Review of Canvas 8

Canvas 8

The Master Illustration Program

Deneba Canvas 8:

Capsule: Canvas is the only "Draw" program to fully embrace all aspects of drawing - technical, DTP, bitmap as well as vector illustration. In that respect Canvas has moved well beyond such classic programs as Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or Macromedia's Freehand which are masters of one or two domains at best; yet Canvas retains an innovative flair as well. There is a trade-off for such versatility - a steep learning curve.

Out of Box: The people at Deneba know they have one of the more demanding programs to master so they spare no effort at getting users up to speed: easy install, getting started manual,a clever active Tour program, and feature demos. To this Deeneba adds dockable pallets , flyout icon bars, and user ccustomizable toolbars. And the Help system is always points to "how to" tips.

Overall Summary: As Canvas merges its DTP, vector & bitmap features into ever more logical groups. Canvas will emerge as a vital player in the 2D Drawing marketplace.. For one stop, top-of-the-line illustration prowess - Canvas is hard to beat.
Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10

Figure 1 - The Canvas 8 bitmap canvas

Many times Microsoft gets credited with tenacity in software as if it were a unique to them. Well Deneba software with its Canvas 8 super draw program, can be credited with similar tenacity but without Redmond's ferocity. The good people at Deneba have stuck to their vision of a drawing software supporting 5 major areas or tasks - 1)vector illustration, 2)bitmap painting, 3)technical drawing, 4)graphic DTP, and 5)web scene animations. Deneba's Canvas 8 has progressed to the point that it is very competent if not near best of breed in each graphic task. In addition new technologies like Sprite Effects, Disperse command, and Lens objects which integrate vector, text, and bitmap operations provide distinctive capabilities to Canvas 8. Specifically, Canvas 8 more than any other graphics program is integrating graphics objects technologies such that users can employ vector, bitmap, text, and grouped objects transparently together. Finally, Deneba has made steady improvements in its GUI interface to the point that its innovations in dockers, navigation, and smart margin controls are so good that they are sure to receive the sincerest form of flattery from its competitors - watch for imitation by Adobe, Corel, Macromedia and others.

The net result is that Canvas 8 has emerged as a unique graphics powerhouse - able to work across a wide range of design disciplines very effectively. We shall examine just how well Canvas 8 does so in more detail. And then summarize some of the unique cross discipline features, seeing how the blend makes for a greater whole. First a look at Canvas 8's illustration tools tools and capabilities.

Canvas Illustration

Having used Freehand, Illustrator, and Corel Draw recently for various Web projects - the thought of learning yet another vector draw interface in Canvas 8 was not a thrilling prospect. Surprise - it was very easy. And surprise again, the technical drawing features of Canvas 8 add distinctive luster to the vector draw capabilities of the product. Users have 6 drawing pens, 4 shape tools, 7 ink and fill options (all of which are user customizable), 12 Combine- object modes, 4 Smart line tools, 3 illustration document/label tools to work with. Sounds intimidating - but they are not for two reasons. First they are nicely clustered together in the menus and/or toolbar flyouts and second they tend to work well together.

But as an illustrator what I really appreciate is support during design work. Canvas has master pages which can have multiple layers each of which can be turned on and off for specific illustration sheets/pages. Every sheet/page can have its own grid layers with specific setting. Every sheet/page can have its own guide layers with the power of snap-to-lines, curves and objects. Move a guide object on its layer and all attached objects move with it if the Ctrl key is pressed. Using the Document

Figure 2 - Canvas 8 Vector Drawing Tools

Layout palette (see Figure 3 below) speeds up navigating to and from different objects for editing. And for movement on a magnified sheet or page, artists have a choice of old fashioned sliders, a magnification control in the bottom leftcorner of every sheet/page or use the Navigator palette to zoom around a thumbnail view of the whole canvas. Canvas 8 aids to the illustrator are excellent.

But even more impressive are the range of drawing tools. We have already listed some of them but here are some additional.ones. The Multigon tool allows rapid creation of 2-36 sided stars, spokes, frames, wheels(spoke and frame), and framed stars. The Gridmaker tool allows laying down a grid or table of up to 100x100 cells with simple drag and drop movement. And the grid spacing of columns and rows can be changed after layout. The Spiral and Concentric Circle tools allow adding upto 35 spirals or concentric circles/ovals - again allowing for post layout changes to the number and spacing in the case of Concentric Circles. Finally the Cube tools allows the rapid creation of rectangular or square boxes of any dimension and orientation. Coupled with the Blend and Extrude commands this allows illustrators to add basic 3D shapes very quickly to their drawings.

perhaps the most important of the illustration tools based on sheer usage turn out to be the Group and Combine commands. Group allows grouping together one or more objects for collective movement, resizing, and/or rotation plus application of any of the Sprite Effects. Equally important is the Group Select tool which allows selecting individual objects within a group without the need to ungroup the object for editing.The Combine command allows 12 basic combination operations between 2 or more objects (with the exception of image/bitmap objects). Figure 2 shows the range of combine effects possible. These tools really speed up complex drawing tasks. Yet mention has not been made of the customizable gradients, hatching, textures, patterns and symbols that can be quickly imported into the Inks and Fill palettes. Nor have we explained Styles or Sequences (think of the latter as Canvas macros). In short, Canvas 8 is so rich in functionality it easily stands among the best of breed in vector illustration programs.

Canvas Paints

Deneba deserves praise for sticking to its guns and producing an image editing part of the program which, though not best of breed. still has enough features to make Canvas 8 equivalent to the 2nd tier paint programs like Jasc's PaintShop Pro or Ulead's Photo Impact. Now that is awfully good company to be in - so let's see how Canvas 8 measures up. Doing paint work involves two sets of requirement, one for photo manipulation and one for original painting and drawing. In photo manipulation , five requirements are paramount: 1)transformational tasks like cropping, resizing, rotating and flipping; 2)color control tasks like brightness, contrast, intensity, saturation, lighting and hue corrections; 3) image enhancement tasks like sharpening, edge preserving smooth, dodging, burning, softening and blurring; 4)touch up tasks like cloning, painting with many brushes and devices, dodging, burning, and smearing; and finally 5)text , vector and other image overlays.. Canvas covers all of these requirement very well - with two major exceptions.

In color corrections, Canvas has only one major three dimensional control - hue/saturation/lightness. In contrast, Corel PhotoPaint has four 3-dimensional (you can vary any one or two or all three factors) controls: i)hue/saturation/lightness; ii)lightness/saturation/brightness; iii)brightness/contrast/intensity; and gamma/hue/saturation. Also Canvas lacks a lighting studio where again in Corel PhotoPaint users can add any number of directional or omni-lights of different hues, brightness, and cone shape (for directional lights) anywhere around the frame of an image. Suffice it to say that it is easier to do color corrections or add dramatic lighting to PhotoPaint images than in Canvas. But Canvas 8 has its own resources for color correction and image manipulation. Sprite Effects are removable layers which change brightness/contrast, color balance, hue/saturation/lightness and about two dozen more effects. But the key advantage of Sprite effects is that they work with not just paint/bitmap images but equally well with vector, text and grouped objects as well. In mixed mode drawings this gives Canvas a distinct advantage.

The second set of critical paint requirements are associated with original painting and drawing. Here brushes, masks, and layering are of paramount importance. And again Canvas 8 acquits itself very well with strong brushes and brushmaking tools and strong layering with transparency masking capabilities. In fact, again because text, vector, bitmap or grouped objects can be masked or used to make up masks - Canvas has a distinctive competency for designers wanting to deliver unique collage and composite works. Only in the arena of direct applied masks does Canvas lack the sophisticated tools available in say Adobe Photoshop where the complete Photoshop toolset can be turned in Quick Mask mode into a vast, applied masking palette.

But Canvas 8 provides all the tools to do top notch creative paint images and has added five new painterly effects. In addition, all the vast 3rd party library of plugin filters and effects are available and can be applied not just to bitmap but also vector, grouped, and text objects - a big bonus. This graphic object utility is a major reason to use Canvas paint tools. For example, when applying fills to a bitmap image, artists can use vector symbols, patterns and hatchings as well as bitmap gradients, colors, and textures. This kind of painting versatility is hard to give up.

Canvas Animation

Canvas for animation ? - This will be a stretch. Sure Canvas 8 supports saving files to Flash SWF and GIF animation format. And Canvas 8 can create animations with individual frame or a block of wait times. But these do not make an animation program. So users can spread one or many selected objects over several frames with a single Disperse command. So its easy to just drag and copy any object holding the Ctrl button down. So a master page can set the background for any or all frames. So it is easy to unlink a master page such that all its layers are assigned to a specific frame to be available for special editing. So what if users can create a guide layer with guidelines and/or objects for any frame and have objects and drawing elements snap to these "invisible" guides. So...

Okay, so users have a huge 3 CD selection of clip art categorized by library and searchable by keywords. Okay so it is easy to copy text blocks from one frame to another and then resize, move, and/or rotate those text blocks. Okay, so it is easy to change the font type, style, size and/or color in those text blocks. Okay its ditto for changing the color, fill-style, ink and other elements of any Canvas 8 object. Okay the individual elements of the Blend command can be Dispersed over several frames. Yea, okay, it is handy to be able to onionskin the frame before or after or both to see changing cell effects.

Okay, okay. I admit to switching out of Flash and using Canvas 8 for some animation sequences. Okay, so it is those ornery animations which require integrating vector draw, painted image, and text blocks together. But this still does not make Canvas 8 the equivalent of Flash or Director or some of the other top of the line animation tools. Besides, Canvas 8 does not support sophisticated audio or video inserts with critical timings (Canvas only supports .AU audio files). It also lacks support for JavaScript or some of the other popular scripting languages critical for orchestrating complex animations. Canvas 8 is certainly not best of breed in the animation world; though this party will admit to sneaking off more often than not to quickly create Web banner ads and other animations.

Canvas DTP & Presentations

There is a surprising need for high quality graphics and words together - presentations, product or service brochures, ad copy, menus, commercial blocking cuts, web templates. These are not quite DTP, not quite illustration tasks where Canvas 8 absolutely excels. Canvas 8 has a pretty impressive array of basic DTP features: facing pages with multi layering per page; headers and footers; master pages with multi layering and unlinking, per page guide layers with snap-to lines, curves and objects; per page grid layers with adjustable horizontal and vertical snap-to grid spacing; resizable text blocks with linking and automatic text flow; character, word and selected text kerning; powerful margins, indentation, alignment and spacing for paragraphs, pages and/or selected text and so on. Couple these robust DTP features with presentation capabilities like Smart Shapes and Lines, flowcharting capabilities and slide show transition effects plus stealing from the animation side of the Canvas palette of tools - the result is that designers can put together some solid visuals.

Figure 3 - Using DTP features of Canvas

On the downside, although Canvas has some templates for presentations slides and master pages, it lacks the familiar preformatted slide pages familiar from PowerPoint and other presentation packages. Also organization charts, plots and bar charts will have to be imported from an Office or spreadsheet tool. But Canvas allows easy OLE embedding of these charts and graphs. So in a rare example, designers won't have all the tools in Canvas itself to do presentations - especially those which are chart and plot rich; nonetheless, Canvas 8 has master page, animation and DTP tools that allow users to quickly develop unique and innovative ad copy, brochures and, yes, even presentations.

However, when the question of how to deliver the copy comes up, Canvas 8 really excels with many options. User can deliver in the form of high quality PDF files or HTML pages or SWF Flash animations or self-standing SlideShows or precision printed documents. Just consider precision printing: Canvas provides not only RGB, CMYK, Grayscale, and LAB color modes; but also a wide range of overprinting, halftone, proxy, color separation and trapping settings, the latter of which can be applied to complete pages or specific vector, paint/image, text block or grouped objects. In sum, Canvas 8 provides Designers with a wide and fairly versatile set of output options.

Canvas Innovations

Canvas 8 is the one program to stick with the vision of a unified graphics programming interface - sort of like the IDE - Interactive Development Environs which unite program editors, visual design tools, compilers, and visual debuggers into one tool. Given that vector, bitmap, text and grouped objects should be treated the same - that is no special command or tools to manipulate them; but rather one tool or one command that knows what to do when presented with a mix of graphic objects to work with. We already see the basics of this in Canvas 8 where the same pointer tool is able to select, move, resize and rotate any object be it vector, image/bitmap, text or grouped. Ditto for most Sprite Effects. And Deneba continues to build up an integrated command and toolset.

But this is not the only Canvas 8 innovations. Two others deserve note. First, Canvas 8 really makes palettes and dockers work well. Every palette collapses to a single title bar to help save space. Second, by clicking on the hook backup button (see Figure 2), a palette can be quickly returned to the Tab bar where it can be dragged down for use next time. Third, many palettes have an extra extender button (see bottom of Figure 2), which expands the palette for even more options. This prevents palettes from being to busy or complicated except when absolutely required. Finally many palettes have additional extra command available on their bottom toolbar as shown in the case of the Ink palette in Figure 2. These tool icons tend to be consistent across palettes and thus easier to remember how to use. Kudos to Canvas will come from its competitors - they are sure to "copy" some or all of these innovations.

The second innovation in Canvas 8 is a faster and more complete Internet browser based Help system. The advantage is that the same system can be used for Mac as Windows. The second advantage is that the Deneba engineers have made it work very fast - in contrast with other browser based help systems. But the third advantage is that URLs allow hyperlinking to any resource - other programs, other websites, other references on the same page or other help system pages. Canvas has taken advantage of these capabilities in its Help files and it shows in assistance to users..

Canvas Goods & Duds

So Canvas turns out to be pretty versatile and remarkably easy to use. Ease of use is particularly supported because the Deneba folk have managed to create a good out-of-box experience by making the install straight forward and the Getting Started exercises very useful. But one of the keys to ease of use is simply the fact that users can treat Canvas objects - be they vector, image, text or grouped - increasingly in the same way. For example to select and edit any object I use the same tool and double click action. Ditto to move, resize, and/or rotate an object. Sprite Effects allow users to perform an increasing number of color correction, filtering and effects in a similarly uniform way. This makes learning the program that much easier. But to their credit Deneba have written excellent Getting Started and User Guides supported by solid tutorials in online help. Finally, Canvas 8 groups its menu commands such that vector, image and text/DTP commands are grouped together. For the longest time I simply ignored using and or learning the vector commands until I forced to; yet I felt safe that I was getting the most out of Canvas 8 for the DTP, animation and graphics I was using it for.

As well Canvas continues to improve its Web capabilities. There are enhanced button making and deploying capabilities. Canvas 8 has a much improved image slicer for cutting a large image into manageable chunks for download. In addition, Canvas 8 has greatly improved its Web out put options: more control for GIF, HTML, JPG and PDF files while adding a very good Flash SWF output to go along with animated GIF files. Finally, the URL palette is one of the easiest to use for setting up Internet links.

However, not to paint a totally rosy picture there are some Canvas duds and desperately-want-to-haves. First and foremost, I found Canvas to be the only program so far that has been able to crash itself and bring down Windows 2000. And not just once but about 4 or 5 times during a week of intensive testing. Admittedly this was after doing some complex operations - but users should be forewarned, better to save after every 5 or 10 minutes of editing or risk losing everything. Canvas does not have an autoback up mode. Contrast this with Adobe Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint that almost never go down and never have brought down my Windows 2000 operating system.

The second most frustrating thing in Canvas is to discover they have not extended the interoperability logic to all phases/tasks of the program. For example, users can Extrude text objects but only in parallel, not sweep or rotation. Also one can Combine text, grouped, and vector objects but not image objects (a capability that Photoshop has). Likewise one can rotate, move and resize any object but not skew or dip them. This is part of the problem of being on the leading edge of graphics innovation. There are other rough edges. The Document Layout Palette , like the Layers palette in Photoshop, is one of the most important. Yet a right mouse click or double click on an object listed in the Document Layout palette does nothing. One would expect a relevant popup menu with a rightmouse click or launch edit mode with a double click. No such luck, and too bad because the palette is used so often. Another problem for heavy users of Canvas is the lack of a or scripting language for Canvas. True there are the new Sequences and one can always do external VB office automation scripts. But there is nothing to unify Sequences with VBA or other scripting tools. One of the attractions of the top of the line programs is the ability to customize them and/or run them in batch mode. Finally, Canvas tends to produce not just big but huge save files; quickly exceeding 1.5MBs to fit on a floppy for quick sneaker-net transfers.

Canvas Summary

Canvas is remarkably robust yet deceptively easy to use. Organizations which have to span several creative environs will find that this Mac and Windows program covers all the bases remarkably well. Creative pros will find it even more attractive because they can specialize in one area - say illustration and find the program very productive. Then as their new creative assignments demand it they will find a very familiar program able to cope with other tasks such as animation, presentations, and highly visual DTP. Canvas 8 is already delivering cross graphic objects capabilities that other programs will be moving towards - yet Canvas, for about $352, costs less than say Adobe Photoshop (about $550), Quark Xpress (about $770), or Corel Draw(about $390); yet it delivers much broader functionality. In short, I would say we have the definition for a graphics bargain.

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