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October, 2005
By: Jim Heid
The program is BeLight Software's Image Tricks,
and it lets you easy modify and stylize photos in a variety of fun ways.
Drag a photo into the Image Tricks window, and you can apply over
35 filters and effects to it. You can also add any of 30 mask designs to the image—to
create artsy borders, for example.
In the example above, I've added the Zoom Blur effect and a mask.
Image Tricks taps into Tiger's CoreImage,
a set of graphics-processing routines that is built into Tiger.
There's room for improvement. On older G4 Macs, Image Tricks runs
sluggishly (but then, what doesn't?). And although BeLight Software touts Image Tricks'
iPhoto integration, the two programs don't work together as smoothly as they could.
When you drag a photo from iPhoto into Image Tricks, it opens as an untitled document,
which makes it cumbersome to use your "tricked-out" photo in iPhoto: instead
of just being able to use the Save command, you must save the image in a separate location
(such as on your desktop), and then drag it into iPhoto.
But you can't argue with the price. If you use Tiger, you'll want to try
out this fun and free program. Go download it now.
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