QuarkVista Brings Image Editing Home To XPress

Illustration han­dling in QuarkXPress has, gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, been a chal­lenge requir­ing deft coor­di­na­tion. Images, as often as not, don’t come in a com­plete­ly ade­quate form; some require the effects that only an image-editor, such as the ubiq­ui­tous Photoshop, can provide.

Historically, the XPress user has had lit­tle choice but to exit or sus­pend work in XPress, load the image file into their image-editor, make the changes, save the file as an appro­pri­ate for­mat, and re-import the image into Quark. Quark looked to change that, respond­ing to the insur­gency that Adobe’s InDesign and Creative Suite represented.

QuarkVista Picture Effects Palette In Use
The QuarkVista Picture Effects palette, the XTension’s avatar

Announced in May 2004, the QuarkVista XTension promised image-manipulation and edit­ing from with­in XPress. After months of wait­ing, QuarkVista shipped with the XPress 6.5 update. In large part, it was worth the wait. 

QuarkVista’s appear­ance blends in with the rest of the inter­face. The Picture Effects palette (avail­able through the Windows pull­down as Show Picture Effects), QuarkVista’s man­i­fes­ta­tion with­in the XPress inter­face, is unex­pect­ed­ly sim­ple, works very well, and dis­plays a great deal with con­cise pre­ci­sion. A sim­ple six-button tool­bar lives at the top, over a win­dow pane, fin­ished at the bot­tom with an “info” sec­tion that pro­vides CMYK and RGB val­ues for the point at which the cur­sor is at any time.

The tool­bar pro­vides access to adjust­ments and fil­ters which are famil­iar to any long time Photoshop user. Amongst the adjust­ments are such as Levels, Curves, Color Balance, Selective Color, and Gamma Correction. Some of the famil­iar fil­ters pro­vid­ed are Gaussian blur, Unsharp Mask, Embossing, and Noise addi­tion. This is not a com­plete list.

Any com­bi­na­tion of effects and fil­ters can be used. The win­dow pane, which claims the main part of the Picture Effects palette, dis­plays all fil­ters and effects used, and allows the user to not only turn on and off indi­vid­ual effects and edit their para­me­ters, but also to rearrange the order in which they are applied by mere­ly drag­ging them up and down through the list. While there is a but­ton on the tool­bar that allows the user to edit ind­vid­ual effects/adjustments, it need­n’t be used; all that is real­ly nec­es­sary is to double-click on the item in the win­dow. Also, any com­bi­na­tion of items can be saved as a pre­set for lat­er use, and exist­ing pre­sets can be imported. 

Perhaps the most remark­able fea­ture of QuarkVista is that the effects and adjus­ments are non-destructive. Unless the image is saved or export­ed (the Save Picture com­mand under the File pull­down pro­vides sav­ing changes to graph­ics or export­ing them as new files as well as relink­ing to the new graph­ic or keep­ing the link to the old) the orig­i­nal graph­ic isn’t changed in any way. Changes to the appear­ance of the graph­ic are saved with­in the XPress project/layout file.

QuarkVista reads and saves/exports in a vari­ety of for­mats: TIFF, PNG, JPEG, ScitexCT, GIF, PICT and BMP. It does not work for EPSs and PDFs

There are down­sides worth eval­u­at­ing, of course. QuarkVista does quite a lot very well, but (my explo­rations were done on a PowerMac G4, 1.24 GHz 2‑processor machine) changes some­times required a great deal of pro­cess­ing pow­er, espe­cial­ly the more advanced effects such as Gaussian blur, of which a quick and dirty wrist­watch bench­mark proved out to between five and eight sec­onds. Similarly, turn­ing effects on and off typ­i­cal­ly caused a pause. Furthermore these paus­es can cause slug­gish­ness in response in the dia­logue box­es and slid­ers; with Preview turned on, the effect is redis­played when slid­ers are moved, with the atten­dant hes­i­ta­tion when the pro­gram works it all out. Working with QuarkVista requires a bit of patience as one adjusts para­me­ters and waits for the appli­ca­tion to catch up.

The vet­er­an XPress user may find the delays frus­trat­ing, but as some­one who has used XPress, XPress in com­bi­na­tion with Photoshop, and has some idea of the effort and time involved, the time spent wait­ing for QuarkVista to catch up is still less than sus­pend­ing lay­out to edit a file and update it with­in the lay­out, mak­ing it worth learn­ing a some­what dif­fer­ent tempo.

And, final­ly, while Quark lay­outs done with QuarkVista can be loaded and print­ed out by users who don’t have the XTension, but will only print images in low-resolution. This can be worked around by export­ing the changes and link­ing to the new ver­sion, which is a lit­tle indi­rect but not oner­ous or impos­si­ble to do.

Quark esti­mates that lay­out design­ers who require image edit­ing only use about 10% of the capa­bil­i­ties of any image-editor they have. It’s not clear how they arrived at that con­clu­sion but, based on my expe­ri­ences as some­one who start­ed out in Quark, it does­n’t seem a whol­ly unrea­son­able assump­tion. QuarkVista serves that need very well, bring­ing basic image-adjustment capa­bil­i­ties with­in the pro­gram, an addi­tion that is long over­due in view of Adobe’s inno­v­a­tive accom­plish­ments with the Creative Suite. Though there are per­for­mance draw­backs, they are accept­able with respect to the pow­er and flex­i­bil­i­ty that QuarkVista brings to XPress.

At the bot­tom line, QuarkVista is a pow­er­ful and valu­able addi­tion to XPress which promis­es to slow, in some way, the loss of Quark’s user base to Adobe, as vet­er­an users will appre­ci­ate the need of not hav­ing to also have an image-editor on hand, and ought to put the indus­try at large on notice that, regard­less of the progress of this bat­tle of pub­lish­ing big-guns, Quark is tak­ing the chal­lenge from Adobe seriously.

About the author: Samuel John Klein is a freel­nce graph­ic and web design­er in the process of being unleashed on an unsus­pect­ing world. Email con­tact and exam­ples of work can be found at The SunDial Earth Station.

2 thoughts on “QuarkVista Brings Image Editing Home To XPress

  1. chandrasekar

    i want to work from home for image edit­ing work

  2. gs

    do you mean to ask – how to launch your work licensed QXP appli­ca­tion at home? If yes – then it depends upon how is your office copy licensed (license serv­er based or acti­va­tion based)? in either ways – it is pos­si­ble to launch and run.

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