iMaginator a great showcase for Tiger
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jul 13, 2005 at 1:23am
I’ve been test driving iMaginator from Stone Design since Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) shipped. Since version 2.0 was released this week, it seemed like this was an opportune time to finish the review. In a nutshell, I can tell you this: if you’re a Tiger user, this is fine software at a great price.
iMaginator is an image processing app that sports over 106 effects, transitions and filters for altering images in real time. It offers an interface for Mac OS X 10.4’s Core Image technology, which is where it’s real magic lies. You can layer images and text and apply any number of effects. Plus, you can save processed images to TIFF, JPEG or create QuickTime movies.
Core Image also provides a plug-in architecture for accessing filters, transitions, and effects packages called Image Units. Image Units provide centralized management for image processing plug-ins that can be shared across applications. Developers can create their own Image Units by describing filters and effects in the CIKernel language, a derivative of the Open GL Shading Language, or they can access any of the 100 Image Units bundled in Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”).
iMaginator is a Core Image “Image Unit” harness, and automatically loads and displays any custom image processing plug-ins you add. It comes packaged with 100 Tiger Image Units, and seven new custom plug-ins from Stone Design, including Crop Fade Mask, Oval Mask, Make Transparent, Colorize, Grayscale and Polka Dots. iMaginator provides interfaces for modifying the plug-ins, which include blurs, color adjustments, distortions, styles, compositing effects, edge sharpeners and transitions.
The iMaginator and Core Image team use the power of your graphics card to do the effects calculations, so you’ll need a decent GPU to see good performance. But if you’ve got one, you can quickly apply some really nifty effects to images. However, if you don’t have at least a medium level (as in 128MB of VRAM) graphics card, iMaginator slows down considerably a lot on really big images.
Opinion seems divided on iMaginator’s interface. I personally like the single-window interface, which opens a default image (though you can change this in the Preferences panel or, obviously, choose your own image from the FIle menu). The interface, with its straightforward design and usability features, seems built to put a user-friendly “happy face” front end on the powerful Core Image technology. However, others—mainly Photoshop users—have told me that they find the interface a bit daunting. They say they’d prefer the library and list to be resizable palettes and that iMaginator is tricky to learn.
You can add effects from the Effects Library or from a contextual menu. An Effects List shows the applied effects and provides access to their controls. With the Effects Library, you can save the effects you like best—or even a chain of effects. You can also change the order in which effects are applied by reordering the preview icons; this is a feature that’s both useful and fun.
You can add or remove effects without messing up the image on which you’re working. You can also set the parameter for each effect—such as radius, color, text size, etc.—and can turn each one on or off. However, finding the effect you want can be tricky since there are over 100 of ‘em—and this list will doubtless grow. Thank goodness, iMaginator implements Tiger’s Spotlight search technology (thank you, Stone Design), which simplifies the process of finding the effect you want.
Several effects are transitions, which means they have a timer slider. You can preview ‘em in QuickTime, another nice touch. AppleScript gurus will also like the fact that the Stone Design app is very AppleScriptable.
What’s more, iMaginator is a LinkBack server, which means you can copy the resulting image and paste into a LinkBack client server, such as Stone Design’s Create, a page layout and Web authoring application. When you want to edit the image, you double-click it in Create to modify the image again in iMaginator. When you save your edits, your changes show up immediately in Create.
Version 2 adds painting and erasing features. Paint can be applied on any number of layers with any size square or round brush. iMaginator can erase the image or be blended in 20 different ways. Several effects chains have been added to the Library, including the winners of the iMaginator Contest. The crop rectangle can be set exactly, and moved by holding down the option key. The new abilities make a good app even better.
What’s more, the update is much zippier than version 1.0. The folks at Stone Design say it’s twice as fast. I’m not sure about that, but it has certainly got a boost in the performance department.
Version 1.x also seemed a bit unstable and crashed several times unexpectedly. Version 2.0 seems to have taken care of this, though admittedly I’ve only been using it for two days before finishing this review.
iMaginator costs US$49 and includes free updates for life. For the power it offers, this is an unbeatable bargain—and one certainly worth checking out.
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.x, a Core Image-ready graphics card and 512MB of RAM.
Macsimum rating: 7.5 out of 10.
Glardos Says:
I bought Imaginator the day it came out and have just upgraded to 2.0. I really like the addition of the painting module. It adds a lot of flexibility. This program gives you incredible possibilities in altering your digital pictures. From very subtle changes such as shadows or light sources to extreme effects that turn your picture into a virtual color pallet, Imaginator gives you limitless possibilities with your photographs.
It really isn’t like anything else out there. I’m not sure it is right to compare it to Photoshop, which I have, because I like it better. It’s way faster and can do many things Photoshop cannot do and it’s all much less complicated.
I also agree that with the poster above that a lasso tool would be a good addition. As fast as this company does upgrades, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that in the next upgrade.
Posted on July 13, 2005
Article Information
Comment on this Article Print this Article Email this Article Digg This
Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Startyger Says:
Stone does great work.... all this needs are more selection tools… (lasso tool etc..) and you’ve got a pretty decent image editor to mess with
Posted on July 13, 2005