Rogue Sheep develops plug-ins for Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 and Illustrator CS/CS2, among others. Their Magma Effects plug-in is now available for InDesign, with a version coming uip for Illustrator. Special about Magma Effects is that all effects are Image Core effects.

I was a bit puzzled by the application Rogue Sheep chose to provide this plug-in for. After all, filter effects like those found in the Core Image collection seem to belong to Photoshop more than they do to InDesign. But they are pretty useful inside an application like InDesign as well.

For example, you can apply effects to an image without having to start Photoshop, which --if a lot of plug-ins are loaded-- on most machines will take some time. The next question then is whether this set of plug-ins is worth its 50 USD. Now, to tell you the truth, my personal opinion of this price setting is that this plug-in must be really bad not to find it worthwhile a meager 50 USD to pay for.

On the other hand, as Magma Effects is really a wrap around Apple’s Core Image effects, Rogue Sheep didn’t have to do a lot more than provide for a useful interface, did it?

And so, while I can safely say that all of the effects that Apple provides with Core Image are first class with some of them belonging to the best I’ve ever seen, the real value of the plug-in lies in the workflow it forces upon you and the efficiency of its interface.

But perhaps it’s not that clear-cut after all. Magma Effects is open to third-party Core Image effects to start with. This means you invest 50 dollars once, immediately get access to all of Tiger’s built-in effects, and if and when some other developer decides to offer new Core Image effects, you can buy these and not worry about the interface to use them.

The interface itself at first was something of a mystery to me. It’s very Mac OS X “Tigerish”, that’s for sure, but in Adobe applications I expect something more “Adobe-rish” if you understand what I mean. Magma Effects is an exception. And to be quite honest, it grows on you very quickly, especially if you have ever worked with Automator—Magma Effects resembles the Automator interface a lot.

The plug-in by default always opens with one “effect” in place: the background colour. A plus icon at the bottom of the rounded square that represents this effect (that can’t be removed, by the way) provides the hint that other effects are added by clicking the icon.

At left the preview panel gives you a preview which you can enlarge by enlarging the whole plug-in window. You can also set the image inside the panel to the actual pixels size. The preview panel serves yet another purpose: many effects have a centre of focus or gravity as it were. When the mouse is not in the preview panel, you might miss the control for moving that centre around. Hovering the mouse over the preview panel immediately reveals a bull’s eye type circle.