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Photogenics - the next generation in photo editing

CGI Magazine Reviews Photogenics 5.0

(This article originally appeared in the August 2001 issue of CGI Magazine, and is reproduced with permission from it's author, Alistair Dabbs)

Photogenics 5.0

Independently developed mask-based photo editor lets you paint and mix special effects with a hands-on brush technique

Imagine painting some strokes over a photo image. You decide the paint colour is wrong, so you change it. Hang on, no, you really wanted to apply a filter effect there. Or a burn/dodge enhancement. Or perhaps you want to paint through the image to reveal another layer behind it. Now imagine you can do any of these things without ever having to repaint those original strokes. Welcome to Photogenics, a radical alternative choice in bitmap image editing.

Choice isn't a big issue when it comes to paint packages. Adobe's Photoshop covers such a wide range of tasks that there are almost no alternatives on the market any more. Only niche packages survive, such as Corel's Painter for artists, Macromedia Fireworks for Web designers and Photo-Paint for those on low budgets. Besides, if Photoshop can't do it, there's probably a Photoshop plug-in somewhere that can. So where does Photogenics fit in?

The appeal in the program is its hands-on approach to working. While Photoshop is principally based around layers and selections and lets you create masks for layers and transparency effects, Photogenics uses masks as its core painting interface. The principal tool in Photogenics is the paintbrush, which is used for applying everything from colour to filters to adjustment effects. You never apply these effects to selections: you paint them on directly.

The whole process is transparent to the user because there's no fuss having to set up masks attached to particular layers, as in Photoshop. Instead, you just dive in and start painting, adding layers as required along the way.

Better still, you can un-paint your strokes simply by right-clicking as you drag the mouse. So having drawn several strokes, you can fine-tune the result by right-dragging 'removal' strokes over them all, not just the last stroke you drew. To keep effects or paint colours separate, you just add another layer for each. Of course, the package supports conventional multiple undos as well. But the paint and un-paint combination leaves Photoshop's History Brush looking clumsy by comparison.

As hinted in our opening paragraph, Photogenics allows a certain measure of play before committing yourself to what effect your strokes will have. Clicking on the light-bulb button in the main toolbar across the top puts everything into an experimental mode. While in this mode, you can change the colours, brush style and filter effects of your strokes in that particular mask. Once you're happy with the result, you just click on the light-bulb again to complete.

The program interface is clean and uncluttered. As well as the single-row button bar at the top there is a tabbed Options palette for managing brush types, layers and masks, colours and so on. The palette is floating and the individual tabs can be torn off and floated separately if you insist.

It's possible to work in multiple window views of one file. That's nothing new, but very unusually the views can be of particular layers, not just different zoom levels and locations. You can switch between layers and any multiple masks you have secured as alpha channels using the big, friendly pop-up thumbnails in the Options palette. A similar pop-up presents a set of brush types to choose from, with airbrush being the default. Alternatives include crayon, pencil and various smudges for Painter-like real-media effects, plus a set of clever special-effect light brushes which produce results such as lens flares, neon lights, explosions and flames.

Painting with filter effects is much more powerful than you might at first think. At its most basic level, Photogenics lets you use a paintbrush to apply the equivalent of Photoshop's adjustment layer effects - burns, dodges, multiplies, subtractions, colour switches and so on. But with over 70 filters to play with, there's potential for some very nifty effects you would find hard to reproduce any other way. For example, try to imagine applying gaussian blurs, posterisation or mosaic filters freehand with a paintbrush.

Otherwise, you can still create a simple gradient transparency mask over an entire layer, or apply a filter to it. In fact, there are a couple of buttons at the top which come in handy for other full-image effects. One applies a selected effect to the complete picture in one go, while the other wipes the mask clean without you having to un-paint it out.

There's plenty of other useful features packed in to the program, including Web format export with previews and compression slider controls, a workable text tool, and thumbnail previews in the Browse window. We should also add that Photogenics is a damn fast product: not only has it been written to be highly efficient (the download itself is only 1.5Mb), it handles all your paintstrokes and special effects in real-time. And we really do mean in real-time, not via preview panes or just after a few seconds wait.

The best way to get a feel for what Photogenics is all about is to try out the downloadable demo for yourself, available in Windows, Linux and Amiga varieties. It's certainly not going to turf Photoshop off your computer, least of all for standard image correction and prepress, but it's easily the better choice for original creative work. There's no setting up of modes and layers or fiddling with a dozen selection tools - you just jump right in with your paintbrush. Sure, the full depth of the program will take a bit of learning, but costing less than a mere commercial plug-in, Photogenics 5.0 is probably the most compelling purchase in photo image editing you'll see this year.

Copyright 2001 Alistair Dabbs

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