You know, I do a great deal of design work and one of the tools which I use every day is Adobe Photoshop. I consider myself a semi-expert on Photoshop and one of the things I do pretty expertly is fix up pictures.
   Many of the print publications with which I am involved include pictures. Sometimes the pictures are really good, sometimes they are pretty awful; but it is a rare picture which passes through my hands without my playing around with its color, brightness, contrast, saturation, tone and a host of other things.
   Because I have done thismyself for so long, I never really took a look at Extensis' Intellihance. Just as I am usually disappointed with Photoshop's autocorrect feature for photographs, I figured Intellihance wouldn't help me.
   But Kim Beasley, who has been a really fine resource for me at Extensis, suggested in an email the other day that I really should look at this Photoshop plugin. Version 4 was just released, she said, and she thought I might be really pleased with the result.
   Well, if it is in Phoptoshop's "Adjust" menu, I know how it works, but I said I would give Intellihance Pro 4 a whirl. Just shows to go you hoiw wrong I can be.
   The bottom line is I can do better image adjustments much, much faster with Intellihance Pro 4 than I could ever do without it. Look at the variations above (this is my buddy Alan Simon, by the way, he just looks a little like Alfred E. Newman).
   If you've ever done any image tweaking in Photoshop, you're probably familiar with variations. Well, this is Power Variations! Just look at that interface: you can make adjustments to shadows, midtones or highlights or any combination of them. You can also select the amount of adjustment you want (see the slider).
   For the purposes of this review, we set the slider at 14 percent to show more change here on the web – we usually work with about 5 percent. As you can plainly see, adding 14 percent of magenta to the entire picture improves it a lot.
   What you would do here is click on the change and Intellihance Pro 4 would move it into the center box, and then show you variations on that. Needless to say with the adjustment set to a low percentage you can tweak to your heart.s content in areas like color balance, saturation, contrast, brightness and three different color casts, plus sharpening. Sharpening is a major boon, because it can be very hard to control many times.
   This interface is completely adjustable, which means you can start out with variations of 14 percent and change to 3 percent as you get closer to what you want. You can go back and forth from shadow adjustment to highlight adjustment. And it is fast.
   If you'll notice the little drop-down box over the center picture which says "digital camera," this is a way you can set up your imput mode and make big changes quickly. It is also how you deal with lots changes in input mode to see what effect they would have on your picture.
   As you can see, Alan's sweater shows up better using bright enhance. Once you have used these – and they are not only changable but can show your picture in a matrix as large as 5x5 – you're ready to tweak. As you see, you can do this with the image broken up into little parts (as here) or with the whole image like the top screen shot. While this is not a good picture to use with this format, we wanted you to be able to see it.
   For those of you not "into" this sort of thing, Intellihance Pro 4 comes with excellent documentation that explains what the program is doing and helps you get going in this important area. I must say I ("the expert") learned some things from the manual. Good job Extensis!
   And thank you, Kim, for suggesting I take a look at Intellihance Pro 4. It is one of the most useful programs I have, its is done well and is fast. If you deal with phoptographs at all, you really should pick up a copy immediately.

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