Auto FX DreamSuite Series One

Guide Rating -

Tool Tips appear when you hold your mouse cursor over any of the tools, menus, or controls. Initially a short tool tip appears with only the tool name, but after a few seconds a longer tool tip is displayed with complete descriptions and hints on using the tool.

While the tool tip behavior was unpredictable and annoying, there was one interface flaw that was downright infuriating. If you look at my screen shot, you'll see there are numeric displays for each of the slider controls. You would think that these are provided so you can click in there and type a numeric entry using your keyboard, right? Wrong. Apparently they are just for show, and any precise adjustments must be made by either dragging the slider or clicking the little arrow buttons with your mouse.

That's not the only interface nuisance, DreamSuite incorporates a lot of fly-out menus and sub-menus and it can be difficult to select menu items precisely. For instance, all of the preset sub-menus have a fixed length which requires you to scroll the menu up and down using tedious mouse clicking in order to browse all available presets. If you have a lot of presets for one effect and the one you need is last in the list, be prepared to sit a while with your finger on the mouse button scrolling to the end of the list. And it's a shame that the preset names are not at all meaningful. For example, the Deckle effect offers presets titled Around 1, Around 2, Bottom 1, Left Side 3, and so on. If you want to see what each preset looks like, you'll need to refer to a separate PDF document. When naming your own presets you are limited to 15 characters, which makes it difficult to create more meaningful names, even for your own custom settings.

There are other areas where visual clues would have been helpful. For instance, the Chisel effect offers a variety of bevel shapes, but you have to choose them based only on names like lip, blade, bead, cornice, and hammered. These would be much easier to work with if there was a way to identify them visually.

I've said enough about the interface problems; let me discuss the actual effects for a moment. I'm not going to show you examples of every effect, as there are plenty of these on the Auto FX Web site and in other reviews. I will say that most of the effects are visually impressive. For the most part, they are very realistic looking, but some of them have small but distinguishable flaws that expose them as being simulated. For one thing, there was something about the shadows created in DreamSuite that never seemed quite right to me. Also, many effects produced a halo of fringe pixels between the effect and the shadow that I found bothersome. You can see an example of this below. Gary Coyne points out another flaw relating to shadows in his review for Applelinks.

Notice the white fringe pixels between the photo and the drop shadow in this example. This was one of the Auto FX provided examples, but I had similar results in my own experimentation with many of the effects.

The metallic and bevel effects such as Chisel, Dimension X, Metal Mixer, and Liquid Metal were most impressive. Some such as PhotoDepth, Tape, or Crease have limited uses. I mean, how many times a year are you going to need to simulate a crumpled, aged and torn photo? Effects like Putty and Cubism seem to duplicate features already provided in Photoshop, and many of the other effects are not so far advanced that they couldn't be produced natively by an intermediate to advanced graphics software user. Photoshop 6.0 users would probably find even less value in these effects given the vast assortment of layer styles in version 6.0. By the way, unlike Photoshop's layer effects, DreamSuite requires text and shapes to be rendered, and it ignores layer masks and clipping masks created in Photoshop.

It seems that every graphics enthusiast--both professional and amateur--has a weakness for stunningly eye-popping effects... but if achieving them is neither fun, simpler, nor quicker, what's the point? DreamSuite is a solid assortment of very nice visual effects, but it's a shame they ruined it with a slow, poorly implemented, cumbersome interface. If Auto FX can go back to the drawing board and re-engineer the software to be faster, more memory efficient, less flashy and more intuitive, they just may have a winner in version 2.0. But if they want to compete with other popular plug-in suites, they'll need to lower their pricing, too. Until then, you'd do better to put your money into another plug-in suite or a Photoshop upgrade.