Software Reviews

Adobe Photoshop
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Thoughts on Photoshop

(Adobe Systems)

Cune is a desktop publishing company based in Seattle. Periodically we share our thoughts on desktop publishing software. The following comments are fromSteve Rowse, one of our cooperating artists. Steve began using Photoshop in art school and currently uses it in his work as a staff artist for Humongous.com. He has used the program to create collages for Cune. And his ability with Photoshop, has turned out to be his chief career asset.
—Scott C. Davis, Cune Publisher

Words from a Photoshop Artist
Several years ago I decided to go back to school to study art in hope of finding a career in the field. I’ve studied many traditional mediums such as painting in oils, gouache, acrylic, airbrush, figure drawing (or traditional pencil ). I also have taken technical classes in light, design and photography. And through all this I have found my preferred medium to be Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is the one medium that I can use to combine all my acquired skills and creativity.

Some say, "All you need is a great machine and you’ll be an instant graphic designer or fine artist." This, of course, is not true. What is true is that Adobe Photoshop allows users to more easily and successfully combine images and traditional techniques to produce a higher standard of imagery. But one must remember Photoshop is a tool , and although a very powerful one , it is no replacement for creativity or traditional methods.

Adobe has very successfully incorporated traditional photography terms and techniques with traditional hand skills such as drawing, painting and airbrush. And Photoshop has added a whole package of goodies to combine both sets of skills. All of the tools within Photoshop work in ways that are similar to their original predecessor. For example, anyone who has ever used a traditional airbrush knows that masks are just as important as the airbrush itself. So Adobe has included as many different ways to create masks as there are painting tequniques.

Photoshop has depth. There are as many ways to complete a task as you can imagine. This multiplicity of methods can stimulate your creativity, make you see the possibility of different effects which are suggested by different techniques.

The computer graphics world is going though a revolution. We are seeing more and more artists becoming hackers, as well as hackers becoming artists. And again the noticeable difference is creativity and traditional techniques. I can always tell the difference between the hacker\artist and the arist\hacker—they have different approaches, not to say one is better than the other( although I probably am a bit biased). I am looking forward to seeing more and more mind blowing images as more and more artists explore the potential of electronic tools such as Adobe Photoshop.

—Steve Rowse, Humongous.com
See Steve's Photoshop created art in the Cune Gallery

Coming soon: new features in Photoshop 5.0

Macromedia FreeHand

After surveying the field and dabbling in several different products, the writers and artists who compose Cune have chosen FreeHand as our graphics program. We needed a sophisticated, high-end product that could turn out a wide variety of graphics for art books, tradtional literary books, posters, slide shows, cards, fliers, and trade show exhibits. Although other programs that we tried were less expensive and were very easy to learn, in the end we felt that they lacked the features we needed. So we chose to invest our time in mastering FreeHand.

One of our Seattle artists, Cydney Brooke McIntyre, spent four hours completing the tutorial exercise laid forth in the manual. Afterwards she was able to complete a complex logo for Boyd Marts Productions—a Seattle multi-media firm. Cydney was most impressed with FreeHand’s "layers" feature. "It’s great," said Cydney. "I could finish working on one part of my creation and then lock it up on its own layer. That way I didn’t disturb it as I continued work in other areas."

Mamoun Sakkal, Cune’s art director and a principal at Sakkal Design in Bothell,Washington created Cune’s distinctive "cuneiform" logo using FreeHand. Also, he produced the color covers for our first book in FreeHand. Recently he won an international Arabic calligraphy competition with designs that he executed in FreeHand. Sakkal has urged us to use FreeHand for laying out fliers and posters as well as for creating graphic elements.

Cune Press book covers were created on our desktop using FreeHand.
Check them out. Cune Press Books
Coming Soon: design for the web in FreeHand 8.0

Adobe Pagemaker

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PageMaker is the original desktop page lay out program and is still a leader in the field. PageMaker can tackle a wide variety of page lay out tasks, from fliers to business cards to book length typesetting.

At Cune Press, we rely exclusively on PageMaker for design, layout, and typesetting of our bound books. We create indexes using PageMaker and use extensive typeface controls to create the perfect density of text on the page to match the reading experience we are creating.

After fussing with cheaper and less fully featured programs, PageMaker was a life-changing experience for us. Coming soon: more on the new features in PageMaker 6.5.

Fontographer

The best graphic designers know that the secret to powerful, discrete design is compression. In other words, you can't always fit an illustration into a design: you need to convey tone, style, intent efficiently by doing it with the same letters that you use to convey literal meaning.. Put it another way: you need to style your type to give the mood and tone that the piece requires.

After a few trips around the block, even a novice graphic designer recognizes fonts that are widely distributed. The solution is to design your own. And Fontographer is the ticket. It gives FreeHand style drawing controls in a format that allows you to customize letters to your own design needs.

The distinctive typeface on the cover of the Cune Press Book Lost Arrow was created by Mamoun Sakkal using FreeHand. Lost Arrow

FrontPage

The Weberati like to create web pages from scratch, typing out pure html in Notepad. The rest of humanity will do well to invest a few bucks in FrontPage, a program that automatically generates html code as you type in and style your text.

One great feature of FrontPage is that it allows you to view your page in straight html. So, if you need to fix a glitch and FrontPage is not grappling with the problem, it's easy to switch to html view and to type in a few bits of html to nail the solution in place.

Cathryn Pisarski has created Cune Magazine using FrontPage.
Cune Magazine

Coming Soon: FrontPage 2000

BarcodePro

Book publishers and a wide variety of other small businesses need to create bar codes to include in their camera ready digital file. BarcodePro makes the process clean and easy. Highly recommended.

Coming soon: new features in BarcodePro 3.0

PeachTree Accounting

Cune Press has standardized on PeachTree Accounting for our publishing and non publishing business operations. With only slight modification, PeachTree handles inventory, royalities, invoicing, returns, and purchasing--the specialized functions required of publishers. Yet PeachTree will also perform job costing, time & billing, and a full range of other business functions. This means that a small publisher can use a single accounting program for publishing, for personal / household, and also for other businesses..

Customized desktop accounting software is the rage these days. Many small businesses, lured by the promise of easy-to-learn choose Quicken or Quick Books--only to find that they soon are turning handsprings in order to accomplish the tasks that they require.

In the area of book publishing, many independent presses will invest in software customized to publishing needs and pay $5,000 to $15,000 or, if going with a lower end product, make numerous sacrifices when it comes to speed, ease of use, functionality. The big problem with accounting software customized for publishing, however, is the lack of flexibility.

More and more small publishers survive as divisions of larger businesses. Or publishers find themselves running their households, their publishing companies, plus other small businesses as separate accounting entities. The software customized for publishing may work wonders in publishing, but will not work at all for other business applications. PeachTree is sophisticated enough to serve in both capacities, which means a big savings in time and training.

Coming soon: new features in recent PeachTree Accounting. Plus special reports using PeachTree Accounting Report Writer.