I recently reinstalled my laptop and a week ago I needed to install Adobe Photoshop to create som images. I could not locate the CD-ROM so I decided to download and try out the CTP of Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer, formerly known as codename Acrylic.
I had already tried the beta last year so I knew I could make the images using Expression, but instead of doing what I needed I started out trying out the features of Expression, and this is my first impression of Expression.
First of all, I am a not a graphics designer, I'm a developer, but working in a small company and working with web development means that you have to do some "art" once in a while, and for personal use I do some work with my digital photographs.
Microsoft Expression differs in a lot of way from Adobe Photoshop, which today is the standard program in the business, but the two programs looks lot a like at a first glance. Shortcuts, tool windows, effects etc are nearly the same in Photoshop and Expression. The big, or the huge, difference is that Expression makes usage of vector graphics far much better and easier than Photoshop. In expression there are two types of layers; pixel and bitmap layers. So if you still like the old fashioned way you can stay with painting pixels.
It took me a while getting acquainted with the way Expression works, but after taking the tours at the Expression website - with an excellent tutor, I had a kickstart with the application. To give you a hint on how to start with Expression Jeremy Kuhne, an Expression Graphic Designer, has a nice blog post about on how to Liven Up Your Office Clip Art.
By using vector layers you can easily create the objects, texts and effects you like and then export the image to a pixel based image type. The nice thing about working with vectors and the live effects is that it is not rendered to pixels until you tell it to and you can scale the object or change the effects until the result looks fine without having to destroy the source (if the source is a pixel based image) or loose any quality.
There are some really neat features of Expression you should check out:
- Variations effects - let Expression change the colors, opacity and effects randomly when working with the objects, this saves you a ton of time.
- Warp groups - warp the objects/images in a smooth way
- Photo montage - this function really stunned me. Let Expression put you landscape pictures (or others) to a big picture without interaction. You could not do this manually with this accuracy - even if you're experienced.
One other thing that is really good compared to Photoshop is the startup speed (which of course sucks on any Adobe program). Expression starts up in seconds, Photoshop loads all the filters for ever it feels like. Expression is generally faster than any program of these capabilities.
But everything can't be good, right! The stuff that annoyed me in the beginning was the color palette, I find it difficult to find the colors I want - probably because I know how it works in Photoshop. Another thing was the color picker, when dragging from the Paint Style window; during my tests I several times wanted to get the color of a pixel in an image object and use it in a vector object, I could not get it to work, so it ended up with me having to copy and paste the color codes, which takes unecessary long time. So, Expression dev team, please make us drag the color picker on to an image object and get the color.
The january 2006 CTP seems stable, never had any crash or bugs so far, and I think we can expect the final product in the shelves soon. Keep yourself up to date at the Microsoft Expression blog.
I have yet to try out the Interactive Designer and I really would like to try out the Web Designer (no CTP for this one yet though) - and I think that all of you that uses Photoshop (on Windows) today should go download the Expression Graphics Designer as soon as possible and try it out.
What are your experiences with Microsoft Expression?