Graphic Tools! is an integrated set of image management tools for Windows. It is also one truly cool piece of software. This package allows you to convert images between different graphic formats, edit the images, assemble collections of images, apply special effects and capture images from the screen.
The Graphic Tools! package consists of the Media Manager, Image Processor, Convert and Capture. Media Manager displays the images in a collection as if they were pages of slides on a lightbox. You can add images to a collection from files on disk, directly from a scanner, or capture them from the screen. While in the Media Manager your images are displayed as thumbnails. You can change the default size of a thumbnail image, print the collection of images, or mark specific images to separate out from the collection.
Double clicking on an image in the Media Manager will load the image into the Image Processor where you can manipulate the image. There are many tools available for image manipulation. Standard drawing tools include pens, paint brushes, fills, and airbrushes. Some of the standard drawing tools have nonstandard properties. For example, you can set the brush to fade out while you draw, add a texture with the brush stroke, feather the brush stroke edges, or set the brush to affect only pixels lighter (or darker) than the added color. One of the cool tools here is the Clone Tool. To use this tool, you select an area of the picture. This area is then painted over the image when you draw with the brush. This is a great way to remove unwanted objects from scanned photos—just select an area similar to the desired background and paint the unwanted objects away!
In addition to the standard retouching tools you can apply filters to sharpen, soften or despeckle; add special effects like emboss or sculpt; enhance edges, pixelize, posterize (reduces the number of colors) or take the negative of any or all color channels. You can rotate images, flip them or transpose them. I received a document over a fax modem and it had been sent crooked. I was able to use the Rotate command (2 degrees counterclockwise) to get it correctly lined up before printing it out. (Did I mention Graphic Tools! understands 9 Fax formats, in addition to 12 Vector and 20 Bitmap formats?)
As part of my job, I suddenly had a need for a scanned photo in 24 bit color, Macintosh PICT format (did you ever have one of those days?). Graphic Tools! includes a Bonus CD full of sample images, both vector (mostly clip art) and bitmap (mostly TIFF). If you don't have a CD drive, a smaller collection is included on floppies. I was able to find a TIFF image we could use, but it was a little dark and muddy. Graphic Tools! quickly converted the image from TIFF to PICT, then I started to fix the contrast. This is made very easy by Graphic Tools!'s use of Test Strips. Test strips are similar to the Variations Tool in Adobe Photoshop.
In my case, I could vary the Contrast, Brightness and Gamma (Gamma is a way of varying the contrast only in the darkest area of the image). At this point, I had three variables to adjust and didn't know where the optimal settings were. I changed the Brightness to remove the dark and muddy look, then needed to vary the Contrast and Gamma to get rid of the washed out look I'd just created. Test Strips are a collection of thumbnail images used to test many new setting simultaneously. I was happy with the brightness, so I decided to vary both the Contrast and Gamma. Graphic Tools! prompted me for the range of Contrast and Gamma to use. Gamma runs from 0.1 to 9.7 and Contrast from 0 to 100%. I decided on 1 to 8 for Gamma and 20-80% for Contrast. I decided to use a 4x4 matrix for the Test Strips. Selecting the two or three best images gave me a much narrower range to use for the next iteration. After two iterations I had a much brighter image that had good contrast. I transferred it on a floppy to my Mac and was off and running.
Graphic Tools! has scanner support as well.
Convert will change the format on images. It can be run in a batch mode, and you can write scripts for it. Convert can also change the color depth of images, or switch from color to gray scale or monochrome. The Raster command will convert a vector drawing into a bitmap image, or the Trace command can be used to convert a bitmap into a vector drawing.
Capture is the screen capture utility. Once again, there are many nonstandard features. To begin with, there are five ways to specify the area. You can chose the entire screen, the active window, a rectangular area, a freehand region or by typing in coordinates. If you select the rectangular area, Capture displays the size of the image in pixels while you drag the selection region. Capture works off a user-definable hot key or by clicking its icon. You can choose whether you want capture hidden when you capture the screen. You can also direct the output to another of the Graphic Tools! applications, the Windows Clipboard, the Printer, or a file. If a file, you can pick the format you want to save as, and whether you want to be prompted for a filename at the time of creation.
All in all, I found this to be a great application. It was fun to use, had a lot of powerful features and a good interface. It even had good documentation. What more could you want? Graphic Tools! was the Expert's Pick top-rated Integrated Graphics Application in the May 1994 issue of Windows Sources. It retails for $169.95 from DeltaPoint. While it may not be in the class of a high-end photo-processing package, neither is the price. If you work with images you need a product like this.
