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Pricing:
It is always a welcome surprise to discover that an application you have used, enjoyed and liked is still around. Enhancing that discovery is learning that your long lost application has been updated. As soon as I learned that Expression was available, and not consigned to cyber purgatory, it seems Expression 3 was literally waiting in the wings.
For those not familiar with Expression, let me briefly recap its history. Originally, it was available under the Fractal Design banner, but created by a company known as Creature House. When Fractal Design ceased to be, Metacreations became home to many of the newly orphaned applications, minus Expression. Suddenly, Metacreations decided to divest itself of their design software titles with the bulk of them winding up with Corel Corporation under the Corel banner or Procreate, a subdivision of Corel that deals with high-end graphics applications. Amid all of the sales and changes, Expression seemed doomed to oblivion. Seemingly out of nowhere, Expression was given back to its original creators, Creature House.
Unlike Painter, Expression for some odd reason never really gained the audience, or the appreciation it rightfully deserved. While there are a plethora of bitmap image editors and Adobe Photoshop clones around, no one, at least to the best of my knowledge, even tried to create a program along the lines of Expression. Perhaps it is marketing, or even the preconceptions of some, few people, even graphics professionals, had ever heard of Expression in any of its incarnations.
In a nutshell, Expression 3, like its predecessors, is a natural media vector-based drawing tool. Unlike most paint programs that use bitmap images, Expression uses vector graphics to create effects that seem impossible using programs like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. While vector graphics lend themselves well to hard edge geometric designs, they have never been considered able to render the type of effects that bitmap images can produce. Because bitmap images are based on pixels, they naturally lend themselves to rendering softer gradations of tone and value. Vector-based images are based on mathematically precise curves and angles that make up an image. Because of their precision, they have often been utilized for hard edge geometric designs.
Those sharply defined borders were blurred by Expression. Proving that soft edges and painterly effects can be successfully created using the curves and angles in the vector format, this application walked into a new arena. Using their own graphic engine, Expression was able to do what few applications dared, and with a great degree of power. Much in the same way Painter is a complement to Adobe Photoshop, Expression was, and still is, to Adobe Illustrator. If the Adobe products represented the most graphical end of the spectrum, Creature House, represents that arm of image generation associated with expressive fine arts.
Expression, as well as Painter, were both extensions of the idea that computer-based tools could and should be accessible to artists. The concept was to create an application, or in this case applications, that could successful permit the nuances and subtle touches of fine art to appear in the dots, dashes, pixels and lines of a computer environment. Where Painter found a niche, Expression seemed to be a very nominal player in a field all its own.
If the parallels between Painter and Expression are close, this can be seen in their respective interfaces. Even with the new reincarnation of Expression, the roots of the program as a Fractal Design application are still apparent. Just as apparent are the problems that programs like Painter and Expression attempt to address.
If the idea behind both Painter and Expression was to create a working environment for fine artists, well both still have a ways to go.
This is particularly true with Expression 3. As powerful and feature rich as it is, Expression 3 is not an intuitive program to learn. Compounding that situation is the fact that it does not follow some of the conventions that govern most graphics applications. Case in point is the ability to move and shift guides. Unlike Photoshop or Illustrator, one cannot simply drag a guide from the top of a visible rule. One has to go through an entirely different process that is anything but traditional. While this is a small complaint, it points to the fact that most applications follow certain templates towards certain activities. One comes to expect to see them since they often seem universal.
Another factor that defeats Expression is that it is still a difficult program to learn. This makes it even harder for visual artists to master since many still are a bit “phobic” about creating on a computer. This is not to say this program lacks potential, it does not. But the very people who could use this program may find themselves discouraged by a program that is a bit idiosyncratic.
Perhaps in answer to that concern, Expression 3 ships with a nearly 200 page manual. Concise, direct and minus useless technical jargon, this plain speak booklet takes some of the sting out of learning the nuances of this application. It also illustrates the power, and possibilities available to those with the time and patience to learn how to control all these options. It is also a welcome relief to see a hard copy book coming with software rather than the small flyers and leaflets that have replaced hard core documentation. While it is nice having online support and Acrobat manuals, there are just too many instances where a book comes in handy.
If this sounds like I am totally down on the program, I am far from it. I just know that as an artist and computer user, I can see that many in the fine arts ranks are not going to really feel comfortable with this program. For graphic designers, Expression may be far more accessible. Naturally there is always a trade off in software. If you want a program to be configurable, powerful, and able, then one has to sacrifice a certain degree of ease of use. It almost seems that there is a relationship between the difficulty of a program and its ability to perform. The more high end the software, the more complicated and less intuitive it is to use. In the case of Expression, sometimes that comes down to being a bit clunky. In all fairness, it still has a long way to go to be as convoluted as the powerful painter. While both do what no other programs on earth can, one hopes that one day they both could be a bit easier to work with and a lot more intuitive.
While software companies often hype their products to the stratosphere, I have to give Expression 3 and Creature House kudos for being upfront. The makers admit that their proprietary engine and approach may not always translate smoothly to other applications like Freehand or CorelDRAW. Rather than cover up, the Expression makers suggest you save all original files in the Expression format, and then export.
Although my little studies were highly informal, Expression does do an able job at exporting to other applications. For designers and others that demand interoperable between programs, this could be a major drawback. However, it is equally possible that transfer issues maybe minor, or be able to be over come in some form or fashion.
With Expression 3 I noticed a bit of a performance boost. The responsiveness and start up times of Expression 3 were noticeably faster under Windows XP than Expression 2. Running on a Pentium 4 with 512MB of memory, Expression is not a slow poke and works rather smoothly. Also, for those with Macs, Expression 3 does run native under OS X. Jaguar users are definitely not left out of this new version. As always the case with graphics software, and particularly new software, the recommendations for memory and processor strength seemed a bit low. I would recommend Expression 3 really for those with OS X or Windows XP and not have less than 200MB of memory. Programs like this one can eat up resources fast so the more power the better. But this is nothing new to those who have witnessed systems come to a crawl because of not having the latest processor and generous memory.
Naturally new software has to come with new features. Below are just a few of the new features to be found in Expression 3.
Retained from the last version is full support for Photoshop plug-ins. And if you were wondering will Expression 3 work well with Photoshop 7 the good news is yes. I had seven installed on my test machine and the plug-ins showed up in the menu without issue. I find this feature entirely too nice and perfect for those times when you import bitmap images.
Also, there is support for TIFF, BMP, GIF, JPEG, as well as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop support. As stated before, there may be incidents when elements may not export smoothly. In order for Expression to do what it does so well, issues of translatability may, or may not, be present. So again, save everything in the Expression format. And, there is color management available.
While the design philosophy behind Expression was to create a relatively easy-to-use application with power to spare, I found that Expression, while not the most difficult program to use, still has a steep learning curve. Also, it does take a while to configure your mind set to use vector tools as fine art ones liberated from the limitations imposed by convention and other illustration packages. Even with those issues in mind, I cannot imagine anyone not wanting or enjoying Expression. It remains in a league of its own. It is great to see the program still in development, still available and most of all filled with so much potential.
While Expression comes in at an economical price compared to so many other applications, I do not see this as a newbie program or for those not familiar with graphics software. I can see serious end users, design professionals and hard-core hobbyist utilizing Expression, as well as educators (of note, there are academic discounts available at the Creature House site). Unlike CorelDRAW 11, which included both the Mac and Windows versions in one box, you can obtain Expression 3 in one box in both formats, but that is a tad extra, see the price listing at the top.
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