Review: Extensis Intellihance Pro 4.0

Product Name: Intellihance Pro 4.0
Company: Extensis
URL: http://www.extensis.com/intellihancepro/
Category: Adobe Photoshop Plug-in
Price:
- $199.95 Full Version
- $99.95 upgrade
Requirements:
- Mac OS 7.5.5 – 9.2.2, or Mac OS X (v 10.1.5 or higher)
- Adobe Photoshop 4.0 – 7.0 or ImageReady 1.0 – 3.0, or 7.0
- PowerPC or equivalent, 32 MB RAM minimum for Mac OS 7.5.5 – 9.2.2 (128MB RAM recommended)
- Power PC or equivalent, 128MB RAM minimum for Mac OS X
Rating: 3 bounces - Lustworthy

Intellihance Pro Box

Like PhotoFrame (see review), Intellihance Pro is a Photoshop plug-in that appears under the “Extensis” menu heading once it has been installed in the appropriate Photoshop folder. The Intellihance submenu consists of the Intellihance command itself, and of a series of predefined settings including “Quick Enhance”, “Dark Image Enhance”, “Despeckle”, “Dust Reduction”, “Digital Camera Flash” and more. As the name of the product and these settings indicate, Intellihance is a tool intended to “intelligently enhance” your digital pictures by applying all kinds of filters, with varying degrees of subtlety, to them.

Not the Best UI

The Intellihance command itself opens a separate window on top of your current Photoshop windows. From a UI point of view, this window has a few problems… It has a title bar, but that title bar was hidden under Photoshop’s top toolbar the first time I used it, making it impossible to move it. As well, the window fills up the entire screen by default, without taking Mac OS X’s Dock into account. This is particularly annoying if your Dock happens to cover the bottom-right part of the screen, because that’s where both the window’s resize control and its “Apply” and “Cancel” buttons are. So if you want to use any of these controls, you need to hide the Dock first. As well, I found that the cmd-option-D shortcut to hide the Dock didn’t work on my machine when I was within the Intellihance window. I had to go to the Apple menu and select the “Turn Hiding On” command manually…

To make matters worse, changes to the Intellihance window only stick if you actually use the “Apply” button, which means that if you leave the window after having made all these changes by clicking on “Cancel” (or pressing the Escape key) and come back to it later, you will have to redo all the changes. Fortunately, once you’ve made your changes to the window and used the “Apply” button once (you can always undo the plug-in’s filters using cmd-Z immediately after), not only do the changes stick for the rest of your photo editing session in Photoshop, but they also stick after you’ve quit and relaunched Photoshop.

Still such a lack of Dock awareness and general level of UI annoyance would have been acceptable a couple of years ago, when Mac OS X was still a new thing — but it’s harder to forgive them today, when companies such as Extensis have had more than enough time to update their software and make it fully Mac OS X-compliant.

Using Intellihance

These UI matters aside, Intellihance is a very powerful tool. Once you are in the Intellihance window, you can view up to 25 different enhancements simultaneously, making it easy to compare between them and pick the one that is best for your picture. You can view the 25 (or fewer) enhancements applied to the same detail in the picture, or applied to various areas within the window, in a “split view” type of presentation. You can zoom in and out of the picture and move around using the familiar magnifying glass and “hand” tools (as well as traditional view settings such as “Actual Pixels”, “Fit” and “Fill” in the “View” menu). This lets you make very fine comparisons and get a better idea of what the picture will eventually look like in print.

Grid of possible enhancements

On the right-hand side of the window, you have access to all kinds of further manual adjustements — “Descreen”, “Dust and Scratches”, “Contrast”, etc. — which you can apply to any of the currently visible enhancements. (The currently active enhancement is indicated with a red outline.) As soon as you make a change to one of the predefined enhancements, a plus sign is appended to its name, in order to indicate that you have made manual changes. If the manual adjustments you made produced good results and you think you might want to use them again on other pictures, you can then save the combination of filter settings as a new “preset” using Intellihance’s “File” menu commands. Just give a name to your preset, and from now on it will be listed along with the predefined ones in Intellihance’s list of enhancements, both in the pop-up menus within the Intellihance window and in the Intellihance submenu in the “Extensis” menu in Photoshop itself. This will give you quick access to your own presets from within Photoshop, without having to go through the Intellihance window again.

Intellihance menu

This effectively gives you an infinite number of possibilities to customize Intellihance’s interface to better suit your needs, and makes up somewhat for the UI shortcomings described above.

In order to attempt to illustrate what Intellihance can do within the constraints of a web column (for which image quality is always a problem), I've applied the "Quick Enhance" to a detail in a picture and included the "before" and "after" images below. Of course, you need to remember that heavy JPEG compression has been applied to these images and that the improvements might not be as obvious as they are in the non-compressed originals. It is also much easier to see the improvements when within Photoshop, by simply masking or showing picture layers. So take the following for what it is, i.e. a very imprecise illustration of Intellihance's work.

Before

After (with Quick Enhance)

More Power For Advanced Users

For really advanced users, Intellihance provides access to even more “under-the-hood” power with its “Fine Tune” and “PowerVariations” modes. The “Fine Tune” mode lets you adjust individual filters (“Descreen”, “Dust and Scratches”, etc.) on an even finer scale. In the default “Intelligent Adjustments” mode, these filters each come with a number of predefined settings. For example, “Descreen” has the following settings: None, Auto Descreen, Newspaper, Magazine, Fine Art. In “Fine Tune” mode, you can actually adjust the amount and the radius manually, respectively from 0 to 100% and from 0.1 to 6.0.

“PowerVariations”, on the other hand, enables you to switch from a view of multiple enhancements to a view of multiple levels of the same adjustement. It lets you compare the brightness, contrast, sharpness, saturation, cast or color balance of your picture with different variations of the setting (for example: -20%, -10%, original, +10%, +20%). This feature is somewhat in competition with Photoshop’s own “Variations” feature (in the “Adjustements” submenu), but it is in fact more powerful, because it is more flexible.

Instead of just applying Intellihance’s filters to a picture and then printing the result, you can actually export an “image grid” of the different variations displayed within the Intellihance window and send that grid itself to your printer, so that you can actually compare the results of various enhancements side by side in printed form and not just on your screen.

And since Intellihance is fully integrated with the Photoshop interface, it can of course be used for batch processing by when combined with Photoshop’s built-in “Actions” architecture.

The documentation for the product comes mostly in the form of HTML-based online help which can be viewed with your browser of choice, as well as PDF files that you can print on your laser printer. (You are not, thankfully, forced to use Mac OS X’s dreadful Help Viewer.) I found the documentation somewhat disappointing, in that it is significantly dated, with old Mac OS 9-era screenshots and references to old product versions such as “Photoshop 4.0 and 5.0” and “Corel Photo-Paint 8.0”, which indicates that at least part of the documentation has not been updated in a long time… As well, some external links within the online help to Extensis’s own web site didn’t work when I tried them.

Conclusion

All in all, however, the only major issue I have is with Intellihance’s interface quirks under Mac OS X. They indicate that Extensis is still in the process of making the transition to Apple’s latest system software. But at least, once it’s properly configured, the software works seamlessly within Photoshop, and provides an unmatched level of control over digital picture enhancements that would otherwise be much more difficult to achieve using Photoshop’s built-in filters and features.

- Pierre Igot

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