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$299 (US) estimated Street Price Requires Mac OS 9, full support for OS X 128 MB RAM minimum, 256 MB or more STRONGLY recommended Review by Gary Coyne Why do graphic program designers want to re-engineer the Mac interface? Why do they choose "bad" so often? Like Kai's PhotoFactory (see review), DreamSuite is a feature strong program that kills itself by straying from the standard Mac interface and becomes not fun to use as a result. This is especially annoying because I like what it does and am very impressed with the final results. DreamSuite provides 18 different effects to graphic images. It can be used as a standalone program and can be placed as a plugin to programs like Photoshop. It is found as a single item at the bottom of the Filter menu. Selected, it opens the image in DreamSuite. This is considered "Series One" from Auto FX Software as more variations are supposed to be coming. Effects arriving with this set include: 35 mm Frame, Chisel, Crackle, Crease, Cubism, Deckle, Dimension X, Focus, Hot Stamp, Instamatic, Liquid Metal, metal Mixer, Photo Border, Photo Depth, Photo Tone, Putty, Ripple, and Tape. Some of these effects are just downright beautiful, such as the Crackle effect seen in the screen shot below. Some seem rather simple/silly such as "Tape" that allows the user to lay graphic pieces of tape (duct, masking, and/or transparent tape) on a photo. The effects can be done on an entire picture or a separate layer. Text must be rasterized prior to running an effect. It's a good thing that RAM is cheap now, because DreamSuite is rather unique in that it will take as much RAM as it can get its hand on. It seems the only limitation is what you currently have available and it will take more as it needs. Currently it is grabbing 390 MB of my RAM as I write this article. Once opened, DreamSuite also takes over your computer: As seen below in a full screenshot, you can see some of the problems with DreamSuite. The blue buttons on the upper left are the menus. You also lose some of the features of MultiFinder as the upper right corner listing of what program you are using is now gone. There are no regular menus. If you drag the size tab on the bottom right of the window sufficiently to the left to cover part of the photo, no scroll bars will appear. Like I said, this program doesn't play fair. It wants all your computer all the time.
If you want to gain access to your computer, you can click the Zoom Box and DreamSuite will now shrink down one menu in height. This does give access to your Application menu, but it acts more like a back door than anything else. If you place your mouse over a tool, a name for the tool will appear and later an explanation will appear letting you know what you can do with that tool. This process took anywhere from 5 seconds for the name to appear to about 20 seconds. I'm not sure why the variation, but I'm a proud owner of one of those new 733 MHz Macs. My Mac is not slow. Also notice in the example below that text bleeds off the instruction window.
Menu draw is also slow. Menus do not crisp out in a standard fashion, they sort of crawl. Also note below that the sub-options do not allow for numerical order. Question: Do you know what the difference is between Crease 17 and Crease 19? Don't worry, I don't either. I can tell you that they are pre-set options to provide some folding, creasing, and rumpling of the image. Fortunately there doesn't seem to be a cumulative effect with the presets. That is, if you perform one preset, and then select a second preset, the effects are not a combination of the two. Separate from the pdf instruction manual is a pdf called "Presets." This has graphic samples of each of the presets, so there is an opportunity to see what they are/can do. Amusingly enough, they are also in the same numerical order as shown in the menus (19, 2, 20, 21, ...). If you want to have cumulative effects, you have to save the graphic after each preset. There is a sort of a re-look feature: if you have selected a particular setting, you can click on one of the eight little dots seen in the circle in the full screen shot. If you move any of the sliders/settings to fine tune the appearance, you can click on a different button. You can see previous settings by remembering which button you clicked on any given attempt, but if you change the type of effect you are using, the buttons are all erased. There is a Revert button, but it only reverts back to the last selection and an unaffected document isn't considered a selection. So, you cannot go back to an unaffected document.
As I stated, many of the effects are just plain
beautiful, but I did find I don't mean to seem I'm attacking this program, but considering that this is not a cheap program ($299), I do have some serious questions on how it performs. It is not all that fun to use because of its sluggishness, and since there is no undo, you can only experiment and play for so long when you realize you are wasting time. I do hope Auto FX Software comes out with a Version 2 of DreamSuite before they bother to release Series Two with more special effects. What I desperately hope they do with this program is:
I like what programs like DreamSuite can do. I only wish that DreamSuite was the program that could do those neat things and be fun to use. 
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what I feel is a error in
rendering: In the example on the right, you can see the
right part of an image that is creased with a fold. Once
rendered, it lays on a transparent background. DreamSuite
also provides a drop shadow. If one assumes that the photo
is intended to be lying on a flat surface, the crease would
be the part that is making contact with that surface. Since
the distance from the photo to the flat surface would govern
how long the shadow should extend, the shadow should be the
smallest at the point where the crease is because that is at
the contact point of the photo and the surface. As can be
seen, the shadow doesn't take the corner/surface contact
into consideration.