that allows you to draw a road path directly onto your terrains, and then automatically applies an asphalt texture to it. And, all the while, it adjusts the terrain surface to your path. How cool is that? Very!

Next is the brand-new Physical Water feature, which introduces an accurate water-shading engine that adds absorption and scattering parameters to the mix. The realism that this brings to the table raises the bar for all other programs out there and allows you to create results easier than ever before.

Another notable tool is the library of Dynamic Rock templates that can be used to create single rocks or groups of rocks, generating a new and unique variation each time.

Next up are some of the back-end improvements that have me just as excited as the cool new tools, the most important of which have to be in the rendering department. Because of major changes to the structure of the internal scene processing, render times have seen an increase of up to 30%—this is huge! Also offered is a powerful new Render Stack with Comparison tools that allows you to easily stack your renders and test various postprocesses on the same image without losing valuable information.

There are many more new features in Vue 10 xStream but I’m running out of space on this page to cover them all; however, I do think that e-on software has really stepped it up with the release of Vue xStream 10. We computer graphic artists have been hoping for a more robust environmental tool that would allow for more flexibility and creativity, without leaving our favorite programs. And after seeing this new version, I think we’ve found it.

Company: e-on software, inc.
Price: $1,495 (Upgrade: $395)
Web: www.e-onsoftware.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Roads tools; Render Stack; increased render speeds
Not:

If you work with video, chances are that Sorenson Squeeze is one of your go-to items for compression and, as the hardware improves, it makes sense that the software moves forward with it. Sorenson Squeeze 8 brings performance without limiting you to making videos anchored to a desk. Getting your show on the road is what Squeeze 8 brings, because you can save your videos (with a high level of quality) to almost any device in a huge range of formats. Mobile quality must meet the demands of end-users and the newer devices have far better displays. For the design professional, however, HD quality doesn’t take a back seat either, and it’s where Squeeze 8 really shines.

Using cloud technologies, Squeeze Server, Sorenson 360, or your own storage, Squeeze 8 makes it incredibly easy to share your output by exporting one source to almost any format—Flash, QuickTime, MP4, H.264, and many others—while accommodating another client that may already be using Microsoft Smooth. Squeeze’s latest professional encoding support with adaptive bit-rate encoding is X.264. Apple HLS, Flash Dynamic, and Microsoft Smooth are all supported, allowing for immediate streaming to almost any device at any connection rate. A nice touch is that Sorenson isn’t abandoning older formats necessary for professionals, enterprise, or older computer systems.

Squeeze 8 adds completely seamless Squeeze Server integration so you can add jobs, presets, filters, and other settings for the server to relieve your desktop processor, while speeding up the process dramatically. Another performance improvement comes from Sorenson’s Enhanced GPU acceleration, which (according to the company) will encode high-quality video at up to three times faster than previous versions. Real-life testing confirms that the go-to-lunch-and-come-back wait time is now appreciably shorter, but still depends on the overall size of the source file(s).

Preset bit rates start at 512 KB/s and go up to 2000 KB/s, but can be customized (as in previous versions). In Squeeze 8, presets for Adaptive Bit Rate formats allow you to select a target rate and fine-tune each additional data rate for best results. You can create presets for Apple’s iOS 5 and Android-based devices, as well as by the generation of the product being used. Long-form videos fragment every 6 seconds with keyframes every 2 seconds. Short-form videos fragment and add keyframes every 2 seconds for videos that are less than 5 minutes.

After dragging the preset to the bottom of the workspace, you designate a destination and server for processing. The rest is automated and appreciably faster than prior versions of Squeeze. Sorenson doesn’t employ any specific security features that may slow down the process, but instead focuses on output quality.

Adjusting audio drift is always a challenge and sometimes there are problems where the video doesn’t sync. Watermarking is another filter option that looks great when adding your logo in whatever opacity you choose. Coming from a higher bit-depth to a lower one converts in the background, automatically reducing banding and other down-conversion issues.

A Lite version of Squeeze 8 is an option that still supports online formats, including Flash FLV, SWF, MPEG-4, WinMedia, QuickTime, and others, but it’s priced at $199 for those who only require the essentials. Even in this version, the quality remains.

Sorenson seems to respond to customers, so the user experience is more comfortable and simplified, limited only by a given processor with its available RAM. Squeeze 8 includes a 30-day satisfaction guarantee plus a complimentary account for the Sorenson 360 platform.

Looking at similar options, Telestream Episode is the only competitor beyond offerings from content creation products by Adobe and Apple. If you’re mobile, in a boardroom, at a conference, creating DVDs, or just uploading to YouTube, the overall smoothness, image quality, audio quality, and variety of platforms supported by Sorenson Squeeze 8 make it the hands down winner!

Company: Sorenson Media
Price: $799
Web: www.sorensonmedia.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Faster; multiple formats; new features;
Not:

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

Ansel Adams was part of a group of San Francisco realistic landscape photographers who called themselves Group f/64. The name came from their desire to achieve maximum depth of field (DOF). However, attaining maximum DOF can be challenging, especially in macro photography. Stopping a lens down to its smallest aperture extends DOF but introduces diffraction. Enter Helicon Focus software. It produces an edge-to-edge focused image by combining partially focused areas from multiple files of a scene.

The Helicon Focus interface and process is amazingly simple to use considering the task. The hardest work is taking the pictures. A tripod is a must. It’s important to take enough pictures of a scene, incrementally changing the focusing distance with each consecutive shot. Small incremental movements of the focus barrel work best for macro shooting, while broader focusing is fine for most landscapes. It’s very similar to taking a successful panoramic by carefully overlapping shots.

Helicon compensates for change in object size that occurs from refocusing. Files for the image are imported in consecutive order and appear as small thumbnails in a source palette to the right side of the preview window. You can delete files but the thumbnail size and the order they appear in can’t be adjusted, which is frustrating for proper editing. For optimization of your image, the Smooth and Radius sliders adjust the transitional areas of the multiple files.

I loaded 25 RAW files from my Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, and in a little more than a minute, I had a stunning image. You can remove artifacts using a retouching brush that allows you to clone from a selected source file to the resulting image. Images can be saved as JPEGs, TIFFs, PNGs, or PSDs. Maximum DOF has a profound image impact, and Helicon Focus does a wonderful job.

Company: Helicon Soft Ltd.
Price: $250
Web: www.heliconsoft.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Solves shallow DOF problems; 64-bit mode
Not: Lack of flexible image culling

It’s hard to avoid artifacts and blur when you need to print an image larger than its current resolution allows. There are several solutions for enlarging an image, and given how far these technologies have come, it’s more about selecting the most appropriate solution for your specific situation. Alien Skin has a strong update to their Blow Up plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom that you may wish to size up for yourself.

Blow Up 3 separates itself from its competitors with Smart Crop. This is a favorite feature providing the option to resize and crop your image in a way that targets the subject matter based on the content. This feature is easy to toggle in the preference settings. Image size is increased by first converting the pixels into vector data, up scaling the data, and then converting it back to the now-larger pixel map. This method maintains clarity far better than bicubic enlarging.

Batch processing is just a matter of setting up a batch action, as you would for any action. Blow Up 3 doesn’t create a new layer in Photoshop in use with an action, so according to Alien Skin, duplicating the layer first is a necessity. In single image use, a checkbox provides the option for the output to appear in a new layer. Unfortunately, Blow Up 3 doesn’t create output tiling unless your original images are already in seamless tile format. Alien Skin recommends keeping the magnification to 400% or less for best results, and print tests confirm their estimate as being accurate.

Blow Up 3 is fast from start to finish with quick previews and rendering. Enlarging an image is simple via the somewhat plain interface, but the real test is the quality of the results, and Blow Up 3 gets big applause.

Company: Alien Skin Software
Price: $199
Web: www.alienskin.com
Rating: 4
Hot: Effective enlargement; simplicity; performance
Not: No tiling

Well I think the folks at Autodesk have been listening to the content creators since the last release. The new version of the Autodesk 3ds Max Creation Suite 2012 has a lot to brag about. While the Suite includes Motion Builder, Mudbox, and Softimage, this review will focus on 3ds Max. With that said, there are still plenty of cool new features, so let’s get to it.

As artists, programmers, film producers, and production professionals, you know that we’re always under the gun to produce faster, better-quality, stunning visuals. Well, our cries for help have been heard. One of the coolest new features that’s going to help out across the board in 3ds Max, Maya, MotionBuilder, Mudbox, and Softimage is the new Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core, which introduces a completely revamped viewport system that provides much-needed improvements to performance and visual quality. Also, it now has the capability of a “one-click workflow” that allows users to jump easily between Max and the other products in the Entertainment Creation Suite. This feature alone is going to save a ton of time for everyone and will increase productivity (and reduce frustration) considerably.

Another key component that Nitrous brings to the table is that it supports unlimited lights, soft shadows, tone mapping, and high-quality transparency, as well as a host of other new features that will improve quality and creativity. But that’s not all—in addition to high-quality, realistic display, Nitrous viewports can also display stylized images to create a variety of non-photorealistic effects, such as acrylic, ink, colored pencil, colored ink, graphite, pastel, and technical drawing. Wow!

Some of the other cool new features include enhancement to the Ribbon UI; for instance, the modeling Ribbon now correctly adjusts to dark UI color schemes, which allows for faster performance, and offers a more consistent contextual UI location. Also newly implemented in the Ribbon is tooltip-based, contextual Help: When any Ribbon tooltip is open, you just press F1 to bring up Help to the specific section that describes that tool.

The next update that jumps out is the Slate Material Editor, where improvements include the following: You can now use the keyboard to navigate the Material/Map Browser; Undo and Redo now work with the Slate Material Editor operations rather than navigation changes to the active View; and in material, map, and controller nodes, spinners and numeric fields now behave more like the way they do in other parts of the 3ds Max interface.

I know a lot of you may not think this next one is a great feature, but I think it’s what every program should do to speed up the process. New to the 2012 release, the 3ds Max Help function is being published on the Autodesk website, so you can access the latest available documentation there. This change also significantly reduces the footprint of locally installed data to your computer and makes 3ds Max run a bit faster. I don’t know about you, but any gain in productivity and resources works for me.

This new version is a game changer that only gets better the deeper you get into it. As I said before, I think that Autodesk has really stepped it up with this release of 3ds Max Entertainment Creation Suite 2012, keeping 3ds Max on at the top of the 3D world.

Company: Autodesk, Inc.
Price: $6,495
Web: http://usa.autodesk.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Interface; 64-bit for Mac; new brushes/tools
Not: Price may be steep for most

Version Cue was a good idea that never took off. It was too hard to use for small agencies and not robust enough for large ones. Evolphin Zoom 2.8 fills the gap left by Version Cue’s demise—quite nicely, too. The software is easy to install and set up on either Macintosh or Windows.

The Zoom 2.8 software combines project management with user access controls. It can even produce timesheets—a great asset for a time-based agency. Like Version Cue, it keeps backup versions of files as the files are checked back in (committed). The versions can then be compared for changes.

I had no problem with the software on my Mac and Windows systems; within 30 minutes, I had it running and everything worked as described.

Although not available on the website, the basic price breakdown for 1-3 users is $250 per user with no additional charge for the server product; however, for 4–25 users it’s $250 per user and $9,999 for the server product. Perhaps there should be a slightly more tiered price structure; jumping from 3 to 4 users increases the cost $10,000—a bit much for a small 4- to 6-person agency.

Something I’d like in future versions is not to have to use a separate checkout and check-in menu. Instead, it would be nice if users could use the standard Open and Save menus where I envision the software would then bring up the necessary checkout and check-in versioning dialogs.

Zoom offers many more features, both big and small, than this short review can mention. If your company is in need of an all-inclusive project management, version-tracking software system, you should definitely check out Evolphin Zoom 2.8.

Company: Evolphin Software
Price: Based on # of users
Web: www.evolphin.com
Rating: 4.5
Hot: Provides (relatively) easy-to-use version control
Not: Big price jump for 4+ users

Okay, gang, hold on to your hats! Autodesk has released the new version of the Entertainment Creation Suite 2012 for Maya. This new release not only has killer upgrades to Maya but Autodesk has also made some long overdue improvements to Mudbox and MotionBuilder, as well as the addition of Softimage to the Premium bundle. The Softimage software includes Face Robot (for complex face rigging), the Interactive Creative Environment (ICE) visual programming system, as well as the Lagoa Multiphysics dynamic solver system written in ICE. I’ve only used Softimage sparingly but one of Autodesk’s goals was to bring the programs together (much like the Adobe Creative Suite) to allow them to work together better in a simpler way. They’ve done that with the introduction of the “one-click” send-to functions that allow you to send and receive data from the other programs in the suite quickly and easily, thus increasing productivity drastically. The company has come through with flying colors on this one for sure.

That’s what the bundle has to offer, so let’s take a look at the new features in Maya, MotionBuilder, and Mudbox in the Premium version of Autodesk Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2012 that we tested.

Maya 2012
There are a ton of new features and enhancements in all of the programs, and while we can’t hit them all, I’ll touch on a few of them. The first thing that’s exciting is the unification of the HumanIK solver and UI between MotionBuilder and Maya. This really pushes to streamline the animation and motion-capture process and is sure to have an impact on the productivity side of your projects.

Another new feature (that’s long overdue) is editable motion trails. These provide a fast workflow directly in the Maya scene for editing the position and timing of keyframes. The motion trails display with your animated models, eliminating the need to leave the scene for the Graph Editor. Updates to the Camera Sequencer include a new playlist for more efficient shot management, improved multitrack audio, and the addition of the Ubercam, which lets you quickly output all shots to a single camera.

Other new features include two new HumanIK windows: the Characterization tool, which allows you to speed up mapping a skeleton to a HumanIK rig, and the Character Controls for quickly selecting parts when animating or pinning and adjusting Reach and Pull settings.

MotionBuilder 2012 and Mudbox 2012
The key to both MotionBuilder and Mudbox 2012 is that they now offer the “one-click” send-to functions that allow you to send and receive data from the other programs in the Entertainment Creation Suite.

Mudbox has become even better with the addition of PTEX, which lets you start painting without having UVs on your mesh and allows you to paint across multiple meshes. Something else that’s really cool: If you want to stay UV free, you can export directly to PTEX files.

MotionBuilder has received its fair share of enhancements, as well: A new Dark GUI and updated character picker; FCurve Editor changes; and new characterization tools; as well as a dockable GUI! Yep, you heard right; finally, a dockable GUI.

Once again, there’s not enough space on one page to really explore the vast new features of the Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2012. The new features are another great step forward for Autodesk, and you definitely owe it to yourself to check it out, as it’s more than worth the upgrade.

Company: Autodesk, Inc.
Price: $6,495 (Standard: $4,995)
Web: http://usa.autodesk.com
Rating: 5
Hot: Interoperability between programs; editable motion trails
Not: