What is Specular Collage 2.0.2?

Specular Collage was the first program on the Macintosh to take advantage of proxy-based image editing. Unlike Adobe Photoshop, which applies all edits directly to the pixels in the original image — thereby slowing down the editing process and potentially degrading the image quality over time — Collage displays the effects of your edits on screen using a low-resolution proxy. As a result, most edits complete in a matter of seconds, regardless of the image size, and the original image data remains unscathed. Once you finish a composition, you can render it to disk at any resolution. Only then does Collage apply your edits to each and every pixel in the original high-resolution image. However, it does this in RAM and outputs to a new image file, thus protecting the original image file on disk.

But as anyone who has used Collage already understands, this system leaves something to be desired. Unlike HSC Software’s Live Picture, which dynamically redraws the screen proxy as you zoom and scroll. Collage’s proxies are fixed at 72 pixels per inch. This means that magnifying your image just displays larger pixels. Where Live Picture’s more intelligent sytem is capable of representing your edits as accurately as Photoshop, Collage’s representation of your edits amounts to a rough estimate.

If Live Picture offers a better proxy system, why buy Collage? Obviously price is one incentive: Collage lists for one-tenth the price of Live Picture and can be bought on the street for even less. Collage also requires less-sophisticated machinery. It subsists comfortably on 8MB of RAM and a 250MB hard drive; even Photoshop 3.0 can’t manage such close quarters. This means freelance artists and other folks on a budget can take advantage of the speed and flexibility of proxy-based editing without the prohibitively high cost.

Filtering Options

But Collage is more than a low-end Live Picture. It offers both Unsharp Mask and Gaussian Blur filters — neither are included with Live Picture. In fact, I find much to like about the modest Collage.

One reason is its flexible method of undoing filters. The program keeps a tally of every filter applied, so you can select a filter and undo it regardless of whether it was the first filter applied, the last, or somewhere in between... But be prepared to wait. Anytime you undo a filter, Collage has to reload the image from disk, generate a new proxy, and reapply each of the filters you didn’t undo. Therefore, undoing a filter almost always takes more time than applying one.

Working with Photoshop

Though Collage 2.0.1 isn’t a Photoshop plug-in. Specular has put some real thought into making sure the two programs are compatible. Collage now supports CMYK images, even permitting you to generate a CMYK color display table from inside Photoshop to maintain consistent CMYK screen display between the two programs. (Collage’s method for creating a CMYK table could be more straightforward, but you won’t have to do it very often.) You can even apply filters to individual color plates in a CMYK image, something no other image editor except Photoshop allows. The two things you can’t do are mix RGB and CMYK images inside a single document, and convert an RGB document to the CMYK color space; after you specify the color space for a new composition, the space remains set in stone.

Previous versions of Collage rendered final images to a flat image file. But version 2.0.1 can render images to the Photoshop 3.0 format with their layers fully intact. This lets you set up a composition in the speedier Collage and then fine-tune the layers using functions available only in Photoshop. Collage 2.0.1 also provides better support for Photoshop masks. If a Photoshop image saved in TIFF or Photoshop format contains more than one mask channel, you can specify exactly which mask you w'ant to use while in Collage.

Many of the features that I was dissatisfied with in Collage 1.0 have been addressed in the new version: You can now access a hand tool by pressing the spacebar, you can see the exact outline of the masked image when dragging it, you can change the page size of an existing document, and you can preview images from the Open dialog box. But some problems remain. For example, you can’t import TIFF images compressed with LZW, you can’t run filters in the background, you can’t undo the Import command, and you can’t open multiple images (which would be useful for dragging and dropping proxies between files). Worst of all. Collage provides no means for generating your own masks, as do both Photoshop and Live Picture. And if you decide to edit a mask in Photoshop, you’ll still have to reimport the image and redo all the edits, something I complained about in my last review.

The Last Word

Collage 2.0.1 is a more practical compositing solution than its predecessor, supplying a smoother interface and better support for Photoshop 3.0. Collage is even showing signs of accommodating professional users — for instance, it now supports images as large as 16,000 by 16,000 pixels (nearly 20 square feet at 300 dots per inch).

But with its low-resolution previews and lack of internal mask-editing functions, Collage is likely to continue disappointing folks who expect to use it as a last step in the image-editing process. As long as you’re willing to return to Photoshop to confirm your edits and make final changes, however. Collage is a serviceable tool.

McClelland, Deke. (February 1995). Specular Collage 2.0.1. Macworld. (pg. 54).

Download Specular Collage 2.0.2 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II