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These web tools are a 23-items set, targeting the web's daily requirements. They fall into categories :
- on the "cool effects" side, you have a Flare FX Renderer, a very good flare effect that comes with a number of presets and settings to play with, which makes a good compromise between
Genesis VFX and Photoshop's default ; a 3D Text Renderer for inserting 3D texts in your images, that does the job nicely even if it does not have the ability to flow the text along a curve like
Vertigo's 3D HotText (together with a poor texture management) ; and a similar 3D Object Renderer that only accepts .3ds models (3D Studio format) and gives quite a poor result.
on the pure HTML side, 3 utilities for cleaning and automatically creating image tags in HTML code, and creating the HTML code for rollovers, the kind of utilities that is not essential but can save time (depending on the HTML editor you work with).
on the utilities side, a simple Animated GIF player; a nice Image Browser that adds to PS a couple of useful features (such as drag-and-drop to PS's desktop) ; a JPEG Cleaner designed to reduce the loss in quality from JPG compression, but without much results as far as I have seen ; and finally, the Web Image Spider, not directly useful as a PS plugin, since it simply gathers all the images in a given URL ;
and finally, five utilities for web images : a simple GIF Animator that can use the above 3 Renderers to animate 3D text, 3D objects or flares in your animation ; the Web Background Renderer, an interesting utility that can create seamless backgrounds from standard motifs (sand, bars, etc), but with its downside : all backgrounds tend to be quite standard ; the Image Cutter should fill a lot of needs, helping you turn your image into lots of pieces and generating the HTML code, you can even compress differently the different parts of the image ; the Image Mapper just sticks to its name ; and in the end, the Web Saver helps compressing the images, without too many options and a honest result.
On the whole, this leaves you with an impressive number of tools, even if all are not really useful or efficient. The suite as a whole has a little downside : the interface is ugly, but a great idea : most tools can be called one by the other, and you can launch several copies of the same one, so that you can try different settings, for example with the web savers.
In the end, a very good suite for the web and a promising challenger to
Ulead's Web Razor, let's just hope it gets better with next release... |
