Product Reviews

Once upon a time, scanned photographs were squared up on the page and fitted neatly into rectangular boxes defined by the grid. But greater integration between text and images has meant that pictures now interact with the printed page far more: text can appear reversed-out over dark areas of an image, or running around small picture elements that break out of the main frame.

When images are composited in Photoshop and the layout is completed in QuarkXPress, this can cause a problem. Just how dark should a shadow be for white text to read out of it? Will a protruding element interfere with a headline? What if the colours created in Photoshop clash with those in XPress? In the past, it was necessary to go back and forth between the two applications to iron out incompatibilities.

ImagePort is the first Quark XTension to enable you to place the original Photoshop image, rather than a flattened TIFF or EPS version, directly into the QuarkXPress page.

The ImagePort palette looks much like Photoshop's Layers palette, complete with Channels and Paths tabs that include all the data you'd expect to find there. Any alpha channels saved with the image are stored in the Channels tab; all the paths are stored under the Paths tab.

Most interesting, however, is the main Layers tab, which shows thumbnails of each layer in the illustration, together with any masks that may have been created. Just as if you were working in Photoshop, you can turn layers on or off, and show or hide their masks. More than that, you can set the opacity of each layer, and even change its apply mode - choosing from the standard range of Normal, Dissolve, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Hard Light, Soft Light, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Darken, Lighten, Difference, Exclusion, Hue, Saturation and Luminosity.

In practice, this means you can create shadows at 100% opacity in Photoshop, then lower

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the opacity in XPress once you've seen how white text reads on top of them. You can also create multiple image possibilities within a single document, placing elements in different places and creating colour washes, which can then be turned on and off at will once they're on the page. Multiple backgrounds can be stored within the file, so you could activate a different one for each page of a document, while keeping the foreground elements the same.

The Channels palette allows you to view (and print) a single colour channel from a document, or create special effects (such as varnishes and spot colours) in Photoshop and then output them to separate plates from XPress. The Paths palette can contain as many paths as you like, and these may be used either as clipping paths (in which case they isolate the area within the path and hide the rest) or as text runaround paths. ImagePort can place CMYK, RGB and grey-scale files, as well as multi-channel and indexed colour files.

The downside is that there are many limitations to ImagePort's functionality. You can't move layers around, which feels frustrating; nor can you group or ungroup layers. You would expect a palette that looks and feels just like Photoshop's to behave in the same way. So if you're not sure about the position of an element which sticks out of the frame, for instance, you'd have to create multiple versions of it in different locations and then hide all but the one you want to use.

ImagePort also can't cope with layers saved using Layer Effects, such as shadows and embosses, or with Adjustment Layers. When it tries to open a document containing these features, it warns you of the fact, and then places the image as a single composite layer.

ImagePort works quickly and smoothly with small images, and large files (100Mb or more) take a few seconds to display each compositing change. One occasional glitch was the incorrect display of layers with layer masks, although this was far from frequent and was easy to avoid by changing the original file.

These limitations aside, ImagePort is tremendously useful for such tasks as preparing a range of proofs for a client. All the variations can be stored in a single document and manipulated directly in XPress. Apart from the disk space saved by not having to render out individual TIFF files for each variation, the flexibility of being able to vary the image without bouncing back and forth between XPress and Photoshop is an enormous asset.