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ImageFX 3.2 Review

By Robert Williams 		ImageFX Page Spread


ImageFX is one of those programs that although it is very well known, relatively few people this side of the Atlantic seem to have used. I bought ImageFX 2.1 from a cover disk upgrade offer several years ago, and gradually upgraded to 2.6. Through this time the basics of the program remained the same, new and more powerful effects were added, but the interface remained quite limited. With version 3 ImageFX takes a huge step with a new interface as well as many new effects and features.

New Interface

The new ImageFX interface The original ImageFX interface used the Amiga's native graphics modes to put the toolbox on one screen overlaying a HAM preview of the 24bit image being worked on. Even when CyberGraphX support was introduced you could still only view one image at a time, but on a windowed screen. In version 3 you can open as many images as you like and each has its own window. Controls on the window border allow you to easily zoom the image and snap the window to its size. Another button allows you to open several views of one image, this allows you to edit a portion of the image magnified in one window while seeing the overall effect in another.

The main user interface remains similar to previous versions, there is a large tool bar which is further split into several pages for the different functions of the program, Scanner, Palette, Toolbox, Render and Printer. The Toolbox section has icons for various painting tools and buttons for different types of effect. Each effect button pops up a list of effects of that type. In version 3 you can configure these lists to stay open after a selection, which makes applying several effects much quicker. You can snapshot a window configuration so your favourite windows are opened everytime you start ImageFX.

Some people may accuse Nova Design of not going far enough with their interface changes, and want them to change to a menu orientated interface (similar to programs like Photogenics and Art Effect). Personally I feel they have taken the right road, IFX 3 is a huge improvement over the 2.x versions without requiring you to completely re-learn the program. For those people who like the old interface or who use video hardware that cannot display windowed screens (older 24bit boards and the Video Toaster etc.) Nova provide an ImageFX Classic mode which works like all previous versions.

The user interface is now font sensitive so you can set the font you want to use, which is invaluable on hi-res graphics card screens. Another much requested feature that has been implemented are improved effect previews. You can now choose how big the previews will be, zoom and pan them. This allows you to get a much better idea of how an effect will look before it is applied. Unfortunately some effects still do not preview properly (PaintFX is a prime example), this seems to be unavoidable due to how these effects work, but an inaccurate preview is not much good to anyone so perhaps they should just be removed.

For new users ImageFX is quite intimidating, as any complex program is to a certain extent, but IFX has quite a learning curve. The learning process was helped in previous versions by the excellent user manual which took you through every aspect, with great tutorials and plenty of illustrations showing you how the various effects and parameters work. As version 3 is such a major upgrade much of the original manual is very incomplete. Unfortunately the 3.0 upgrade comes only with a Quick Start guide to supplement the version 2.0 manual. The guide gives only a very brief overview of the new features with none of the indepth explanations of the old manual. New features like layers are sadly under-explained, in fact it wasn't until I went to WoA and saw ImageFX demoed by Corrina Cohn that I discovered some of the layer functionality available.

Layers

The Layer Manager window Layers are definitely the biggest new function in ImageFX 3, they allow you to build up an image of several parts and then alter each part seperately. All layered images start with a background, this can be any image loaded into IFX or a fresh image buffer. You can then add a layer over the background. The layer is like a piece of glass over the image, you can paint on a layer and although it covers the background it remains separate. So if I drew on a layer I could then move my drawing about using the move layer function without effecting the background. ImageFX lets you have as many layers as your memory allows so you can build up complex compositions and still be able to alter each element separately. You can move layers up and down in the stack (although you can't move the background), add and delete them at any time.

Lets take an example, say I want to compose a person onto a new background. First I would load in the background image. I could then load the image of the person (or scan it using IFX's scanner support). Using the region tools I would select the person from the original background and pick them up as a brush. Moving to the background image by selecting it's window I would add a layer to the image using the layer palette pop-up menu. Now when I stamp the brush down on the background image, it is applied to the new layer. At this point I might decide that the background is too dark, as the image is now layered I can simply select the background layer and use the Balance effect to alter its brightness, because the person is on another layer they are Not effected. By the same ticket if I want to apply an effect to the person, say I want to motion blur the person so they look like they're running across the backgound, I select their layer and apply the effect.

Just this aspect of layers is really cool, but IFX has several other tricks up its sleeve, layers can be combined in many ways, one layer can, for example, brighten, darken or colourise the layers below it. Each layer has its own alpha channel which controls which parts of it are transparent. An alpha channel is just a greyscale image the same size as the layer. The Black areas of the alpha channel correspond to transparent areas of the layer and the white areas to opaque areas. The shades of grey in between make the layer more and more tansparent the darker they get. ImageFX allows you to edit and process the alpha channel in the same way you would any other image. Therefore you can Paint white over areas of the image you want to see and black over areas to easily crop an image. You can blur an alpha channel to fade the edges into the layers behind. Other effects that work well on the alpha channel are distorts and texturing. One effect I particularly like is filling a white area of the alpha channel with a greyscale gradient fill which causes the image to fade into the background and lower layers.

Effects

At it's heart ImageFX is an effects program, and this is the area where it is best equipped. The range of effects is truly astounding and everyone of them is totally configurable. Most effects have a complex controlling requester, several of these have multiple pages of options. What this means is that with ImageFX you have a huge amount of control over how an effect will look. At first all the options seem very daunting, however most effects have some presets you can load up and experiment with. You soon learn to appreciate the flexibility the program offers. Here are some of the best effects out of the hoards included with ImageFX 3.2:

PaintFX

This effect is one of the most configurable in ImageFX, It works by painting a brush down many times on the image controlled by various factors. You set the number of times the brush will be painted and you can then set how the size, colour, transparency and rotation of the brush will be determined. You could, for example, choose that the colour of the brush comes from another image. This would mean the colour from the second image would be painted onto the first using the brush of your choice. As you can imagine with a bit of work this effect can be used to simulate different painting styles. It is also excellent for making random backgrounds.

FXForge (New in 3.0)

The new FX Forge hook allows you to use formulas developed for Photoshop's Filter Factory. There are a wide variety of formulas available on the 'net to produce loads of different effects. ImageFX comes with a variety of formulas to get you started. FXForge is very useful and some of the effects are good fun, however they do take much longer to apply than standard effects as they have to be interpreted.

Fire, Clouds (New) and Lightning Generators

As well as applying special effects to your own images IFX has the ability to generate images of its own. You can generate realistic fire, clouds and lightning tailored to your exact requirements. The clouds generator is new in version 3, it generates random fractal clouds, it can generate several layers of cloud for a realistic random effect. You can also change the colour of the clouds to create effects such as plasma and lava too.

Painting Tools

Painting is probably ImageFX's weakest area, although it has all the tools you'd expect in a traditional paint program like DPaint. You can draw different shapes and lines using different line thicknesses and it has the standard range of solid and gradient fills. Two things of note are the excellent airbrush tool which is quite realistic and easy to use and the flood fill which has configurable sensitivity allowing you to control how closely colours must match before it floods over them. All the painting tools can operate in many modes, apart from normal painting in the selected colour you can blur smear, lighten and darken an image for example. If you use Photogenics you will probably find IFX's painting tools limited, in particular the left mouse button to apply/right mouse button to remove feature is missing which makes IFX seem a bit clumsy. Version 3's Layers go a long way to improve matters however, as you can now experiment without fear of damaging other parts of the image. ImageFX can also be set to have any number of UNDOs (this applys to all IFX operations) which also makes painting easier.

Regions

An example image using layers If you want to apply an effect to a particular part of an image you can use the powerful region tools, these allow you to select parts of an image in several ways. For a start you can use a box, circle or polygon to enclose a region. More powerfully you can draw around the region in freehand mode and finally you can flood select. The flood tool selects the area of similar colour around where you click, you can use the fill tolerance to set how close the colour match must be. Once the region is selected you can add and remove parts from it by holding down a key while you select using any of the region modes. When you've selected the area you want most effects will be applied only to that area. You can also choose to pick the region up as a brush which allows for very complex areas to be picked up and composited into other images (using layers if you like) easily.

Brushes

You can cut brushes in ImageFX using several methods, as well as using regions as mentioned above you can cut using the different drawing tools (rectangle, oval, polygon, freehand etc.) and using the magic scissors which attempt to cut an object away from it's background. Once you have the brush you can stamp it down onto the current image or by simply selecting another image window you can compose it onto that image (or layer if the image is layered). When you have picked up a brush the region gadget has a brush option, if this is selected you can apply effects to the brush before it is pasted down. You can also scale and rotate the brush. Cutting a brush from one image and then stamping it down onto a layer of another image makes for very easy compositing.

Automation

One of the areas of ImageFX that often gets ignored is its facilities for automation. The program has an extensive AREXX port that is well described in the on-line documentation. You can record your actions into scripts and play them back at any time. This feature allows you to create your own scripts more easily as you can record the action you want to perform then add the controling AREXX code, lots of example scripts are supplied. There are two batch processing engines included, AutoFX and IMP (ImageFX Multi-Processor) which allow you to apply effects to a series of frames. Most of ImageFXs effects are designed for animation so, for example you could make animated floating clouds or ripples. The AutoFX batch processor comes with many pre-set effects, and you can combine as many as you like of these and save the output in a variety of formats including animations. If you want to write your own effects you can do so using AREXX and use them in conjunction with the ones provided. Personally although I don't use the animation side of things much, I was able to use AutoFX to combine rendered frames into an IFF anim using the provided effects very quickly.

Scanning and Morphing

Aside from its major role as an image processor ImageFX also has a couple of "added value" features. The first is scanner support for Hewlett Packard (SCSI only) and Epson (SCSI and Parallel) flat bed scanners and a couple of digitisers. ImageFX has all the basic scanning features you need, including the facility to preview and pick just the area of the scanner bed you want to scan at full resoloution. Also included with ImageFX is the CineMorph morphing package that can be used to create complex distortions and for morphing between images. The program can create single images or animations. Cine Morph has not been upgraded for a long time, and is a totally separate program, not integrated into ImageFX. However it has a nice style guide compliant interface and does its job well.

Issues

When ImageFX 3 was released in April it was quite buggy, the cause of this seems to be ImageFX's modular nature. Version 3 adds so many major new features (e.g. layers) that some of the existing modules just can't cope with them. Four upgrades (3.0a, 3.0b 3.1 and 3.2) have been released so far and the vast majority of the bugs have now been squashed. Unfortunately there are a couple of operations that will crash ImageFX still, you learn to avoid them, but still it is annoying to find these in an expensive program that has been out for six months now.

Conclusion

Results box-out ImageFX is a great program with a very wide range of effects, with the implementation of layers it becomes much better at painting and composing images which was previously one of its weaker points. Unfortunately the version 3 upgrade has caused some stability problems which are being solved (albeit rather slowly). Although an expensive package by Amiga standards you do get an awful lot for your money, particularly if you're going to use the scanner module. New users will need to persevere to learn the program but once you have it rewards you with unrivaled flexibility in the effects it produces.