14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe Photoshop is a great program used by a lot of designers all over the world, ranging from beginners to gurus. There's no use in telling you about its features or about the fact that, with the right skills, you can do almost everything you'd like to. Apart from Photoshop, there are also a lot of good, very good and excellent graphics editors on the market, some of them are even free, just think about Gimp or Inkscape.
Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview version of what will be their first professional graphics design application, entitled Expression Graphic Designer.
It is free to download and use, so let's check it out!
The installation kit has 118MB in size and the setup process won't ask you too many questions, but I advice you to spare some minutes to read the disclaimer and remember that this is a Beta version. Let's move on!
Hmm...what's with this interface? I can't say it's great or really bad, but average. For example, it took me around ten minutes, maybe more, to notice the narrow layer panel to the right of the current document...but maybe it was just me!
Since I talked about layers, it seems there are still some things to be thrown in into this, but things look nice so far. There are two layer types available in Expression Graphic Designer: pixel and vector layers.
Photoshop has a big lead in this field, because I found it harder to work with layers in Microsoft's program and also there are only a few options available for now. You can't group layers, use adjustment layers and many more, but Expression Graphics Designer makes it up for these with its innovative vector painting features.
What can we use when it comes to vector painting? Well, we have the B-Spline Tool, as a companion to the well-known Freehand and Bezier. The width and transparency of the stroke can vary along the length of a vector path with the help of the Variable Width palette. Of course that using a graphics tablet will help a lot, but even the mouse can turn you into a "little great" vector artist.
If you are thinking about customizing your shapes and brushes, you came to the right place! You can choose from an extensive list of preset brush families and design your own custom brushes.
What I didn't like with Photoshop in the beginning was that it can be pretty hard to work with the vector tools and achieve professional results, although this is not impossible. In Expression Graphic Designer you can work using advanced and flexible vector manipulation tools that provide vertices & path manipulation, path operators, and shape transformation/morph capabilities.
Now let's get to the raster painting and editing that can be done here. This is the second area where this program is clearly beaten by Photoshop, but the situation is better than with the layers. I am sure that time will solve the draw backs, but let's see what we have now.
I found a really interesting selection tool here, called SmartSelect, which segments an image and allows for gesture based image selection. In addition to the standard lasso/rectangle/oval selection tools, you can also use a B-Spline Selection for optimum results.
The image filters are not up to Photoshop's ones, but they are not that far behind either. You can choose from a set containing Grain, Emboss, Gaussian Blur, Craquelure, Emboss and many more.
PhotoMontage is a tool that can help you create professional panoramas, automatically aligning edges, correcting for color and lens distortions and eliminating double exposed areas where the image changed between exposures.
For now the file formats supported are not that many, but enough to enjoy this Beta version, so don't worry. You can't save PSD files but you can save into AI format, and TIFF file save is also present.
This is it for now, and I must say it was fun to work with this program. The future looks bright, and I hardly wait for the final version, the same as with the Expression Web Designer. Anybody wants to join me?
The Good
First of all, we have a free program! Even more, it comes from Microsoft! It works great; it has a very good Help system and promises a lot!
The Bad
The list with file formats supported has to grow a lot until the final release, or at least that's what I think should happen. Working with layers should also be improved, and the interface is a bit hard to use.
The Truth
Even if you are using Photoshop, Gimp or Corel PhotoPaint, Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer is a program worth checking out. Prepare your coffee or tea, and start the download right now!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
