Product Reviews

Forget the cheesy page curl effect that shipped with Kai's Power Tools: this latest version of AVBros' Photoshop plug-in is a powerful, hugely customisable filter for creating folds and bends of all kinds.

At its most basic level, Page Curl will do just that: curl pages. Simple controls set the angle and up/down direction of the curl; further sliders set the level, radius, obliquity and torsion to create precisely the effect you need. It's all done with a real-time preview, so you don't need to look up obliquity and torsion in the user manual: just drag the sliders and see what happens.

Page Curl can use the current Photoshop layer to map onto the distorted surface, or it can load any layer in the current document - or an external file. You can choose separate images for the front and back, so the reverse side of a curl can show a different image to the front. Both front and back images can be flipped both vertically and horizontally, which makes the process of placing the reverse image far easier.

Folds, as well as curls, can be used in compositions. You can combine multiple folds and curls, as our example shows, to create complex transformations that can make flat artwork look truly three dimensional.

Although the main

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controls are enclosed within a single window, four further floating windows control additional aspects of the distortion. The Lighting panel offers a comprehensive set of controls for moving multiple light sources and adds optional shadows to the inside of curls. Diffuse reflection and specular reflection can make surfaces appear shiny, and you can apply the settings to the front, back or both.

The 3D Transform palette provides a simple and intuitive way to set the angle of view and rotation of the surface, together with a perspective slider. Again, real-time previews make it easy to position a surface accurately in 3D space.

Page Curl also includes a Bump Map palette, which uses alpha channels within the document or external files as the basis for the map. This works in a similar way to Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter, except Page Curl can tile or resize maps to fit the current artwork. Best of all, a Blur slider sets the smoothness of the raised edges.

Page Curl Pro is fully integrated with Photoshop CS3 and can be used within Smart Filters, which means you can set up a custom distortion for, say, a flag, a leaflet or a magazine spread, and then replace the contents at a later date. Most intriguing of all is that Page Curl can work with movies in the Extended edition of Photoshop, distorting each frame perfectly.

The only omission in this otherwise excellent plug-in is the ability to pan and zoom the image within the preview window. Frequently, a distortion or perspective view can mean the image exceeds the bounds of the original canvas, and is cropped when the filter is completed. The workaround is to export the image as a PSD.

Page Curl Pro is an impressive tool that's capable of spectacular results. Its additional features, such as bump mapping and 3D transformation, make it almost perfect.