After Effects has had z-space for what seems like forever and you can do a lot with it, but it’s limited to the point that many people refer to it as 2.5D instead of real 3D. Digieffects has brought us closer to true 3D than ever before with their new plug-in, FreeForm AE.

Digieffects calls FreeForm AE a 3D mesh warping tool “that allows users to manipulate a flat object into almost any shape using a mesh in 3D space.” In other words, it’s a displacement map on steroids. You can take an image or solid and manipulate it with points on a scalable grid or, better yet, create a displacement map by using another layer and applying fractal noise.

To jump in and create a flag blowing, mountainous terrain, or a liquid effect is easy. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a lot more experimentation, patience, and processing power to build really advanced shapes. Also worth mentioning is that FreeForm functions in its own 3D world, not global 3D.

What’s the one thing that everyone wants to be able to accomplish in After Effects? 3D text, of course! Well, after a few hours of play, it came close but with detail maxed out, producing some rough edges—not worth the strain on processors. Digieffects didn’t tout this as a text-extrusion tool, but you can’t knock a guy for trying.

FreeForm is great at what it can do, but it isn’t going to be used every day, so the $299 price tag seems out of reach for freelancers and small production houses. Combine that with how much time is required for building more intricate shapes and things aren’t looking good. On the other hand, Digieffects has brought us so much closer to what we want—that’s worth something, right?—Jason Scrivner

Company: Digieffects
Price: $299
Web: www.digieffects.com
Rating: 2.5

Hot: Killer concept that pushes the boundaries of After Effects
Not: Price; limited usability

The best tools are the least sexy, and CoreMelt ImageFlow FX is a perfect example. It’s not the sort of tool that will wow you when you see it demonstrated at a conference or user-group meeting, but it’s the tool that may save you hours of toil. That’s better than sexy; that’s money in the bank.

Put simply, ImageFlow FX is a Mac-only plug-in for After Effects, Motion, and Final Cut Pro that generates slide shows from still images. You apply it to a solid and then, in the Effect Controls panel, point it to a folder that contains images. ImageFlow FX displays each image, one by one, with cool transitions between images. If you’ve ever tried to do this by hand, you know how boring and time-consuming it can be.

ImageFlow FX will display the images or videos in the folder in filename order or in a random order. That’s probably good enough for most purposes, though I wish it would let me order the images any way I want. To get around this, I name my images image01.png, image02.png, image03.png, etc. in the order I want them to appear (ImageFlow FX works with most standard image and video types, not just PNGs).

New to version 2 is the ability to pull images from “image wells,” which are layers in your Composition. You can pull images from up to eight wells.

ImageFlow FX isn’t a single effect—it’s a suite of 25 effects, each one containing a different transition. Some of the transitions are simple, such as fade-ins and drop-downs; others are more complex, such as 3D zooms, carousels, and image walls. Each effect has a default behavior that you can easily customize, changing timings and x, y, and z positions.

The effects allow you to add custom masks and frames to images. ImageFlow ships with many standard frames, but you can add your own. You can choose to display each image just once, or you can loop the images so that after the last one displays, the slide show begins again with the first image. The effects also support blend modes, so as various transitions cause images to overlap, they can interact with each other in interesting ways. If your images aren’t all the same size, you can tell ImageFlow FX to leave them as is or scale them to fit so they’re all the same. I’ve gotten best results when my images are all the same size, so if I have images of different dimensions, I usually animate them in groups, giving each group its own instance of an ImageFlow FX effect.

I’ve also been experimenting with using ImageFlow FX to create quick, funky backgrounds. I fill several folders full of random images and then layer random, looping slide shows on top of each other, mixing them together with blend modes.

As is my usual custom, I initially tried out ImageFlow FX by downloading the free, 15-day trial version. I was pleased to discover that CoreMelt let me keep four of the 25 effects permanently, with no obligation to buy the full product. The four free effects are Carousel, Continuous Random Pan, Multi Pop Forward, and Filmstrip. But it was a no-brainer choosing to buy the suite. I knew my $129 would repay itself almost immediately, giving me more time to focus on really creative work rather than sequencing dozens of still images on a timeline.—Marcus Geduld

Company: CoreMelt Pty Ltd
Price: $129
Web: www.coremelt.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Huge time saver; bargain: 25 effects for $129
Not: Mac only; lack of built-in image ordering

If Dreamweaver is your main website-development tool, you’ll want to give FusionCharts for Dreamweaver a test run. This extension installs in the Dreamweaver Insert panel and provides a user-friendly interface for creating animated, colorful, interactive, and data-driven charts.

If you don’t like looking at code, you’ll appreciate the ability to add interactive, animated Flash charts to a webpage without ever leaving Design view. The FusionCharts interface contains three tabs: Data Grid, Chart Selection, and General Options. The Data Grid tab allows you to manually enter data or import it from either a CSV or XML file. The Chart Selection tab displays 34 types of 2D and 3D charts from which to choose. The Advanced button expands the panel to display an array of menus that allow you to customize almost every aspect of your chart. The last tab, General Options, provides settings for specifying your chart’s dimensions, font size, adding labels, and more.

One of my favorite features is the integrated preview. The Preview button is always available so you can view your changes before the final chart is published. If you accidentally click the OK button before you mean to, you only have to select the chart in the HTML page and click the Edit Chart button.

I found FusionCharts for Dreamweaver easy to use and was impressed with the hundreds of presets and styles. The online documentation loads quickly and is easy to understand. The gallery of examples is inspiring. While there are other chart-building applications available, it’s worth your time to download a trial copy.

FusionCharts for Dreamweaver is available in Designer and Developer Editions. The Designer Edition, which was used for this review, is for users who want to create animated charts without writing code. The Developer Edition is for developers who develop database-driven websites.—Cyndy Cashman

Company: Extend Studio
Price: Approx. $87.07
Web: www.extendstudio.com
Rating: 5

Hot: Easy to use and affordable
Not:

Tracking changes in text-heavy documents can be a real headache, especially if several people are working with the files. CtrlChanges Pro helps keep your text tracking under control by showing you exactly what’s been modified in your InDesign CS3 and CS4 files. The plug-in tracks all text changes, shows added and removed text, tracks who made changes and when, can print a list of changes, builds PDF reports, color-codes text changes based on author, includes the ability to accept or reject changes, and can build PDF versions of your InDesign documents with changes shown as sticky notes.

CtrlChanges Pro is amazingly easy to use, and its features are nicely grouped under a special menu item and also in a tool panel. Text change highlighting can be shown or hidden, which is really useful when lots of people are modifying your document’s copy, and change tracking can be disabled for documents where text control isn’t critical. InDesign and InCopy CS4 users can hover their mouse over text changes to see who made the modifications, along with a date and time stamp.

On the down side, licensing goes smoothly on a Mac only if you’re logged in as an administrative user. Entering a license code as a standard user fails without any indication that something went wrong, and the installation instructions don’t mention the administrator requirement—something that could easily be avoided with a simple warning dialog.

Despite some potential confusion when entering license codes, CtrlChanges Pro does its job like a champ. It makes tracking text changes in your InDesign documents wonderfully simple, and its change history makes it easy for project managers to keep up on a document’s evolution, too.—Jeff Gamet

Company: Ctrl Publishing
Price: $549
Web: www.ctrl-ps.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Easy to learn; highly detailed text tracking
Not: Licensing works only for administrator-level users

Digital Juice Fonts is a new multivolume collection of layered graphic fonts that can be endlessly customized and used in all of your print, video, and Web projects. Currently, there are three collections containing more than 4,000 individual graphic presets and community fonts (see below): Collection 1 contains 35 font families (2,500+ fonts), Collection 2 has 10 font families (1,000+ fonts), and Collection 3 has 12 font families (850+ fonts). An illustrator has drawn each graphic font, and the results for some are absolutely gorgeous. And each font is separated into 5 to 12 layers so you can easily turn on and off layers, as well as add effects to each layer, using the included Juicer software.

My favorite part of the whole collection is that Digital Juice has built a community aspect into the product that allows users to design and share their own presets. This means you can collect even more graphic fonts for absolutely free. What’s more, many of the community fonts are so good they’re actually worth paying for!

The Digital Juice website has also added a number of much-needed training videos that extends the life of the product. Training includes using Juicer, as well as using DJ Fonts in Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop; Apple Motion and Final Cut Pro; and Sony Vegas. With output options from Juicer that includes PNG, JPEG, Targa, TIFF, BMP, and PSD, you’re pretty much guaranteed compatibility with most video, animation, Web, or print applications. Both Mac and Windows OS are fully supported.

All in all, this is a terrific collection for anyone who’s tired of the same old Photoshop layer styles and wants to put a little “art” back into their typography.—Rod Harlan

Company: Digital Juice, Inc.
Price: $149.95–499.95
Web: www.digitaljuice.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Quality selection of graphic fonts
Not: Additional activation

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

There are quite a few plug-ins, tricks, and techniques for creating smoother skin in portrait images, but finding that “just-right” method for your most-frequent corrections can become a time-consuming and costly endeavor if it’s all trial and error. With Imagenomic Portraiture 2, there’s a balance of smoothness and color to the output. While it can do more than just correct images, it can be overkill if not used judiciously.

There’s a lot of improvement in the new version that jumps right out at you, starting with a vastly improved user interface. The performance was also appreciably improved over version 1, and the addition of unlimited user presets saves a lot of time in the fine-tuning. The factory presets, however, should really be a jumping off point—particularly when used with smaller and lower-resolution images—and seem to have a cooler colorcast. Another wonderful, yet simple improvement is that Portraiture 2 now generates a new layer in Photoshop, saving steps.

Clearly, Imagenomic has taken note of what their end users are asking for and made some major enhancements to an already fine product. As always, the results tell the story, but Portraiture 2 is now more intuitive, easier to navigate, and better performing than ever.—Daniel M. East

Company: Imagenomic, LLC
Price: $199.95
Web: www.imagenomic.com
Rating: 4

Hot: Great results; big improvements; performance
Not: Presets can be harsh for certain image sizes

The main focus of Q2ID v4 is to support InDesign CS4 and QuarkXPress 8 files. One important thing that’s changed in this version is the updated conversion notes PDF, which now lists most of the conversion issues you might encounter. Another change is that you can use either the InDesign Open menu or the new Markzware menu. Quark files with multiple layouts can be converted individually or all at once; multiple Quark files can be converted, too.

This version appears to fix most of the issues I noted in the last version, including keeping the proper based-on settings, better translations of Quark’s transparency effects into InDesign (with one major exception noted below), and better layer translation between programs.

The biggest glitch I could find was that text with opacity applied to it in Quark is translated to tinted text in InDesign, even if the text had just one opacity setting for the entire text block (Quark can set opacity on a per-character basis). Opacity of text should be honored and if the text has multiple opacity settings, the first character’s settings should be used. A less-critical issue is the stroke alignment—Quark typically positions the frame inside the item, whereas InDesign centers the stroke on the object. These are the defaults used during translation; however, InDesign does support aligning the stroke inside the object. This is an issue when using opacity on the stroke.

Other areas that still need improvement are some text conversion settings (such as keep-with-next-paragraph settings and discretionary line breaks), Photoshop layer control, and conversion of item styles to object styles.

Overall, Q2ID does a great job converting QuarkXPress documents to InDesign. Considering there are no other options out there, this plug-in is a must-have.—David Creamer

Company: Markzware
Price: $199
Web: www.markzware.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Easy to use
Not: Opacity on Quark text doesn’t translate

The Corner Pin in After Effects seems like a great effect until you actually try to use it. If the image you’re pinning wasn’t shot dead on, it’s hard to composite it realistically into a new scene. To the rescue comes Warp, a new suite of plug-ins for After Effects (and Premiere Pro) from Red Giant Software.

Warp’s Corner Pin effect includes secondary controls that allow you to distort the pinned footage so that it’s skewed to match the target layer underneath. Corner Pin also works well with masked images, allowing you to set the pin bounding box to either the footage itself or the bounds of the mask. It’s a complete compositing solution, including transfer modes, upscaling, motion blur, and opacity adjustments right in the effect. It also allows you to adjust the color of the Comp window controls so that you can see them against the colors of all sorts of footage.

Red Giant has applied its smart-distortion technology to the other two plug-ins that also ship with the Warp package: Shadow and Reflection. The former allows you to apply shadows to layers and then, via multiple points of control, skew the shadows in any direction in faux 3D. The latter allows you to do the same with reflections. Both effects include realistic, controllable falloff controls.

The online help is well-written and fully illustrated, and the $199 price is reasonable for this powerful set of everyday-use effects.—Marcus Geduld

Company: Red Giant Software LLC
Price: $199
Web: www.redgiantsoftware.com
Rating: 5

Hot: Power features; good documentation
Not:

Topaz DeNoise is a noise-reduction plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. Unless you’ve been living in a cave the past few years, you’re probably aware that there are many products that promise to remove noise from your digital images. Topaz DeNoise differs from the other noise-removal products in several ways.

First and foremost, it’s simple to use. I’ve tested some products with control options that looked like the control panel on the Space Shuttle. The UI on DeNoise is simple, with only a few sliders. In most of my testing, I was able to remove the noise using a single slider adjustment. There are several sliders for fine-tuning but in most cases, I didn’t use them.

Next, it does an excellent job of removing noise while preserving details in the images. I cleaned up some low-light images that were captured in a dimly lit church using a long lens. The photos looked like they were printed on industrial grade sandpaper. DeNoise effectively removed the noise, leaving only some very minor artifacts, which was an acceptable tradeoff considering how noisy these test images were. While removing noise and preserving details, DeNoise can also correct the slight blurring in the image that’s common when shooting at slow shutter speeds.

DeNoise is available for both Mac and Windows. It can work on both 8- and 16-bit images and allows the user to save and reuse settings as presets. Now for the best part—it’s inexpensive (or cheap, as we say in Texas). At $79.99, this jewel is a real bargain. Download the fully functional, 30-day, free trail and see for yourself. Just make sure you watch the video tutorial first before trying it.—Dave Huss

Company: Topaz Labs LLC
Price: $79.99
Web: www.topazlabs.com
Rating: 5

Hot: Inexpensive and easy to use
Not:

Attention Flash designers: Have you ever wished you could include interactive 3D objects in a Flash movie or game without having to be an ace programmer? If this describes you, then you’ll want to check out FreeSpin3D. This easy-to-use Flash component allows you to import and control 3D models in a Flash document.

FreeSpin3D’s clear-cut control panel makes rotating and animating 3D objects in your Flash movie painless. The program’s real magic, though, is how easy it is to add mouse and keyboard commands that allow the user to control an object. Adding user interaction is as easy as selecting a 3D object on the Stage, checking Keyboard Control in the control panel, and clicking the Plus button to open the Behaviors dialog. The window contains a drop-down menu listing four types of behaviors: BasicRotation, Freefall, Movement, and Sticky Object. The behaviors Freefall and Movement each contain motion presets such as Fall and Bounce and Fly.

Depending on the behavior selected, you can change values for the x- and y-axes, z-space, speed, acceleration, as well as customize the keyboard selection for the types of movement. Once you’ve made your selections and given the object an Instance name, FreeSpin3D writes the ActionScript 3 code needed to control the object. Editing the texture of a model is as simple as opening the object’s symbol source folder in the Flash Library and locating and editing the texture JPEG files in Photoshop.

At the time of this review, FreeSpin3D was only available for Flash CS3. However, according to company CEO, Amir Fischer, an updated version with additional features is in the testing phase and will soon be available for CS4.—Cyndy Cashman

Company: Revolver animation & game technologies Ltd.
Price: $299
Web: www.freespin3d.com
Rating: 5

Hot: Easy to add interactive 3D objects without knowing ActionScript 3
Not:

Extracting text from an InDesign file can be a pain if your document has lots of text frames, but CopyFlow Gold for InDesign CS2 and higher turns the export into a drop-dead simple process. In addition to exporting a document’s text, it can reimport the copy, making this plug-in especially useful for designers that need to hand off text for editing (or, according to the company, for translation purposes).

CopyFlow Gold sports an easy-to-use panel interface that manages importing and exporting text, file export formats, document settings, and its own activity log. It supports plain text, RTF, Adobe Tag, XLIFF, XML, INX, and IDML file formats to accommodate most any reason for exporting copy, including editing and archiving, and it can export a document’s stories as individual files or as a single document.

Every text frame in a document needs to be tagged before copy can be exported, and CopyFlow Gold handles that for you, too. It can auto-name each frame, or lets you apply names on a frame-by-frame basis. Exported text files can be edited and reimported, although RTF and plain text documents will lose their formatting when imported, so don’t spend time on formatting before those files come back.

While importing and exporting is amazingly simple, installing CopyFlow Gold takes extra effort. There isn’t an installer, so all of the components need to be copied to the appropriate directories before launching InDesign. Clear instructions are included, which makes the process a little bit friendlier.

Despite the manual installation process, CopyFlow Gold is a breeze to use for repurposing or archiving text, and its round-trip text control can be a lifesaver for designers that work with several copy editors.
—Jeff Gamet

Company: North Atlantic Publishing Systems, Inc.
Price: $495
Web: www.napsys.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: Easy to use
Not: Manual installation process