Extensis Intellihance

By Gary Coyne Wednesday, May 14, 2003.
Tags: Reviews ï Graphics/Design ï

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Extensis Intellihance can do an amazingly great job at enhancing a photo. By using its Quick Enhance, one can easily and quickly bring an image to easily acceptable qualities. While it doesn't replace knowing how to do such repairs within Photoshop, it can successfully sidestep such knowledge--to a point.

Like other Extensis Photoshop plugins, one can select Intellihance from either the end of the Photoshop Filter menu or from the self-created Extensis menu within Photoshop itself.

From there, one can either select the program to get into the Intellihance world, or simply select from a pre-set series of corrections. With the latter option, all corrections are done and you never leave the standard Photoshop interface. The advantage of the direct approach is that if you know that such-and-such a filter will solve your problem, you can save a great amount of time. The advantage of selecting the Intellihance Pro option in the menu is you can fine tune and correct beyond the default corrections done via the pre-set.

If you select the Intellihance option, you can still select any of the 23 preset Intellihance options within its interface (see image below). Any of these presets vary the ranges one can fine tune in the upper right of the image below. These include Descreen, Dust & Scratches, Contrast, Brightness, Saturation, Cast, Sharpness, Deskpeckle, and Paper and Ink. The image below shows the result of Quick Enhance with (in this example) the bottom half image being the original image.

If one wants greater "fine tuning" than the various presets, one can chose amongst the dropdown menus on the right to focus on any of these parameters as seen below-left when selecting Brightness. But if you really want to do some fine-tuning, you select the "Fine Tuning" option from the Mode menu (while in Intellihance) which provides more control for each of similar options for each setting. However, with "Fine Tuning," you can have subtle variations as opposed to the canned preset options available from the "Intelligent Adjustment" option on the left hand side as seen with the five pre-set variations for brightness.

However, probably the greatest strength of Intellihance is that one can also select Power Variations from the Mode Menu and then you can look at actual percentage variations of any of these options at any percentage you choose.

As shown below, the Power Variations provides 3X3 layout, which shows the Color Balance with a 10% Adjustment (10% was selected to really SHOW the differences in this review with a small image. By clicking on any of the eight outside images, the clicked-on image will take the center square and all the other images rearrange themselves and update accordingly.

While this is by itself no different than "Variations" from Photoshop's Image -> Adjustments menu option, it does have three differences (and advantages).

1. Extensis has moved the Darker/Lighter images from the right side of the variations to above and below the image. In my opinion, this makes more sense.
2. They have quantitative adjustments. In Photoshop, there's a slider but no numbers for varying how much a percentage of variations you are creating.
3. Photoshop only has this feature for color; Intellihance has this for all of the variable conditions as provided by the Intelligent Adjustment option.

As seen in the very top and 2nd image, Extensis has provided a wide variety of preset corrections to handle common digital problems like those created with digital cameras and flatbed scanners or dust removal.

When not in "Power Variations," one can choose a variety of views of the same image from 1 X 1 to 5 X 5 as well as 2 X 5 or 5 X 2 or anything between. One can have the same section of an image repeated in these cells.

or have the full image split into cells.

Surprisingly and/or dissapointingly, I found the best result from the simple, generic Quick Enhance. As I selected any of the other options, I found I had to futz with the settings much too much. Even some of the focused filters like the dust removal selection showed no strong benefits as my scan of a dusty slide was not corrected in any way, shape, or form.

One aspect of the interface i found very frustrating was whatever setting you last had when you accepted the correction would be the one you were presented with when you selected the full Intellihance option. So, if you had last saved a Power Variation with its 3X3 grid and last had the "Brightness" as the item being fixed, that's what you will see the next time you open the filter. There is no way to say "I want you to open with "this" setting."

Extensis Intellihance Pro is a powerful program that one can (and should) take some time to properly learn. My problem with programs like this is that I'd rather take the same amount of learning time and apply it to Photoshop and learn how to make the same corrections better and without the extra expense. One way this program would/could be a valuable asset is if you have many, many images that need a general correction and would not need any fine tuning. For example, say you just received 100 images and need to fix them up because a client is coming that afternoon. You could probably do a better job by hand, but I doubt you could do them faster. If such a "fast and dirty" would satisfy your needs, then the value of this program is self evident.

However, if you wish that this program will let you bypass the challenging nature of some of Photoshop's enhancement capabilities, forget it. Spend time learning Intellihance Pro or spend time learning Photoshop. Personally I recommend you take the money this program costs and get yourself some 3rd party books or take some Photoshop classes.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.

http://www.joeryan.com Joe Ryan