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A few years ago, Adobe, a graphics software company that does a lot of customer surveying, realised that a substantial portion of its customers could not use its flagship product, Photoshop. 
It had sold millions of copies of this expensive software application to people who only used one or two of its features. And if these customers could not use what they already had, they  would not be likely to upgrade to a version with more features.
In an incredible act of courage, Adobe decided to risk Photoshop sales and release a more user-friendly version with all kinds of simple-to-use features at a  fraction of the pro version's price.
  The new version, which is called Photoshop Elements, does not have all of the advanced features of its big brother, but it does have a dozen or so unique features missing on the original version.  
And if you want to create awesome photos with a minimum of fuss, Elements is the hands-down winner. Of course, saving US$500 adds substantially to the joy. 
As you might have guessed, the experiment worked and Adobe now has two healthy markets to feed and, like many new and successful marketing endeavours, it has now become a fad. 
Below are a few products that follow Adobe's model and continue to illustrate that without the learning curve and expense, graphics software can be incredibly fun. (Adobe will upgrade to Elements 4 within the next two months.)
Corel's Painter has been an industry standard for drawing and painting on a computer, but like Photoshop it is a tough application to master. Recently, Corel introduced Painter Essentials (www.corel.com) . It is a lot less scary than Painter, having only 87 megabytes of data  to install compared to the 270MB drive-filling files of its big brother.
It is nowhere near as automated or intuitive as Elements,  but it is a good step in the right direction. With a few simple tutorials you can auto-trace or auto-paint a photo, and if you have a Wacom-type pen tablet for drawing, you can paint through tracing paper or directly on photos. 
If you are serious about art, Essentials is a much better starting point than Painter, but I plan on nagging them to make it even more simple. 
Eovia makes 3D software applications that used to be the best, but it products slowly evolved to become mediocre compared with the competition. 
They were trying to capture the middle market, which consists of those illustrators who used 3D professionally but only occasionally. Even though they purchased some of the best products in this area, such as Ray Dream and Infini-D, Eovia's designers  could not find their niche until they launched Carrara 3D Basics (www.eovia.com) .
This application  makes 3D useful to anyone with a computer. The first thing Eovia  did was come up with some uses that you or I might want, such as putting foreign objects - such as flying saucers and gigantic fish - into our photos.
You can easily create the perfect backgrounds with 3D landscapes, or add clouds to suit your mood. In addition, you can add these effects to your videos and it even has 3D titles and 3D effects for business graphics. You can use easily constructed 3D objects for charts, graphs and logos, and even animate them as Flash movies for your website.
It is as simple as selecting a scene from the Scene Wizard by pushing one button and dragging props from the huge (more than 900 objects) library of 3D objects that come with the application. Adding  special effects such as explosions, fire, fog, lens effects and object deforming is, likewise, drag-n-drop simple.
After making it useful, they made it iApp simple and the result is an impressive application that brings the benefits of 3D to the world.
This application best illustrates the potential of the 'make it useful, make it easy and make it cheap' model pioneered by Apple with its iApps, and then Adobe with Elements.
Now, I would like see some other professional applications make this same leap, such as Adobe's Illustrator, Go Live and InDesign.

E-mail Dave Horrigan at horrigan@electriciti.com with your Mac queries.




Adobe in its element with simpler version of graphics software