A nifty tool, but for whom?

Alien Skin has released another updated product, Blow Up 3, that has only one major downside: price.

Most of the company’s add-ons for Photoshop are aimed at graphics professionals and the $199 price tag makes sense. Blow Up, however, is one that would be valuable to consumers if the price were less expensive.

As the name implies, Blow Up allows users to resize photos, It uses more sophisticated technology that Photoshop’s standard tools, thereby allowing you to make photos larger without losing quality. When you blow up a digital photo, the density of the pixels (the “dots” of image data) in the original image is diffused and the conversion software needs to extrapolate data to ensure that the image quality is maintained.

Not only does Blow Up resize, it will also as part of a one-step process crop and fit to standard web and photo paper sizes. It does so in a very user friendly fashion, making it accessible to non-professionals. In fact, the major advance in version 3 is that the process is now so automated and intuitive, anyone who can use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements will find Blow Up easy to use.

The ability to resize photos is as important to average users as pros. Maybe even more so.

These days consumers routinely take shots from cellphone cameras, which lack the close-up, wide-angle, or telephoto lens of pro cameras. As a practical matter, then, you often wind up with a photo that depicts a much bigger area than you actually want. So you will want to crop down to the piece that is really of interest. However, a significant crop will reduce the pixel density beyond what is required for a quality print. You need to blow the picture back up to ensure that there is enough digital information for your printer.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and all that. I took an early morning photo off my balcony with my iPhone. Shot captured a moody cloud cover handing over the skyline of Boston in the background. Picture was way too big to upload to this blog, so in this case is needed to be blown down, which Blow up accomplished in roughly three mouse clicks:

It’s not immediately apparent that the Boston skyline is there -- it’s just a row of shapes along the horizon. So I did a crop with Blow Up that put the landmark Prudential Center at center-left and the John Hancock Building further to the left:

The end result was the equivalent of a telephoto lens shot taken without the telephoto.

Simple. Useful. Works with Photoshop Elements as well as the full version of Photoshop. I cannot give it a 100% endorsement because of the price. However, if it does fit into your budget, Blow Up 3 will greatly enhance your ability to tweak everyday cellphone and point-and-shoot photos into more sophisticated shots.

Make Art a Snap

I have to confess up front that I am a sucker for photo art programs. So spending $200 Alien Skin’s new Snap Art 3 software is something that may make more sense to me than to you.

Alien Skin’s software is aimed at graphics professionals. However, consumers who are serious about working with photographs will find many of their products worthwhile. Their Image Doctor 2, for example, is pretty much a must have. Its toolbox allows users to easily retouch imperfections and unwanted elements out of photographs. Blow Up (for preserving image quality when enlarging) is another helpful tool.

Snap Art is not quite as necessary, but it is one that lets you modify photos for a variety of purposes. Professionals use it to do photo illustrations, advertisements, and the like. Consumers might use it to create greeting cards, cover pages, content for digital picture frames, or as graphics for presentations and documents. It allows you to stylize a photo that lends impact to your work.

Snap Art installs as a plug-in to Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and other photo editors. The first version of the software was very similar to the tools that come with Photoshop, albeit with more presets and options to allow users to get to a desired effect more easily. In version 2, Alien Skin redid the program so that its output would be added to a Photoshop file as a separate layer. This allowed user to then use the Photoshop layering tools to dial down the artistic effect if desired.

Now in version 3, Snap Art adds masking and layering within the tool itself. This change makes it absurdly simple for amateurs to turn photos into simulated paintings and illustrations. Alien Skin as a set of excellent video tutorial videos on its website to help you along.

Having just noted Steve Jobs’s resignation as Apple CEO, let’s use his official portrait:

It’s a nice photo, really pretty usable as it is. Apple’s PR department gave it the file name “jobs_hero,” and that’s its one problem: the photo is a little iconic. One might prefer something a little less formal.

Enter Snap Art. The two photos below are the same portrait run through the software:

Following the tutorial’s instruction, I used a double-masking approach. One mask for Jobs’s face, the other for just his eyes. This allows you to sharpen the detail in places where it is needed, such as the eyes, while softening other parts of the photo such as his beard and the signature black turtleneck. Heightening the detail in the eyes is particularly important here because that penetrating stare is essential to the portrait.

For the first one, I used the “pastel portrait” tool. It softens the image and to me makes Jobs look a little more thoughtful and a little less intense. However, reduced to a size that fits this blog, the changes are not as obvious as one might like.

So for the second, I went with a “pencil sketch” look, which is more abstract and stylized as well as being black-and-white. With the pencil effect, the Jobs stare would have been totally lost if it weren’t for the ability to mask the eyes. With the mask, Jobs continues to project his laser-like focus.

Professional effects that can be executed by someone who is most definitely not a graphics professional. It makes Snap Art 3 a leading product in its niche.

The Man Who Made Things Simple

Years ago a PR guy associated with the original Star Trek TV series wrote about one of producer Gene Roddenberry’s key concepts: In an action show, a character pulls a gun and shoots someone. In sci-fi, however, typically the character spends time explaining the physics of the weapon, then shoots someone. Star Trek, Roddenberry decreed, would not interrupt action sequences with technobabble. Captain Kirk would just shoot the phaser.

Which is pretty much the genius of Steve Jobs.

When you are writing a letter or a memo, your objective is to write, not to experiment with advanced technology. What you want from your computer or software is for it to make it as easy as possible to get your writing done.

A famous ad for the early version of Apple’s iMac had the punchline: “there is no step three.” Steps one and two being to plug it in and hook up the modem to a phone line. This was a cheat, by the way, you also have to plug in the keyboard and mouse. But the point was still that the iMac was designed to let a user get up and running in the fewest amount of steps.

Yes, there is a lot of hype and glitz associated with Apple products. For years I steered clear of them believe them to be overpriced, overrated, and oversold by its legion of cult-like fans.

Then I got a Mac to test for a review, and it turned out it was easier to use.

That principle -- the user wants to shoot the gun, not have to figure out how to shoot it -- shaped Apple’s product lineup: Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, iEverything.

The iPod illustrates the point. The iPod is elegantly simple on many levels. At a time when users were transitioning from physical media for music, the iPod and companion iTunes software made the process of getting a song into your hands to play fast and simple. It made the task of managing and accessing a large music library fast and simple. It made the transaction of buying digital music fast and simple -- and reasonably priced. As a business proposition, it turned Apple from a computer company to a media company and pretty much set the company on the road to challenging Exxon-Mobil as the corporation with the largest market capitalization on earth.

Not everything Jobs touched has turned to gold. In the current product lineup, for example, the Apple TV is a product that has yet to find its market niche. The iWork productivity suite (Keynote presentation, Pages word processing, Numbers spreadsheets) have yet to evolve into products that are as easy to use as they should be. Apple has had a fair share of flops. But as Hiawatha Bray In The Boston Globe and Nick Schulz in the National Review both wrote, Jobs has an extraordinary ability to learn from failure and rebound.

Taming a Lion

David Pogue nicely captures the inspiration Apple's new "Lion" operating system drew from the iPad and its OS. If you have an iPad (or iPhone or iPod Touch, all of which use the iOS system).

One point he didn't make: alternating between Mac and Windows will now be more confusing.

Mac and Windows essentially reverse the functions of the "control" and "alt" (Windows)/"command" (Mac) keys. Many keyboard shortcuts, such as saving, involve those keys. Saving a file is "command + s" on a Mac and "control + s" on a Windows PC. We are all creatures of habit, and if you switch back and forth between the two systems, you constantly mix up the keystrokes.

Lion now changes the way the you scroll especially on notebook touch pads, so that what used to be an upward scroll on both Mac and Windows now requires scrolling down on Lion. As all reviewers have noted, this messes with your mind when you first use the new Apple OS.

While you may eventually adjust your habits if you stick to an all-Apple world, going back and forth from Windows to Mac will leave you permanently confused.

In Apple Upgrade, Steps Forward, Stumbles Backward - State of the Art - NYTimes.com

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Peter Falk ("Colombo") RIP

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Peter Falk, ‘Columbo’ Actor, Dies at 83 - NYTimes.com

Peter Falk, ‘Columbo’ Actor, Dies at 83 - NYTimes.com