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These programs include what´s arguably the most important component of your toolkit—the paint program and host for plug-in filters. I'm quite torn because there are two very different products, at different prices, that are a good beginning for any graphics toolkit. So here goes, and I'll offer my own preferences when I do a wrap-up. This application looks and feels like "Adobe Photoshop for the Web" in the same way that Adobe PhotoDeluxe is "Photoshop for the home (novice) user". It has many of the
features of Adobe Photoshop 5, but it also has a lot of features that Photoshop 5 does not have. You can produce animated GIFs in Image Ready, you can preview how an image looks with color reduction without changing the image. The selection and painting tools are genuine, first-class Adobe—which is to say they are beyond comparison. The learning curve on this package is a tad steep—you should pick up a book on Photoshop (cheap plug: such as "Inside Adobe Photoshop 5
", by the Boutons) to get you up and running with the features it shares with Photoshop. Download the trial version from
Useful Web Toolkit Offerings There are several programs made by the "big-league", commercial manufacturers that have identical features on either the Mac or Windows platforms. The price of these products is steeper than shareware, but if you're serious about designing for the Web, the products are also the least expensive you can get away with and still have powerful, quality tools. For the $149 price, you also get Adobe Streamline version 4, which is a utility that converts bitmap images to vector format; if your only interest is in creating Web graphics, you probably won't use Streamline. The Web abounds with 3D objects, and Dimensions is the
least expensive, sure-fire method of getting you quickly into thinking and designing in 3D. Like all Adobe products, you can download a limited trial version at
If you're a Windows user, you will be intrigued by Paint Alchemy and Terrazzo. Paint Alchemy paints an image document window with brush tips that can be user-defined (you can paint with an image of a leaf or a windowpane, for example), and you can vary the color, direction, and amount of dispersal of the brush strokes. Terrazzo is handy for creating seamless, tiling Web backgrounds. The image above is an example of about two seconds of work in Terrazzo. Why
don't you download this image and see how it looks as a Web page background? Alien Skin Eye Candy Version 3 You can download a limited trial version for Mac or Windows at
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Image Ready is a powerhou se program for $219, only a third of the street price of Photosho p. I doubt you would ever outgrow Image Ready, and after playing with it for a while, I didn't really miss the fact that Image Ready doesn't have Paths or
Pen tools like its big brother. This program is optimized for producing clean, compact Web designs, and naturally it takes Adobe standard plug-ins. 
For $99, you can't lose with this program if you're into painting. It does not have all the features of Graphics Converter for the Mac or PhotoImpact for Windows, but it's a solid, inspiring program like its big brother Painter 5. A lot of Painter 5's features are missing from
Painter Classic, but if you've never seen version 5, you won't miss the features. The interface has been cleaned up big time from Painter 4 and 5. You can paint with different brushes on different canvas types and you have the Painter "nozzles" feature and the seamless tiling capability, plus other fun stuff. Here you can see a trick for creating a warm, light-textured background for Web pages. If you notice, I've clicked on the Raw Silk texture, and the Art Materials
palette tells me that the texture is 240 by 240 rows. Every canvas in Painter Classic is seamless tiling, so I open a new image window that is 240 by 240 pixels, fill the window with a warm foreground color, and then apply the Surface Texture feature.
Here you can see the results. You can copy from this document and specify it as a
background on a Web page. You'll see that the image tiles without seams and is quite attractive and professional looking.
Adobe Dimensions is one of my personal favorites for creating Web graphics. Not only does it extrude text, but it contains basic modeling tools (this is not 3D Studio Max, not at $149). Its interface layout is logical and you can get 3D results fairly quickly. To the right is a scene I was able to design quickly using Dimensions' tools.
Here´s an an example of extruded text. The text can be shaded, lit from multiple directions, and made glossy or flat in appearance.
This is a suite of three mini—applications that can be loaded into any program that accepts Adobe standard plug-ins. Total XAOS consists of Paint Alchemy, Terrazzo, and TypeCaster—Alchemy and Terrazzo have been available on the Mac platform for quite a while, but TypeCaster is new to both platforms. 
If you need true three-dim ensional text, XAOS TypeCast er is your ticket. If you have a paint applicatio n that supports a layers feature, you can render 3D text to a layer, and then slip your background image behind the text to see how
your Web page will look with the text. Total XAOS is about $149, and a limited demo version can be downloaded from 
For around $89, you can get more than 16 plug-in filters from Alien Skin that will
work with Image Ready, Graphics Converter, Painter Classic, Photoshop, and other paint programs. These are good, solid filters that perform things that would take you a lot of time to do manually, such as creating buttons and drop shadows. Of the thousands of plug-ins available, Eye Candy is the one to get if you can only get one set. 
