Now shipping as part of the FrontPage 98 package, Image Composer 1.5 makes it easier than ever to create stunning graphics for your Web site.

If there was one piece of software last year that showed promise but that needed a little more polish, it was Microsoft® Image Composer. For those Web designers, like myself, who fell in love with this product, Image Composer represented a better way to manipulate images. Image Composer treats images as objects that are all part of the same composition. This makes combining these images much easier than with a traditional image editing program. It makes so much sense you wonder why anybody would do it any other way. But a number of problems kept Image Composer 1.0 from becoming the default image editor on many user's machines. I'm happy to report that Microsoft has dealt with most of these issues with aplomb. On the Surface       Image Composer 1.5 retains the popup toolbox interface introduced in version 1.0. In the popup toolbox, each choice pops up a palette giving the user access to a number of related functions. Rather than opening many different palettes at once, the visible palette is replaced each time the user clicks on a button in the toolbar. Though this feature is a bit difficult to get used to if you spend a lot of time with programs like Fractal Design Painter or Adobe Photoshop, you'll start to appreciate the extra space you get as you do your work. In the latest version, many of the Image Composer tools have moved. Some tools and effects have been consolidated into a single palette; others have been spread out and given their own palettes. For example, the Cutout effects, formerly part of the Shapes palette, are now on their own Cutout palette.       Most of the effects filters built into Image Composer have been moved to the Effects palette. Effects are grouped much as they were in version 1.0, but some names have been changed. For example, the Note Paper effect, once part of the Art Effects palette, is now called Flocking and has been moved to the Arts and Crafts group on the Effects palette. The name changes are documented in the Image Composer 1.5 help file.       One of the most useful changes in the Image Composer palettes is the addition of a small image that lets you preview how an effect is likely to change a sprite before you apply it. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of choosing the proper effect from a large collection. The preview image doesn't show the current object; a picture of a parrot head is used to represent each effect. You can see the Arts and Crafts group from the Effects palette in Figure 1. Effects can be adjusted by clicking on the Details tab after selection.

Figure 1: Parrot heads show how an effect will look

      A big change in Image Composer 1.5 is the naming scheme for the interface element. The composition guide is now called the composition space. The area outside the composition space that was formerly referred to as the "void" is now called the workspace. New in version 1.5 are guidelines called composition guides, which are used to adjust the size of the composition space. These changes aren't particularly straightforward for Image Composer veterans, but they make a lot more sense for new users.
      One final user interface change of note involves the shortcut keys for the various palettes, which have been changed to reflect their new positions on the toolbar. This change might cause you a stumble or two at first if you're used to calling up the palettes with a keyboard shortcut, but the changes are really very intuitive. Alt+1 invokes the Selection pointer, Alt+2 opens the Arrange palette, Alt+3 opens the Cutout palette, and so on. If you can recognize the icons for the various palettes, you can easily call them up with a keyboard shortcut by counting down from the top. The exception is the Color Tuning palette, which is opened with an Alt+= combination.

Buttons
      Image Composer's new Button Wizard makes creating button images a breeze. The wizard is opened by selecting the Insert | Button menu item. Using the Button Wizard, you select a button style, the number of buttons to create, and the text for each. After you create your buttons, they'll be piled on top of one another in the workspace, so you'll need to drag them apart to deal with them individually.
       Figure 2 shows the Button Wizard in action. Notice that you have a number of styles to select from when creating a new button.

Figure 2: The Button Wizard in action

Once you've created a button, it will actually consist of a group of objects. Right-clicking on the group will bring up a popup menu containing an Edit Button selection. This item opens the Button Editor, a tool that allows you to further customize the button you've created. You can see the Button Editor in Figure 3. The Size tab lets you preview your changes before you commit them to the button.

Figure 3: Previewing the changes to a button on the Size page

The Button Wizard isn't the be-all, end-all button design tool, but its ability to refine the buttons it creates should satisfy most designers. Remember that a button created by the Button Wizard is a group. You can explode the group and work with the individual button components if you need to. Plug-ins       Plug-ins extend the capabilities of an image editing program the way macros automate tasks in a programmer's editor. Although most of the effects that these filters create can be done by hand, a good filter can save a designer literally hours of editing time.       The ability to add features through plug-in filters is one of the things that makes Adobe Photoshop so popular. Photoshop plug-ins have become fairly standard in image editing: most popular graphics editing programs support them to an extent. Image Composer 1.0 supported a level of plug-in compatibility that's outdated for most of the newer plug-ins available. This rendered most third-party filters useless in the program. Image Composer 1.5, happily, remedies this situation and was able to handle almost every commercial plug-in filter that I threw at it.

Figure 4: The Photo Graphic Edges plug-in in Image Composer 1.5

In Image Composer, plug-in filters are accessed from the Plug-Ins menu. A plug-in acts on the currently selected sprite. This is a little different from most image editing programs, where a plug-in is usually run on a selection. When the plug-in is opened, you see the editing program's plug-in interface, which usually includes a preview of the filter on the current sprite. The screen in Figure 4 is a shot of the Auto F/X Photo Graphic Edges plug-in run on a photographic sprite in Image Composer.       The plug-in upgrade is an important step in the development of Image Composer. Artists can spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars a year on plug-in filters. Any time you can do most of your work in a single program you save time and money. Text Handling       Image Composer 1.0 had a few problems handling text. Users groped for workarounds and solutions that could get them past the program's limitations. The new capabilities in Image Composer 1.5 have made working with text a whole lot easier.       Image Composer 1.5 can now produce multiple lines of text. In version 1.0 users had to paste in text from other programs. Version 1.5 also allows users to edit text after it's been created. Text remains an editable object until you perform some sort of operation on it. Finally, the Microsoft WordArt program is now available with the program and is accessible through the Insert menu.       WordArt was a popular tool among early Image Composer adopters. The only problem was that users had to run WordArt in Microsoft Word and then paste the results into Image Composer as a plain sprite. WordArt is far more flexible and convenient in Image Composer 1.5. As with a text sprite, as long as you don't apply effects to a WordArt sprite, the text remains editable. This is a very nice feature. You can see in Figure 5 what the WordArt editor looks like when it's run in Image Composer. The resulting image can be resized easily in Image Composer without a loss of resolution.

Figure 5: WordArt in Image Composer

There's one problem that you should be aware of with text in Image Composer: on normal text sprites, the program tends to cut off parts of the first and last letters in a line of text. There was no fix available for this annoyance at the time of this writing, but an easy workaround is to just add a space to the beginning and the end of any line of text you create. OLE       One of the most exciting additions to Image Composer ties right into the text subjects that I discussed above. You're now able to insert OLE objects into your compositions. This really soups up the program and helps differentiate it from the other available image editors. Because Image Composer already deals with sprites as individual objects, it makes perfect sense to be able to insert and use objects that are created in other programs. Once an object is created you can just pull it around and resize it like any other sprite. If you want to edit the object using its native tools, all you need to do is double-click on it to invoke the program inside Image Composer.       In Figure 6, I'm creating a drawing in Micrografx Designer, a vector drawing program. A vector drawing program is like a drafting table. You can draw all sorts of lines and shapes, then go back into the program later to easily change what you've done. It's not quite as easy to edit lines this way in Image Composer.

Figure 6: A vector object is created inside Image Composer

OLE in-place activation gives you the ability to edit vector drawings within Image Composer and then treat what you've created as a native sprite. To demonstrate, I added a drop shadow to the vector object from Figure 6; the results are shown in Figure 7. Notice that the shadow effect follows the lines in the drawing, not the perimeter of the object. (I was pleasantly surprised by this!) Even after you edit the object and add an effect like a drop shadow, you can usually get back to the original object by double-clicking on it. If you do this and it works, you'll see a dialog box letting you know that you'll lose any effects that you've added in Image Composer if you proceed.

Figure 7: The Drop Shadow effect applied to a vector object

Sprite-based editing and OLE go together well. For artists who work with many different programs, Image Composer is just the ticket for "mixed media." Conclusion       Microsoft has taken some giant steps in the move from Image Composer 1.0 to 1.5. Don't let the point upgrade fool you. This program has improved as much as you would expect from a couple of regular revisions. It's become a grown up product. For old hands, the interface is cleaner and easier to navigate. If you haven't used Image Composer before, you're in for a treat.

From the April 1998 issue of Microsoft Interactive Developer.