Product Reviews

QuarkVista is a new XTension for QuarkXPress that lets you apply filter effects and colour adjustments to placed images directly on the page. Not yet released, QuarkVista will only be offered as part of the forthcoming XPress 6.2, which is to be a free upgrade for existing users. It was first publicly demonstrated back in May during the Drupa print show, and here we review it in beta form.

Developed in response to Adobe's Creative Suite mantra of integration, the XTension offers an alternative solution: why run two integrated programs when you only need to use one? The scenario is that you have laid out your page designs and need to make alterations to the bitmap images already placed - for example, to adjust the colour or apply an unsharp mask. Currently, you would use the Edit Original command to re-open the images in Photoshop. QuarkVista, on the other hand, saves you the trouble of switching to Photoshop at all.

Instead, the XTension gives you access to image adjustments and filters directly within your page layout. Based roughly on their Photoshop equivalents, these are applied and managed using a new Picture Effects floating palette. Additionally, the XTension lets you apply the adjustments and filters from the Style menu or from the contextual menu when you control-click on a selected image in your layout.

The Picture Effects palette is intuitive. All the adjustment and filter choices are available from a pair of pop-up menu buttons at the top. Clicking on the Adjustments button lets you choose between Levels, Curves, Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance, Hue/Saturation, Selective Color, Gamma Correction, Threshold and Posterize. Each of these launches its own dialog and optionally updates the image preview on your page as you tweak the settings before clicking OK. The same goes for the commands under the Effects pop-up menu: Gaussian Blur, Unsharp Mask, Solarize, Diffuse, Emboss, Embossing Effects, Edge Detection, Trace Contour, Add Noise and Median. There are also simple one-pass effects that require no settings,

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such as Find Edges and Despeckle.

Basically, if you know how to use these effects in Photoshop, you already know how to use them in QuarkVista. The interfaces are not identical but they're generally similar.

Each effect you apply appears along with its settings in a list in the palette. To change the order of the effects, just drag them up or down. To change the settings for a particular effect, double-click on its name. To disable an effect, remove the tick next to its name. To remove an effect from the list, select it and click on the dustbin button.

The Picture Effects palette lets you save effect combinations to independent preset files so they can be reloaded and applied to other images. Another nice feature is an Info section offering precise pixel-colour data in RGB and CMYK as you pass the cursor over any image to which you have applied an effect.

Quark has designed the XTension to be non-destructive: the effects aren't automatically written back to your source image files but are saved as part of your XPress data. You can still save the edits to your source images at any time, individually or all pictures at once, or have QuarkVista generate entirely new images and update the page links automatically.

Your options at this point are determined using the Picture Export Options dialog. In addition to the above choices, you can toggle individual adjustments and filters on or off, and even apply your picture box transformations as image edits - that is, scale, rotation, skew and crop. You can even change the image file format and colour mode in this dialog, although we wouldn't recommend it because of potential compression artifacts and colour shifts.

Naturally, there are some beta glitches. The effect previews often take time to refresh while editing hi-res images, and sometimes look a bit weird; the beta XTension is also prone to crashing XPress. Thankfully, these are all 'known issues' in the beta. However, the big limitation is that the effects apply uniformly to whole images: QuarkVista can't work with separate selections, layers or alpha channels. For this, you still need to run the Edit Original command and make changes in Photoshop.

On the other hand, the enhancements QuarkVista brings to XPress are far better than we had expected. This isn't a useless gimmick for shifting brightness and contrast, but the real deal for imaging professionals. The feature set is properly implemented, the Picture Export options are well thought-out, and the edited images it generates are good. Contrary to all previous expectations, XPress 6.2 now seems an exciting prospect.