 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
|
 | | |
by Gary David Bouton The following programs and mini-applications can be downloaded from the sites indicated in the text, and most of the items are fully functional and only have a time limit in which you can use them on your machine. I don't know what to say about CorelXARA except that I'm a seasoned CorelDRAW user (I've written three books on DRAW), and from the moment I first laid hands on XARA in 1996, I stopped using CorelDRAW. The program is a vector drawing application that thinks it's a paint program. This is a full-featured design creation program that i/us has discounted to $99 (anywhere in the world). XARA has an internal GIF animation feature, and it exports images to JPG and GIF format by first converting the vector designs to bitmap format.
As far as a Web tool is concerned, XARA rivals Adobe Photoshop, at about one-sixth the price. If you feel more comfortable drawing paths and filling them than dragging a paint brush around a canvas, you will not outgrow this program, and the moment you use it, you'll see that it's the choice of novices and professionals alike. You can download a fully functional trial version at the Xara site.[Editor´s note: We used CorelXara to create all the graphics here on eFuse.com and cannot recommend this program highly enough. It´s easy, fast, powerful and creates the smoothest, most professional-looking graphics for the web. If you only want to invest in one graphics program, this should be that program.]PhotoImpact is a complete paint program at a reasonable price. This program can easily become the core of your graphics toolkit, while the other applications listed in this article are utilities, or can plug into the host application. PhotoImpact has layers, channel masks (channels is an image where you can save a selection and load it later), a lot of special effects tools, and a drag and drop, palette-style interface. In the image above, you can see that I've created text, made it look dimensional by simply playing with the
interface's toolbox controls, and dragged the Blue Noise texture onto the text to apply the texture. PhotoImpact has so many native features that you'd want to run the program with a screen resolution of 800x600 or greater. The program also takes Adobe Standard plug-ins, but again, the program ships with so many of its own cool effects, you might never wind up buying plug-ins for this program. It's also worthwhile to mention here that Ulead
originally designed a program called PhotoStyler, and it was distributed by Aldus Corp. (acquired by Adobe Systems about four years ago). PhotoStyler was a very well-respected, Windows-only image editing application, and PhotoImpact shows some of PhotoStyler's strong points, while allowing the program to mature to a very powerful 1998 bitmap application. Download a trial version at There is a world of difference between PaintShop Pro version 3... which JASC still sells, and the steroid-driven PaintShop Pro version 5. PSP3 includes tools for painting and editing (previous versions did not), and will accept 16-bit 3rd party Adobe Standard plug-ins. Figure 32 is of PaintShop Pro version 3's interface. The disadvantage of PSP3 lies in its tools. Quite simply, they are not as advanced as MetaCreation's $99 Painter Classic,
so if you're into image editing, Painter Classic would be my choice over PSP3. Additionally, there's a lot of special effects you can perform in Painter Classic that come with the program. You might find it hard in the days of Windows 98 and NT to find a 16-bit version of a specific plug-in for PSP3. And PSP3 does not read or write long file names.
This is one of the programs you'll need to create animated banners and all of those little graphics that dance on Web pages to call attention to special areas on the page. Use them to point out new content, to amuse, or to highlight mail-to links. Naturally, you need source material for the animation utility. You can design still images in a paint or drawing program, or you can render still images from a modeling/rendering program. The least expensive GIF animator is free
, and you can download it from Ulead System's site at If you've never created an animated GIF image before, it would be a good idea to read the documentation (the Help line, "Getting Started") for Ulead GIF Animator LE before you begin. It's necessary (and also makes sense<g>) to have
still frames that are all the same dimension. The LE (Lite Edition) of GIF Animator offers transparency for the animation—if the GIF files you import have transparency information and if you can interlace the animation to make it download faster. Other features let you tweak your images even further. One sets the interval between successive images being displayed. The other is a replacement method that lets you decide whether images are displayed one on top of another (this is
an interesting but usually irritating visual effect) or whether each image is displayed after the screen is redrawn (the previous image is erased from screen). Although you'll find several "nags" in GIF Animator LE to purchase the full version ($39), this free utility is fully functional, and there's no expiration date.
XARA, Ltd., has a text animation program that is a little less
on the glitzy side than Ulead's text animator, but it's the same price and offers a few more manual controls over the final appearance of the animation. You can download a time-limited trial version of XARA 3D from Xara.com If you want to do some really wild stuff with either application, I suggest finding a font that's a symbol font, such as WingDings, and typing a few characters into the text field
box. Better yet, find someone whose profession (OK, or hobby) is to create fonts that consist of corporate logos, and before you know it, you'll have animations of logos, very kindred to the ubiquitous "flying logos" on television! Both Ulead and XARA's text animators are fun, and I'd recommend either one—download the trial versions and see how you feel about the interface and the "look" of the animated text that's produced.
The difference between JPEG and GIF compression For those of you who are not familiar with file compression, the JPG format accomplishes compression by averaging
colors in the image. It casts away subtle nuances your viewing audience might not even notice. GIF achieves compression by throwing out specific colors. The GIF format can only hold 256 colors, and scanned images and painted designs typically contain 16.7 million colors. The trick with GIFs is to use a process called error diffusion to "simplify" the representation of the original image by using colors that are a close match—but not perfect.
As a designer, I've been using SmartSaver since its introduction to the market almost two years ago, and I would not be without this product for exporting small, detailed images from their originals.
You can download the trial version of JPEG Optimizer from Additional tools for Windows OK, OK, I know the programs in this section are not design programs, or HTML utilities, and they might not fit into your budget, but they are really cool! You might not need cutting-edge Web media creation tools right now, but you'll find these next two programs to be extremely inviting. Button-making for navigation controls on your site will never be the same once you've worked with WebTools. You can download a trial version at AnfyJava is a collection of 20 Java applets that you can customize. OK, what is a "Java applet"? Java is a platform-independent programming language. This means Macintosh and UNIX users will see the results of a Java applet in their browser exactly the same way Windows users
do. The creator of AnfyJava has created mini—programs that can be embedded in an HTML document. Java applets are not the same as JavaScripts. It takes a little extra effort to add a Java applet to a Web page. In other words, this is not for beginners, but it's not as hard as working with an Excel spreadsheet, and the asking price is $20—a buck an applet. You just can't beat the price.
Web Graphics Toolkit: |
| |
 |
|
|
| |
 |
For $99, you get more than an image editing program; Ulead
allows you, as a registere d user of PhotoIm pact 4, to download utilities from its site for free, which would ordinarily cost $39 or more as stand-alone utilities.
The advantag e of PSP3 is that it is small and quick. You can perform batch conversio ns of files, export GIF images with transpare nt backgrounds, and you can resize images without too much loss of detail (you can always use PSP3's Sharpen filter after resizing a graphic). 
WebStyle is for those who have a good artistic eye but haven't yet mastered a paint or a drawing package. It's completel y menu-dri ven. All you need to do is select elements, such as the background image, buttons, text on buttons, font types, and before you
know it, you have a color-coordinated, professional-looking set of bitmap images you can add to your Web page. Here you can see a button being created. I've chosen a light, textured background, a button with a stone surface, and a heavy weight font for the button. I didn't lift a paintbrush or pencil tool to accomplish this. All you need to do is pick and choose from the available styles in WebStyle, and then save the elements you've defined as GIF or JPG images. A trial
version can be downloaded at 
Here you can see the simplicity of Ulead GIF Animator LE. All you
need to do is open an image and then drag and drop files from a folder onto a pane in the application interface. The image is then added to the list of frames in the animation. Images need to be in BMP or GIF format to compile the animation.
There's a current slang for animations on the Web that do very little beyond moving around or flying through space. They are called "Dancing Baloney". At its worst, Ulead Cool 3D ($39) can produce an amazing amount of Dancing Baloney in a very short time, but if you use
the program with a little forethought and a good concept, this program can create amazing, extruded, animated text. You can download a trial version of Cool 3D from 
I highly recommend this program for people who have little or no design skill and really, really want animation on their Web site. It's menu-driven (you don't
have to know how to draw a straight line), and the results can be completely professional in appearance. The animation shown here is a simple, seven-frame animation created after about 30 seconds of playing with Cool 3D.
Like Cool 3D, XARA 3D allows you to direct lights on the text, import textures for the surface of the 3D text, and export your work as an animated GIF, or as a Video for Windows file. 
Wouldn't it be nice if you could actually see what compres sion does to the visual quality of images you want to post on the Web? One of the answers is Ulead SmartSaver ($39...it seems as though all
of Ulead's applets are $39!). This is a stand-alone application, or it can be used as a plug-in for applications that accept Adobe standard plug-ins. This utility is a boon to anyone who wants the best possible image for the smallest amount of file space. Compression is always a trade-off for image quality—the smaller the file, the less of the original image shows through. But with SmartSaver, you can preview GIF, JPG, and PNG images, and play "what-if" scenarios
within the utility's interface until you see which format, and the amount of compression and color reduction, best suits a specific image. 
This $29 utility won't convert images to GIF format as Ulead SmartSav er does, but it's also $10 less and makes compress ing JPG images goof-proo f. It's sort of a simplified , more automated version of SmartSaver. 
This is a suite of Adobe standard plug-ins that covers graphics creation and some HTML coding. The price for this suite of tools is $200, so this might not be your first purchase for your Web toolkit. However, the effects in SPG WebTools are completely original and a refreshing change from plug-ins that create drop shadows! The graphic to the right show the list of functions WebTools offers when it
is installed into Photoshop or an application that reads Photoshop-compliant plug-ins, such as PhotoImpact and CorelXARA.
As a small example of the power of these plug-ins, take a look at the picture to the left. This looks as if it was created in a 3D modeling program, right? Wrong! SPG WebTools has a utility that's a rendering program, with interesting
models provided for you to light, add texture to, and rotate in space before writing the 3D object to bitmap format.
Java applets can be "Dancing Baloney" at its worst, but this collection offers some very visually compelling effects you can add to your HTML pages with absolutely no programming background
required. Two of my favorites in this collection are the MenuCube, which displays a spinning cube with different links on each facet of the cube, and the BookFlip applet, which peels the current image on screen to reveal a new image (this is terrific for showing a thumbnail gallery of artwork with a minimum of Web page space). Here I've customized the MenuCube to display different menu items on an imaginary site. The visitor can drag on the cube to click on a
specific menu item, or if you don't touch the cube, it will spin slowly by itself.
