Image Editing Software

PC Week Labs used PC Paintbrush's Sharpen tool to make edges look clearer in a scanned image in a paint image editing software. Areas selected in PC Paintbrush using the selection tool appeared with a boundary and sizing and skewing handles. Within seconds they skewed an image of a rose to include it in a logo that was placed in a document.

PC Week Labs applied special effects in Picture Publisher by using the magic wand tool to select the background. The Labs then selected Special from the Effects menu and chose from a wide variety of effects such as mosaic and graphic pen. They also applied a gradient fill to the same masked region by dragging the fill tool to set the direction of the gradient.

Picture Publisher's Color Shield feature came in handy during editing as it prevented specified colors from being inadvertently altered. Clicking the Color Shield button on the status bar at the bottom of the screen brought up the Color Shield panel. They then selected the Color Shield tool from the tool palette and selected colors by dragging and dropping. Up to eight colors can be protected, and the selection tolerance can also be set for those colors.

Among Picture Publisher's many tools, PC Week Labs found the Defined Mask feature very useful for marking a region of an image for later retrieval. The Labs used the Mask Tool icon to select several regions and then name them. This allowed us to edit those regions without having to manually reselect them. Both programs produced satisfactory output, but Picture Publisher has the added plus of being able to produce color separations. The package also allows screen angles to be changed when printing color separations.

In tests, Picture Publisher's file access performance was marginally better than PhotoStyler's at opening 2M-byte and 4M-byte TIFF test files, with times of 7.5 seconds and 12.2 seconds, respectively, compared with PhotoStyler's 10.3- and 17.3-second times. However, PhotoStyler flashed past Picture Publisher at opening a 21M-byte file and when saving files. PhotoStyler required only 2 minutes and 44 seconds to open the large file, compared with Picture Publisher's time of 6 minutes and 21 seconds. Saving a 2M-byte file took PhotoStyler 9.4 seconds, compared with Publisher's 37.7-second clocking.