RealZoom for Mac

User Reviews

• I think this app is cool...

  VersionTrackerUserOpinionDecember 7, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Good work... I look forward to seeing this app evolve. Don't listen to the stupid people who don't understand what this app does. They obviously are not designers.

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• Not a bad start

  scaissie--2008December 2, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I would ultimately like to see proper angles for CMYK halftones, as well as the ability to specify a halftone frequency. What would make it really rock would be the ability to preview dot gain on various paper/ink combinations, and to be able to take any vector-based postscript file (including PDF) and render those as well, showing overprints. And what about non-CMYK colours? Non-round halftone dots? Spot varnishes? Maybe the way to do all this is to abandon the raster rendering in favour of vector rendering (using OpenGL, maybe?). It would certainly cut down on the RAM consumption. Just a suggestion. Still, it's a nice start, and a potentially useful mini-app. I didn't try out the LCD or CRT modes, but I'm not a broadcast designer, so I wouldn't know how to rate those.

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• Quit whining

  BackSlash--2008December 2, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I don't see how you can give this 1 star just because another program can do the same thing. The fact that this costs a fraction of Photoshop and doesn't even enforce payment on you by watermarking the image, or only letting you use images of a certain size is an instant winner. He only asks nicely that you might pay if you like it. As long as you are sensible and use moderate sized source images (not using raw size photos from a 4 megapixel camera for example) the memory required isn't too hogging. It'd be nice to be able to scale down a source image before processing (so you CAN use camera-sized pics) but there's no need. If these effects are what you're looking for, this is a much quicker, cheaper alternative to Photoshop. Good work!

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• Pathetic

  wyvern5November 11, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Don't run this app unless you have at least 1.5 GB of ram. RealZoom effortlessly chewed up 1.2 GB while working on a 96k jpg (which generated a 300Mb file). It doesn't allow you to pan around in either the before or after image, nor does it let you select an area of the source image to work on. In short, why isn't this implemented as a Photoshop filter? It seems pretty obvious to me: make a new image with a suitably high resolution and place the results of the filter inside it. Photoshop can effortlessly deal with a 300MB file, but this vile creation slowed my system to an almost complete halt; even the Dock had stopped responding. A nice idea, but the implementation is unusable.

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