Product Reviews

When Apple introduced Mac OS X 10.4, it included a number of technologies designed to help developers of third-party applications build rich tools without having to reinvent the wheel each time. One such technology is Core Image, a bundle of tricks that provides developers with a range of ready-made filters and plug-ins - Image Units - and offloads the rendering of these effects from the CPU to the GPU in the card that drives your monitor. The practical upshot of this is that you should begin to see applications appearing that include rich graphics handling abilities and can render in real time.

However, BeLight Software decided that just the graphical processing abilities in Tiger were compelling enough to build an entire application around, and quickly launched Image Tricks as a relatively simple GUI 'wrapper' for Image Core. Now at version 2, this little software title deserves a big following.

Like other applications from the Ukrainian development house, Image Tricks 2 looks very slick: icons, buttons and application behaviour are all commendably 'OS X', and the help files, while admittedly a little thin and written in English that's occasionally erratic, are properly integrated into OS X's own help infrastructure.

So what can it do, and who is it for? It's marketed as a fun, quirky application, but while in reality it poses no practical threat to Photoshop or even the open-source Gimp, there's plenty here to impress the pros as well as entertain everybody.

The application operates in two modes - Filters and Generators - and you can switch between modes from a set of tabs at the top of the left pane.

The filters provide the core functionality, and while little has changed here since the first version, they're stunning. Image Tricks doesn't give you access to the entire range of Core Image's manipulation tricks

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(see www.apple.com), but you do get lots of useful and fun ones.

They're split into seven sections: colour, focus, distortion, style, halftone, tile and lumine. The colour tools are particularly handy, encompassing good basic colour manipulation, along with exposure, gamma, hue and white point adjustment, as well as some special effects. Focus gives you an unsharp mask tool, along with Gaussian blur, motion blur and zoom blur.

All tools have controls associated with them, and with zoom blur and others, you define the focal point for the effect by clicking on the image.The distortion controls are less useful, but fun, and on a powerful Mac, moving bumps and whirls around in real time looks impressive. A glass distortion option, similar to Photoshop's distortion map feature, lets you define any image to act as a distortion map.

Other filters give you other special effects, and you can layer up adjustments. Images can have masks applied to them to add frame effects. Commendably, Image Tricks creates images with proper transparency, so you can drop irregularly edged pictures onto coloured backgrounds at will. The supplied frames are good, but if you're confident, you can easily add your own greyscale images to Image Tricks' Application Support folder to expand your options.

Generators are the big new feature in Image Tricks 2 and the results are technically good but we're stumped as to who would find them useful or even interesting. You define what type of pattern you want to generate, change a few parameters and click Render. The results will be different with each click, although you can step back and forward through generated images.

BeLight Software has introduced a Pro version of Image Tricks 2, which, at a little over £5, is hardly extortionate, but since the only difference is the addition of yet more Generator types, we're not sure how well this charging experiment will go.

Ultimately, though, Image Tricks 2 is still a fantastic application, even just on the strength of its filters. The touted iPhoto integration is a little ungainly - although you could define Image Tricks as iPhoto's external editor - the new Generators are of questionable usefulness, and you do need the latest version of the Mac OS. However, it's free and more than capable of producing some superb practical and fun results. Download it today.