DeBabelizer for Windows & Macintosh (Visual QuickStart Guide) [Paperback]

Nolan Hester (Author)

Book Description

Series: Visual QuickStart Guide | Publication Date: February 15, 1999

For quickly processing lots and lots of images, DeBabelizer can't be beat. In fact, most commercial Web sites depend on Debabelizer for its unsurpassed ability to create "skinny," color-accurate Web graphics for quick-to-download Web pages.For all its powers, however, DeBabelizer isn't ideal for creating graphics. That's best left to Photoshop, Painter, Canvas, or a similar program. Instead, DeBabelizer's real strength is processing graphics with amazingly powerful, yet easy to create scripts. The drudge work of resizing, dithering, and saving images in various formats becomes no work with DeBabelizer. Used in tandem with a mainstay graphics program like Photoshop, the program gives you the best of all worlds.Packed with real-world tips, DeBabelizer for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide helps you quickly tap the program's power while guiding you through its tricky to learn tools and menus.Beginners start off by learning their way around the DeBabelizer interface, and move on to working with the image processing tools, palettes, scripting, and batch automation. More sophisticated users will find special tips, tricks, and tools related to animation, film making, and Web design. Experienced designers will rely on the coverage of the powerful SuperPalette and will use the book repeatedly as a reference. With the DeBabelizer for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, users quickly learn to master this powerful tool and find they have more time to design and create.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

DeBabelizer for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide provides a good introduction to DeBabelizer (Pro 4.5 for Windows and Version 3 for Macintosh), the highly popular image-processing tool. Descriptive usage tips and helpful screen shots assist you in working through each of the program's main features. DeBabelizer works well whether you read it in chapter-to-chapter succession or jump around among the topics that interest you.

The book begins with the basics of DeBabelizer, including a tour of the interface, help options, and printing tools. Next, by working with the supported media--images, animation, and video--you learn to create, manipulate, and save in these formats.

In the section devoted to color, you study palette basics and learn how to modify palettes; create and work with SuperPalettes; and manipulate colors via brightness, intensity, gamma, and other controls. A four-color section helps illuminate some the theory associated with the palette tools.

In the fourth section of the book, the author discusses batch processing, which is used to create and manage BatchLists and set batching actions. Later in the book, you learn to automate your activities with scripts. The appendices at the back of the book help you install DeBabelizer; set global, reader, and writer preferences; and use keyboard and toolbar icon shortcuts. --Kathleen Caster

From Library Journal

DeBabelizer is software for preprocessing images for print, CD-ROMs, or the web, often all at the same time; it allows the user to create compact images for the web easily, batch renaming of files and file types, and scale batches of images to the same height and width with just a click. DeBabelizer is not the tool for creating imagesAbetter to use Photoshop or Illustrator for that jobAbut it is an excellent aid for the drudge work of mass image manipulation. Hester's guide offers a good introduction, explaining how DeBabelizer handles everything from simple animation to digital video, how it controls colors and does batch processing with automated scripts. A useful title for new and advanced users.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 319 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Pr; 1st edition (February 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201353865
• ISBN-13: 978-0201353860
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,910,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nolan Hester's latest book is Photoshop Lightroom 3: Visual QuickStart Guide (ISBN: 0-321-71310-9). Follow the book's blog at: http://lightroom.waywest.net

Nolan has written more than two dozen books for Peachpit Press, focusing on digital photography and Web site creation. He's also has worked as a darkroom technician, ad studio assistant, and photojournalist. His photos have appeared online and in print for a variety of outlets, including ZesterDaily.com, Alaska magazine, and The Los Angeles Times travel section.

His landscape, travel, and Web photography have inspired many of the timesaving tips and techniques found in his Lightroom 3 VQS. Like every photographer, Nolan truly believes he'll eventually find the perfect camera bag.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Debabelizer Visual Quickstart Guide, September 7, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: DeBabelizer for Windows & Macintosh (Visual QuickStart Guide) (Paperback)

The book explains how to use all the menus, but often leaves you in the dark as to when you would apply certain steps.I would say the hardest part of learning Debabelizer, lies in it's powerful and advanced scripting features, which this guide is too narrow, and jumps from one topic to the next. I understand that it is a quick start guide, and that it is not suppose to be set up like a tutorial book, but in a situation where there are lots of steps that require other steps found in other chapters, there needs to be a step by step approach that doesn't drift from the goal someone might be tiring to establish. I have found the programs help menu in some cases to be more descriptive then this guide, which is uncommon in most programs. I'm not saying this is a good or bad book, I'm just saying that it doesn't use the best approach for someone just starting to learn Debabelizer's scripting futures. However, the book was very good at explaining some of the terminology, such as what the differences were between (Image/Stand Alone/and Supper Palettes were.) The search goes on..................