In fact, the special price is usually a myth. I'm glad that one big company failed to process my application for three upgrades to a certain program we use every day to design magazines, at £150 per serial number - we survived, and six months later the price is down to £99. It was more like a limited period introductory HIGH price offer!
Recently I have spent well over £500 on special software offers, two purchased from a DTP Resource CD-ROM issued by Monotype Systems but including software mainly from the Adobe stable. The advertising blurb and specification description was persuasive - here was one package, called ArtScan, which promised to drive most popular desktop scanners to ultimate quality and replace clunky Photoshop plug-ins; here was a complete set of CMYK conversions from Kodak, to give us control over ink densities on our pages.
The total cost of these two was around £180, unlocked off the CD-ROM disc instantly - Monotype were very efficient, and took my credit card details in exchange for de-encryption codes over the phone.
The ArtScan package has so far proved entirely useless. Despite having
Microtek, Apple, Agfa and Sharp drivers in the demo package the only
scanner it works with is our Nikon Scantouch, which already has a much
faster and better plug-in. It won't run the Microtek Scanmaker III, did
not work with our Sharp JX-600 because it was a GPIB connected model
instead of SCSI, failed to recognise an Agfa Focus Colour Plus, and
assumes all Apple scanners are greyscale only and were made before 1992.When it does run, ArtScan is complex, memory-hungry, slow and hard to control. The majority of scanners it supports are makes common in the USA two to three years ago - it does't provide the vital upgrade to older commonly-found scanners like the Sharp and Agfa, and fails to drive brand new models any better than the much improved plug-ins now issued by Microtek, Umax and others.
A month or two later, we purchased three Apple Colour OneScanner units at the knock-down price of £190 each. What we didn't realise is that these otherwise excellent Hewlett-Packard based single pass colour scanners come with no Photoshop plug-in available. Instead, a supposedly superior scanning package called Ofoto 2.0 is bundled - another of those programs you can also buy separately to run many other types of scanner.
Ofoto is slow, cumbersome, loaded with bells and whistles but lacking simple direct control. It certainly works, and does many things which a Photoshop plug-in rarely offers, but impedes productivity in the process. Then we remembered the ArtScan plug-in. Surely that package - which had proved to have no use in a studio full of different scanners - would be bound to drive the Color OneScanner properly?
Unfortunately, ArtScan was not able to recognise the 'Colour' bit and added insult by identifying most colour photographs as line art when set to its automatic mode.
There is only one scanning program which we have used and tested which consistently adds real speed and functionality to everyday scanners, and that is Cirrus from the German software house Canto (marketed by Computers Unlimited). The earlier versions, without ColorSync and complex auto-sensing of modes and image areas, are in some ways superior to the later versions. If you turn off all the extras, and use the latest version in a purely manual mode, you get photographic quality control of scan input without interference from some programmer's half-baked idea of how colours should really be reproduced.
Cirrus really does run all those oddball scanners - Rollei Scanbacks, Sharp A3 scanners, Ricoh, Seimens, Agfa Focus, early Microtek, you name it. As each version is released they also seem able to add new models swiftly. It will operate as a Photoshop or XPress plug-in, but one or two of its better functions are removed in this mode, and in practice it is best operated as a stand-alone program with the benefit of multiple scan frames.
After a month of experiment, we're back on that standard setting - all the £69 did was to produce some variations to existing colours, with unpredictable results, and insert these conversions into new PageMaker documents. I'm sure the profiles have some practical use, but as is so often the case they could not improve on something which was apparently right to start with.
This is one of the main reasons why bolt-on programs, enhancements, plug-ins and miracle cures are rarely worth buying. Generally, you would need to have a specific common failing present in your digital photographic work before considering buying a program designed to correct flawed scan files. People who find it impossible to get decent colours from their Photo-CD images may find the Kodak CMS profiles extremely valuable - but our scans are generally well corrected straight off the scanner, as a result of setting the correct white point, black point, and contrast (gamma) curve. These three settings are all that a scanner of decent quality should need to produce perfect results.
Still, along came the Adobe Shop catalogue, and in it was a special bundle from Extensis, a company specialising in add-ons and plug-ins. One of the packages on offer, PageTools for PageMaker, offered one function we desperately needed - the ability to assign a typestyle from a menu to a single character or word. The normal "Style" menu alters entire paragraphs at a time, but for typesetting catalogues, tables and forms it is worth spending £99 on a package of enhancements just to get character-level style commands.
The same company offered Intellihance, a Photoshop plug-in which uses a
single before-and-after comparison screen and some adjustable alogrithms
to post-process scanned images in a single operation. Despeckling,
sharpening, colour saturation boost, white and black points, and tone
scale adjustments are all handled in a single fairly fast action and the
plug-in has automatic presets for beginners, plus full manual control for
experts.
This was another £99. Still, for buy these two, and we could have a third plug-in kit, this time for Adobe Illustrator. Another £200 wings its way out of the accounts, and a very slim package containing all three arrives. Bright readers will understand that we just paid the price of a full program for a few bolt-on bits - but that is how this after-market postal vending works.
PageTools is not really within the scope of Photon's coverage. Suffice it to say that it eats a little extra screen space, and has far too many icon-click boxes for shortcuts which were already tackled better by keystrokes. Hidden within this cumbersome overcrowding of repeated features from the main PageMaker program are two or three critically valuable functions missing from the original program. It does however increase the frequency of PageMaker crashes, specifically when using Printer Styles.
Intellihance is a different matter. If your scans or digital pictures are good to start with, it can do little to improve them. But... in the case of our Agfa Focus Colour Plus scanner, now fairly old and with idiosyncratic results from slides, it can transform raw scans into very well corrected work. Intellihance therefore went to Andy's Mac and now gets used regularly. It would not be of any use on our LeafScan or Nikon scanner systems, because the results from these higher-end and more modern scanners are finely tuned to start with.
As for the Illustrator add-on pack - well, we have to have Illustrator, but anyone who bought this program thinking they could do something simple like draw the outline of a cogwheel for an engineering client would be disappointed. Illustrator is the most uselessly dysfunctional yet indispensable program. It is almost impossible to draw any diagram quickly or intuitively in Illustrator. Every package of plug-ins I have so far bought for Illustrator has caused repeated crashes so we haven't even bothered to load up the Extensis one we have paid for.
I have tried the other end of the market, expensive colour scan correction software like Cachet, Color Quartet, Binuscan, Monaco Color and CoCo. Without exception I have found them superfluous to requirements; if the scan or digital picture data is poor to start with, no program can actually add missing data, all it can do is redistribute tones and interpolate values. This is no substitute for correct scanning to start with, and that depends on having a photographer's insight into what highlights, midtones and shadows should look like. As none of these programs actually measures a pre-scan and sends adjusted commands to the scanner - they all let the scanner run 'raw' then analyse and rework the resulting scan - they don't tackle the problem of getting better quality at its source. They are like printing programs designed to deal with poor negatives, when we all know that the solution is to make a good neg.
My final comment is that nearly all the bolt-on, plug-in, extension software I have bought or tried has been one version behind the latest release of its host program or OS. They all tend to increase the frequency of crashes and hangs, and these can be so frustrating that you end up removing your new purchase a month after installing it. You may, however, find one of these small programs does answer a vital need - and how else can you find out, unless you buy them and use them?
Return to Photon August 96 contents