A job that small shop web designers often have to do that isn’t talked about much is creating documentation. Sometimes we have to do so to support our clients in using the features we set up for them. Sometimes we have to document problems when submitting a tech support help ticket. Either way, writing and illustrating procedures in an easy-to-understand way is not easy or quick. Until now.

Well, it still may not be a lot of fun but it got a whole lot easier with the introduction of ScreenSteps, a program that makes taking screen shots and creating documentation about as simple as it can get. It doesn’t seem that hard to do it the old way. Take a screen shot (Cmd + Shift 4), resize the image then insert it into the document. I used to use TextEdit. That’s used to. I’m not going back. (hopefully)

After downloading the demo, then following the very short “Getting Started” tutorial, I was ready to go. A client had called in the morning wanting me to come to her office and demonstrate how to add new addresses to her ConstantContact mailing list program.

Now, Constant Contact provides lots of very good documentation, including how-to movies. The problem may be that there is too much there and the client couldn’t navigate the sea of choices. Whatever. I added three new contacts she emailed me, using ScreenSteps to take screen shots as I went along. (Cmd + Shift + Ctr + 4). Now that’s an awkward keyboard chord but that can be changed.

ScreenSteps took the screenshots as I captured them, giving me an opportunity to crop the shots and add highlights to the image to direct focus to the important parts of the screen. It did this unobtrusively and arranged the shots in order as I continued the address adding process.

When I was done, I went back and annotated the steps. With a screen shot for each step there wasn’t a lot of writing left to do.

Click a button to export the project to PDF and it was ready to email. The client was able to add two more addresses herself.

This is one of those why didn’t somebody think of this before kinds of programs, easy to use and figure out. No bloat, no learning curve. Instant productivity gains. What more could you want?

Quite a bit actually. The software is pokey, very pokey when I re-opened the file to play with the HTML export function. The export went just fine and produced nice clean code. But opening the file tool over a minute on a 2 GHZ G5 iMac with 1 GB of ram. That’s slow. A couple of screen captures had a lag time too.

After saving the file again then going back to re-edit an image, ScreenSnap failed to export my new version. Not cool. Also the first time through, the program crashed on me. Still, I called the boss and asked him to buy a copy. I tried making 2 more quick tutorials and had no problems.

The PDF was pretty basic looking, but the HTML export was very nice. As ScreenSteps allows me to use custom HTML export templates, that part shows a lot of promise. There are workarounds for the clunky PDF exports by using the HTML, styling it copying the finished pages from Safari into TextEdit. Not quite instant RTF but not a horrible inconvience. Since I’m mostly interested in web based documentation this is reasonable.
Editing features are very basic. No font choices, no text resizing, though in the HTML export that’s not a problem for web pages as the program creates good clean code with an external style sheet. There may be a way to adjust how the PDF’s display text out but it wasn’t immediately obvious. On the plus side you can add hyperlinks to text or images.

Images are automatically resized to fit one of two built in page styles. Both worked. I’d like a couple more, but that’s quibbling. I would also love the ability to embed a thumbnail in the web page with a larger image that would pop up with a click.

If you need to crank out how-to’s or other documentation that incorporates screen captures, this tool can save you a lot of time and effort. If you don’t, the $40 price is a bit high to pay for a one trick program that won’t export to RTF or other editable desktop formats.

ScreenSteps http://www.bluemangolearning.com/products/screensteps/ $39.95

Ease of use: 5
Features: 3
Value: 4
Documentation: 4
Stability: 3
Recommended with reservations. For web based how-to’s ScreenSteps looks very good. For desktop published PDF’s the output is primitive. Though for quick and dirty documentation, nothing comes close to the speed and ease of workflow. As with many version 1.0 releases, you might want to wait until some of the bugs are ironed out before making the purchase.

You can, of course open the image in your editing program, but that’s not particularly quick. If I’m on somebody else’s computer, I will drag an image onto the Safari or Firefox icon on the dock. The image will open a new window, which has the image dimension displayed in the title bar. That’s faster than opening Photoshop, Fireworks or GraphicConverter.

But there is an easier way. Dimensionizer, a free contextual menu plugin from Automatic Labs makes as simple as it can be without ESP.

After downloading and installing the plugin into either of your Contextual Menu Items folders, a simple Right (ctrl) click on an image will display its size in a contextual menu. It’s easy, fast and free.

Highly Recommended

[rate 4.5]

Composition can often be helped by a quick crop, that is if the photograph is usable at all. What is much more time consuming is adjusting exposure and color balance. If all the photos were shot under the same lighting conditions it is sometimes possible to batch process them in Photoshop, but most of the time I am handed a hodgepodge of shots taken at different times under different contitions and possibly with different cameras. Ugh.

While there is no perfect solution there is help. iPhoto Batch Enhancer makes it possible to save iPhoto adjust-palete operations and re-apply them to multiple photos. For the quick and dirty kinds of photo touchup I have to do this is often the simplest and most effective way to make photos adequate for public display.

iPhoto Batch Enhancer also makes it easy to apply batch processing of iPhoto effects to multiple photos. Though I don’t use effects as often as adjustments, it is handy to apply a matte to a bunch of images. It will work with any iPhoto effect or adjustment. You can add effects in much the same way you add rules to Apple’s Mail program. Click the + button and set a drop down menu for your choice of options. It’s easy.

This is donation ware or nag ware. You set the price but if you don’t pay you will get reminders that you need to support the software authors. It’s annoying but fair enough. This give you a chance to try it out and see if it is as helpful for you as it is for me.

Documentation is sparce, just what’s on the website but it’s pretty easy to figure out.

Recommended.

HexColorPicker

The built in Mac color picker is undoubtedly useful, but it won’t tell you what color you’ve picked so you can use it elsewhere, like in a web page or image editor. A free pluginHexColorPicker from Lucky Software has you covered.

Choose a color in ColorPicker and click on the HexColorPicker icon on the top of the program (the tool tip says “Crayons”) and your color will be presented in a bar across the top of the pane. Just below you will see the color presented in Hex code, ready for your style sheet.

The name is a little misleading. HexColorPicker will also give you the RGB values for your color in either percentages or absolute values. There’s pull-down menu to choose which color description you get.

It will even tell you if your color is web safe.

Painter’s Picker

If you want more features, try Painter’s Picker, a $16 shareware program that turns the simple ColorPicker utility into a powerful design tool. From the website:

Painter’s Picker puts an interactive color wheel in almost every Mac OS X application. It adds the ability to choose related colors, such as complementary colors, analogous colors, etc. directly within the color picker. It also adds more precise controls for choosing saturation, hue angle, and brightness. Painter’s Picker is the simplest way to perform complex color selection in almost any Mac OS X application.

Painter’s Picker brings you a neat color wheel, with a number of views and will present different color palettes from which to choose complimentary colors. Choose RGB, CMYK, or HSV values and lots, lots more.

Painter’s Picker comes with its own set of online documentation. Whenever Painter’s Picker is active, simply click the button marked with a question mark.

Making ColorPicker into a program

You can call ColorPicker from most OS X programs but if you want it to be a separate application, you have to do a tiny bit of AppleScript programming.

Resiffbard offers these instruction:

First, the Color Picker/Palette of of OS X is common to most OS X document apps, for instance TextEdit. But, how do you make it available all the time?

Simple, (create) the world’s smallest useful Applescript.

Open Script Editor found in Applications/Applescript/ and write this:

choose color.

That’s all there is to it.

Save that as a script where ever you like. I saved it as Color Picker and keep it in my User Apps/ folder where I keep all my non Apple applications. I can then call it up with a quick CP using Quicksilver.

I’ve been using Photoshop for over 12 years now and am not likely to give it up. But Photoshop, even Photoshop Elements is far from the easiest photographic correction tool to use.

There have been a few other options like ULEAD’S PhotoImpact and Corel’s PhotoPaint that never gained enough traction in the Mac world for their publishers to keep them available. Canvas and Fireworks are excellent design tools that can be used for photo editing, but that’s not their strength.

We’ve had a huge gap between the conversion automation tool, GraphicConverter, which has only the most basic photo editing functions and Photoshop. iPhoto has been improving steadily but isn’t my first choice either. I think PhotoComplete will be.

For starters, PhotoComplete is a photographer’s tool. Period. It can certainly be used to ready images for the web and I’ll get to that in a bit. But creating a new program from scratch that doesn’t worry about layers, channels, compositing, text, vectors or the million other features that Photoshop offers can allow programmers to look at photo editing from a whole new angle. And that’s exactly what PhotoComplete’s programmers did.

The result is a program that is both reasonably powerful and reasonably easy to use. FunkyPixels, the publisher has this to say:

We’ve left out the fluff that never gets used, and instead spent our time tuning the features you really need. We think the result is that PhotoComplete is easier to use, and lets you get the results you want faster than any other photo or image editing application out there.

Take away the inevitable marketing hype and that’s pretty close to the truth. But don’t throw out your Photoshop.

Most of the features will look familiar but the way you access them is clever. PhotoComplete allows you to add effects one at a time and see what you’ve done. Each effect shows up in a side panel. All effects affect the entire photo. There is no potential for spot editing.

Effects are non-destructive and applied in order. If you don’t want to add an effect to an image, simply click the X to close the effect and it is gone. Only the saved, final version actually has any effects applied to it. You may notice a bit of a wait for the photo to render, depending on how many, or which, effects you’ve applied.

You’ll find most of the standard image adjustment options with a few nice extras. There’s the sliders for saturation, hue, etc. There are also nice color wheels for cast and remove cast. Crop and resize, are as you’d expect. Unsharp mask is there too, as is a pleasant surprise, curves. The curves panel only allows you to use two points and you can’t adjust the endpoints, but for most needs that’s plenty and more than Elements offers. And like Elements, PhotoComplete has a functional Shadow/Highlight correction effect built in.

There are translucent EXIF data and a histogram overlaid on the screen, unobtrusively on the top and bottom of the page.

PhotoComplete will also let you export your photos to any color space setting you have set up in your Displays preference pane. You can rotate and straighten images. The straighten effect works much like that in iPhoto, with a grid popping up over the photo for reference. Rotate the image left or right with a slider.

Of course, for $40 you won’t get all the features you’d find in a pro level program. I imagine that there are a zillion and three things you can do with Photoshop or Elements that you can’t do with PhotoComplete. But for most images you won’t need to.

Besides not being able to work on selected portions of your photo, PhotoComplete won’t handle RAW files, only JPEG, TIFF, PNG and its own format. That’s for import or export. The unsharp mask filter won’t remember the last setting you used between photos. There are no batch or automation capacities. JPEG export only offers a few compression options, all of which are a bit softer than Photoshop exports of the same file size. Still, they’re perfectly usable for the web.

One other feature that’s nice is Flickr export. You can do that with iPhoto, but only with a third party plugin.

And iPhoto doesn’t recognize PhotoComplete as an external editor. If that little problem is corrected, then I’d have absolutely no problem recommending PhotoComplete to anybody as the first choice photo editor. As it is, I’d probably suggest using iPhoto first, then switching only for more difficult editing jobs, and Photoshop only as a last resort or for batch work. I love Photoshop and find Elements an excellent program but PhotoComplete is so much simpler to use that it makes a much better starting point for the average digital photographer.

In conclusion, PhotoComplete isn’t really a complete digital darkroom solution. However, it does handle the most common adjustments easily and quickly, and at a good price. Unless you are really willing to spend tons of hours learning Photoshop, you may never use more than it has to offer. It’s an excellent first choice for routine photo editing needs.

Publisher: FunkyPixels
PhotoComplete requires Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4 or later. It’s not yet a universal binary. (they’re working on it)

Ease of use: 5
Features: 4
Documentation: 3
Value: 5
Macness: 5

Highly recommended.

When getting photos ready for the web or email, what capacities do you need? What I typically do is crop, resize, rotate (when necessary) and set jpeg quality. ImageWell handles all of these in the main window without having to pull down menus or enter dialog boxes. It’s all quick and simple. If that were all that ImageWell did, it would be a very useful tool. Get ready, as they say in late night infomercials, “Wait there’s more!”

Some added features that I love are a drop shadow option. Yeah, it’s a cheap and easy trick but, hey, that’s just me. Simply choose Add Drop Shadow from the Tools menu and you’re done. There’s no shadow control but the default looks good and should be fine for most needs.

Sending the image to either your website or .Mac account should be as simple as it gets. Click the Send button. Of course, you have to first enter your account info into ImageWell preferences. No getting around that in any program. You can even set up multiple accounts and access them in the More panel.

ImageWell’s ability to copy the image location to the clipboard for posting in your page, is a great feature. You can choose to copy only the image URL or have it wrapped in either bbcode square brackets or with the HTML image tag ready to paste. That’s the kind of little detail that makes a program truly great.

At first, I couldn’t figure out how to do this without having ImageWell post the image path instead of URL. Definitely and annoyance. But Ginny of XtraLean sent me a quick email response:

Regarding the URL’s not always being the right directory, just a helpful tip: in ImageWell Preferences, under the Location tab, when you enter your server information – the URL for viewing text field is editable. You can enter the correct directory path into that field. And then each time you paste the URL it will be correct, and you won’t have to change it each time.

Of course, you can save your image to your own computer.

ImageWell also has some simple editing tools. I’ve already mentioned the crop tool. You can also add text to an image, either directly on top of the image, as a watermark or in a cartoon balloon. You can add basic shapes, arrows, boxes, and circles, too. You can crop your image with several pre-designed shapes like hearts and clouds, and change the jpeg background color. ImageWell will save images in jpg, png, or tif. Sorry, no gif.

There’s one more feature of note, screen capture. ImageWell takes advantage of OS X screen capture capacity. No big deal except it drops the image directly into ImageWell for immediate editing, saving a couple of steps and saving you from a cluttered desktop with Picture 1.png, Picture 2.png and so on. As you can imagine, that makes writing reviews or documentation much simpler.

ImageWell is one application that is worth having for its ease of use and targeted feature set. It’s a bonus that it is attractive and free.

Publisher: XtraLean
Version 2.1 • Requires 10.3.9 or greater. • Tiger Support. • Universal Binary
Price: Free

Ease of use: 5
Value for Money: 5
Features: 4
Macness: 5

Highly Recommended