What is Color It! 3.x?

Everybody knows about Photoshop, Adobe’s king of applications. It even has become a verb in common usage (at least among computer jocks), as in, “Let’s Photoshop Dave’s head onto this lingerie dummy.” However, not everybody owns Photoshop, whether because of the high price tag or the demanding system requirements. If this sounds like you, does it mean you are doomed forever to only dream of working with a powerful, pixel-based image-editing package?

Heck no. You have an alternative: Microfrontier’s Color It! 3.2. Think of Color It! as Photoshop for the little guy. The guy who wouldn’t toss out that LC III because he knew it had been there for him, the guy who wanted a shot at Adobe’s big toy but never had the breaks or the dough.

Color It! is available on the cheap — about $150. Although it doesn’t have all the goods that Photoshop 4.0 offers, it’s there for you to retouch almost any image, whether it’s a photo of your niece or a graphic for your latest Web page.

This program succeeds for two reasons. First, it employs the same basic tools and working methods as Photoshop. All the crucial tools — the magnifier, the eyedropper, the smudge tool, and the others — work identically to their Photoshop counterparts, if not as accurately. You can save a graphic in all the basic formats, be it TIFF, JPEG, or Photo CD. You can anti-alias just about anything. Second, the type tool is significantly more straightforward than Photoshop’s, which can be arcane even to the professional.

Color It!’s value for price isn’t unique. A freeware program called NIH Image performs a majority of Color It!’s (and Photoshop’s) functions. But Color It! has a distinguishing feature: an honest-to-goodness paperback manual complete with descriptions of the tools, menus, and filters. A book you can read and dog-ear whether you’re in the middle of airbrushing the lines out of your face or you’re on the beach gathering more of them. It’s a complete, descriptive reference that weighs only a fraction of your lightest dumbbell.

The 50-page tutorial affords you a quick way to master the program. If you’re a beginner, go directly to it. Three chapters walk you through creating an ad, using a wide selection of the tools in the program. You use masks, touch up flaws, fool with brightness and contrast levels — all those things that you’re vaguely aware of but never learned how to do. Moreover, because Color It! uses the same basic setup and tools as Photoshop, it serves as a general Mac graphics tutorial.

Despite everything Color It! offers, it isn’t Photoshop. You can’t layer images. You can see only individual CMYK channels. The preview dialog boxes show only small portions of the “before” and “after” change in filters rather than the entire photo. Not surprisingly, fewer filters are included with the program than with Photoshop. The scissors tool isn’t as accurate as Photoshop’s. And the tool setup, which is hard to access from outside the tools palette, is not as intuitive as in Photoshop, though that hardly matters if you didn’t know what the Photoshop tools did in the first place.

And that’s the reality. A graphics program isn’t worth a hill of beans if you don’t know how to use it. Microfrontier’s Color It! 3.2 is easy to learn, easy to use, and gives you the ability to make drop-dead images. Also, it didn’t crash on the LC III or the Power Mac on which we tested it. Not once. If that doesn’t make your Windows rivals cyan with envy, well, they’re just dreaming.

Weisman, Robyn. (May 1997). Color It! 3.2. MacAddict. (pg. 65).

Download Color It! 3.x for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II