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

If you look closely at older printed materials—where ink has been pressed onto paper—you’ll see some predictable effects. You may see areas overlap or come apart—the result of plates being out of register. You may see thicker ink around the edges of solid areas, and lighter ink just inside the edges—the result of ink being pulled back off of the paper. In process color printing (CMYK), the halftone dots may be large enough to easily see, gradients may become solid, and if CMYK plates are misaligned, then all kinds of wacky effects appear.

This rough, “analog” look is difficult to achieve with today’s digital software, so the engineers at Mister Retro took it on as a challenge. They studied the relationships between ink viscosity, plate alignment, pressure, and angle. The result is their astonishing Permanent Press filter for Photoshop.
If your image has several solid areas of color, Permanent Press will identify them and separate them onto separate “plates” that you can drag around. You can then adjust the ink thickness, edge roughness, and press pressure, and apply old-fashioned paper colors and textures. Imagine using this on clip art!

If you have a continuous-tone image, Permanent Press can apply many kinds of old-fashioned printing processes. My favorite trick is to make text appear as if printed on an old press.
Permanent Press includes many realistic presets, including Comic Book, Concert Poster, Letterpress, Matchbook, Newspaper, Pizza Box, Pop Art, Printed in Taiwan, Vintage Advertisement, Vintage Decal, and Wrapper. The interface lets you control every conceivable aspect of the “printing” process, and while the preview window is accurate only at 100%, you can scroll around your image to see any area of importance.—Jay Nelson

PRICE: $99
FROM: Mister Retro
WEB: www.misterretro.com
RATING: 5

LAYERS VERDICT
HOT Realistic effects; automatic color separations; presets
NOT

ColorMunki is a brand name for three different products: ColorMunki Create is an inexpensive colorimeter, identical to X-Rite’s Eye-One Display2, that includes software similar to ColorMunki Design. ColorMunki Design combines a sophisticated spectrophotometer with software that helps you create and manage color palettes. The spectrophotometer can measure colors to generate profiles for LCD displays (but not CRTs), as well as for printers and projectors. It can also measure colors on physical surfaces such as paper, textiles, paint, and so forth. ColorMunki Photo is identical to ColorMunki Design, except the device is black instead of white, and its software has an additional feature for sending photos to clients.

The spectrophotometer connects via USB cable and has a removable, weighted strap so you can drape it over your display when profiling. The software guides you through the process, which takes just a few minutes. The main functioning part of the device is a giant rotating dial, which I found clumsy to operate. (Note: A single-user license is included with ColorMunki, and you may install the software on up to three computers.)

To profile your printer, the software prints a page of swatches that you measure with the spectrophotometer. It’s easy and takes just a few minutes. The software then prints an updated page of swatches, which you also measure. It then offers to add the profile to QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. You do this for each kind of paper you use. To measure a color from any surface (paper, textile, paint, etc.), place the device onto the surface and press a button.

The software is brilliant. With it, you can generate a color palette from any real-world surface color that you sampled or from a photo or any color in the included libraries. (Pantone GOE colors are included, but to use the older Pantone Matching System, you must download the libraries after registering.) You can also borrow palettes from photos by famous photographers (15 are included, with more available online) and share your color palettes online with other designers, printers, or clients.

Sorting is easy because you can flip through colors, just like album covers in iTunes. Click on a color and several sets of harmonious colors appear. You can also find colors by theme or keyword and save them to your own custom palettes; snap sampled colors to Pantone spot colors or to various Process printing standards; preview colors as they would appear when printed on various presses, or when printed on your desktop printer, for fewer surprises when printing; and preview colors as they would appear under different lighting conditions (daylight, tungsten, or fluorescent). There’s a Synchronize Color Palettes feature that currently works only with QuarkXPress 7 and Adobe CS2 and CS3.

I had difficulty profiling my MacBook Pro and its external display. After profiling the external display, and then profiling the internal display, ColorMunki assigned the profile for the internal display to both displays—I had to manually fix that in System Preferences. Also, the two displays didn’t appear remotely similar after profiling (the external display was satisfactory but the MacBook had a distinct bluish tint). Perhaps it’s because of the LED backlighting on the MacBook, but X-Rite couldn’t explain it. After profiling both the display and printer, prints matched the external display pretty closely.

No manual is included and the Help menu takes you to the ColorMunki website where you can click through topics. A downloadable PDF manual should be available soon.

There’s no comparable device on the market at this price, so if its features match your needs, grab one. But if the color profiles that came from your printer manufacturer are good enough for you, and you don’t need to sample colors from real-world objects, you can save $350 by buying the ColorMunki Create instead. It has similar software, along with a colorimeter for profiling your displays.
—Jay Nelson

PRICE: $499.99
FROM: X-Rite Incorporated
WEB: www.colormunki.com
RATING: 3

LAYERS VERDICT
HOT Measures almost anything; clever software
NOT Questionable LED profiles; no manual

Graphic Inspector provides such an obviously useful function that I’m surprised no one else thought of it before: to display every bit of useful information about vector or raster graphic files and flag the ones that match rules you define.

To tell Graphic Inspector which folders to inspect, you can drag them onto its icon, drag them into its window, or select them using its clever built-in file navigator. You can add multiple folders from multiple locations and optionally include subfolders. The Inspector window then displays detailed attributes of graphic files, putting a yellow warning triangle next to any file that matches any criteria you define. For example, you could ask it to warn you about images below a certain resolution, with or without particular ICC profiles, in RGB mode, using compression, or that use spot colors or fonts.

For the amount of information displayed, the interface is impressively straightforward—and you can sort by any column header. For any chosen file, you can also view its EXIF data, see its preview, see a list of fonts or spot colors it uses, open it, or reveal it in the Finder. You can also export the Inspector data as a text file for use in other applications.

Because it can scan folders within folders, and it can list every kind of file (not just graphics files), you can also use Graphic Inspector to discover duplicate files on your hard drive: Just scan the whole thing, then it’s easy to sort files by name, reveal them in the Finder, and then Trash them.

With its combination of price, utility, and thoughtful design, Graphic Inspector is a rare gem.— Jay Nelson

PRICE: $24.95
FROM: Zevrix Solutions
EMAIL: support@zevrix.com
WEB: www.zevrix.com
FOR: Mac
RATING: 4

LAYERS VERDICT
HOT Unlimited Checkup presets to share
NOT Presets can’t check for EXIF data

Even if you understand color science, choosing complementary colors to use in a color palette can be incredibly tedious. That’s why Genometri’s GenoPal is such a relief—for many users, it may eliminate the color wheel altogether. GenoPal uses a color model based on human perception to create naturally pleasing color palettes based on any pixel on your display. In fact, it’s so natural that when I chose one pixel in an organic image, it generated other colors that already existed within that image.

To create a palette, first you decide how many swatches you want GenoPal to generate: 4, 16, 85, or 510. Then, you click on any pixel on your display—inside a picture or document, on a webpage, or within the usual color pickers. GenoPal then generates a color palette. If you click or move one of GenoPal’s sliders, a new set of colors is generated. You can “lock” swatches you want to keep, and GenoPal will create new colors only for the remaining swatches. Repeat this process a few times, and you’ll have a palette generated specifically for your project.

The sliders let you control the color difference between the swatches, and also their difference in lightness. This changes the way the colors relate to each other in both saturation and contrast, giving you fluid control over the generation of hundreds of different color schemes. You can save the palette either as an image file or in ACO format to import into Adobe applications. You can also drag any swatch into the Foreground and Background color swatches in Adobe applications, or use the numerical values to build colors in other applications.

If you need to choose colors for a print or Web layout, GenoPal is $35 well spent.—Jay Nelson

PRICE: $35
FROM: Genometri Private Limited
EMAIL: info@genometri.com
WEB: www.genopal.com
FOR: Mac (v2.1) and Windows (v2.5)
RATING: 4

LAYERS VERDICT
HOT Immediate, pleasing color palettes
NOT Interface could be more intuitive