Desktop publishing is changing faster than you can say Johannes Gensfleisch Gutenberg. With the advent of high-resolution input devices from companies like Abaton and Microtek, Mac publishers can produce digitized versions of photos, which can be placed into a variety of page-layout programs and printed on the LaserWriter or a PostScript-compatible phototypesetter. Images recorded by many of today s scanners include the gray-scale information necessary to approximate the range of grays in a continuous-tone photograph.
Although scanner software offers some control over brightness and contrast, as well as some rudimentary image-editing tools, it's inadequate for extensive touchup work. But salvation is here: Letraset's ImageStudio (formerly code-named The Realist) gives publishers an extensive array of tools for retouching scanned images before placing them in page-layout programs. In addition to touch-up tools, the program provides a number of halftone printing effects in the form of adjustable dot and line screens.
Digital Darkroom
ImageStudio's collection of tools and special effects does everything from smooth the jaggies to improve the contrast in selected areas. The program can be used for simple tasks like cleaning up unsightly glitches in a scanned picture, or for more elaborate alterations, such as removing a deposed leader from the company newsletter’s group portrait. And although it’s not intended to be a stand-alone drawing program, ImageStudio can be used to create freehand drawings as well. I spent hours experimenting with numerous pens, brushes, and effects, printing out several paper trays’ worth of experiments on the LaserWriter.
ImageStudio's layout is clean and straightforward. The program offers four movable palettes. The Tool Palette contains two selection tools (a lasso and a rectangle), six drawing tools, a zoom tool, and a “grabber” to slide the drawing area around the page, the Pen Palette offers a selection of eight pen tips (drawing tool shapes) and a space for custom tips you design. The Graymap Editor palette displays one slider for brightness and another for contrast, as well as the graymap box, which sets the distribution of shades in an image. Finally, the Shade Palette shows a continuum of 17 grays; double-click a shade to access ImageStudio's full range of 65 shades.
The basic procedure for editing an image is this; first, you load a digitized photo into ImageStudio, which maps the grayscale information for each dot into one of ImageStudio's 65 grays. The program accepts MacPaint, ThunderScan, FOTO, and TIFF hies, although TIFF (Tagged-Image File Format) may differ from one scanner to another. (According to a Letraset representative, ImageStudio reads images from most 300-dpi scanners, including those from Abaton, Thunderware, and Microtek.) Once the picture is in ImageStudio's drawing window, you can crop it, rotate it, change the brightness and contrast of all or part of the image, touch up flaws, or otherwise edit the image. ImageStudio lets you open several views of an image at once, in scales ranging from 25 percent to 1600 percent of its original size. In most cases, you'll zoom in on a section and retouch the picture in a magnified view.
Some of the drawing tools may look familiar to Mac artists, but ImageStudio's tools operate somewhat differently from those of Macintosh paint programs. The brush, for example, blurs the edges of each stroke, as if ink or paint were spreading out. The pencil draws a hard-edged, opaque line in the selected shade, the charcoal lays down a progressively darker line as you rub an area, and the rubber stamp draws multishade lines with custom shapes and patterns. Two unique tools, the water drop and the linger, blend or smear rough edges, smoothing the transition from one shade to the next and eliminating jagged lines (anti-aliasing in computer-graphics terminology).
Custom Tools
All ImageStudio's tools can be customized. Double-clicking on a tool brings up a Preferences dialog box that offers options such as Pressure (how many strokes are required to darken an area), drawing from dark to light (this option causes a brush stroke to “fade out”), and repeat pattern (this option allows you to create effects such as a broken line rather than a continuous one). The Preference dialog boxes enable retouchers to create a set of custom tools to suit individual needs. For example, the charcoal can be made into a piece of chalk that draws in white instead of black; the brush can be made to paint only on the background, leaving foreground objects untouched; or the paint bucket can be instructed to spill a smooth gradation from one shade to another rather than a solid shade.
ImageStudio not only lets you customize the existing tools, but al low's you to create original tools as well. Surround a pattern with the selection rectangle, choose a command, and the tool is inserted in the Custom menu, ready to be retrieved.
Only a few of ImageStudio's many features are mentioned here. The more I used the program, the more I was impressed with the programmers' attention to detail. For example, ImageStudio lets you click on a pattern in the drawing and “pick it up,” making it instantly available for shading adjacent areas. Another example: a lassoed selection can be edited; if you slip when surrounding a complex shape, you can alter the blinking lasso line rather than start over.
Once you've retouched an image, you can paste it into a page-layout program that accepts TIFF, MacPaint, or EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files. Unfortunately, files saved in TIFF or EPS take up quite a bit of memory; this is not a function ImageStudio, but results from the routines TIFF and EPS use to store files. For example, a file that occupied 94.5K in ImageStudio format took up 405. 5K in TIFF and a whopping 834K in EPS. A file of this size could be refused by the LaserWriter as well as by page-layout software. (A Letraset spokesperson suggests scanning large pictures at less than the full 300-dpi resolution; 150 dpi should be sufficient for most printing applications.) I encountered no problems pasting an image in both TIFF and EPS format into ReadySetGo 4.0 and printing the file. (This is not surprising, since Letraset distributes both programs and had a chance to work on compatibility.) I was able to paste EPS and TIFF files into PageMaker 2.0, but ran into problems when I tried to print the files on the LaserWriter.
If you plan to use ImageStudio with PageMaker, I'd suggest checking with Letraset before making your purchase - I can’t make a definitive statement on printing problems based on a prerelease version of ImageStudio.
Other than oversized files, the only notable problem I ran into was sluggish behavior on the part of some of the drawing tools. This could prove annoying when drawing freehand, but shouldn't be a bother during the generally slow and meticulous work of touching up a photo. Finally, although ImageStudio works on a Mac Plus, I'd suggest running on a Mac II for best results. A Plus can display only simulated gray scale-pixels are either black or white, and must be arranged in patterns to represent shades of gray. On a Mac II equipped with a graphics card, however, each pixel can have a shade of gray, producing a much better representation of the final printed output. Retouchers who use ImageStudio on a Mac Plus will have to resort to printing numerous proofs on the LaserWriter to see the results of their work accurately.
Any Mac publisher who uses scanned photos should take a look at ImageStudio. While retouching digitized photos may not be as noble a pursuit as creating original artwork, it’s nonetheless an important aspect of producing professional-looking publications. ImageStudio, by enabling artists to enhance scanned images, adds another layer of sophistication to the art of desktop publishing.
Nielson, Erfert. (December 1987). A (Re)Touch of Gray. Macworld. (pgs. 138-139).
Fractal Software
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2015-08-13 / 
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IMAGESTUDIO.img_.bin
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
