For a long time now, I have been looking for a quality, affordable photo/image editor. This weekend I gave Microsoft Expression Design 2 a try. The upshot? It is missing some really critical features, the UI focuses a bit too much on form and not function, and the price point is poor.
Granted, I am comparing it against Photoshop (Photoshop CS 1, at that, which is why I am in the market for a cheap Photoshop replacement). But Microsoft bought the basis of this product ("Acrylic") ages ago; it has been in development for a long time. One of the problems that it suffers from, is that is never figured out if it wanted to be a vector tool like Illustrator, or a raster tool like Photoshop. So it ends up with some really intresting ways of doing old tasks. For example, the "paintbrush" actually constructs a vector path, and "closing" the brush generates a full shape object. I am sure that vector tools work this way (I don't have any experience with them), but considering that I was looking for a Photoshop stand-in, this was novel. But at the same time, I can't find a magic wand, an eraser, or a pencil tool. There is no "gradient" tool; a "gradient" is merely a type of fill that can be applied to shapes. There is no mask tool either, but my suspicion is that you are supposed to use shapes for masking as well as outright design pieces.
I really like how the "special effects" work, though. You apply them on to individual objects or layers. And you can change the order that they are applied. The end result is that what Photoshop calls a "filter" never touches the underlying pixels directly, which gives you some great flexibility. But the lack of raster editing features can't make up for this in my mind.
The UI deserves special mention. It is gorgeous. It is pretty intuitive. But it has some odd quirks that kill me, like having a toolbox be too tall so it has scroll bars, and to make it worse, the drop down boxes in it go past the part on screen, so you need to scroll the toolbox in order to see the bottom of the drop down within it. Huh? Why not have the drop down limit itself to the visible portion of the toolbox? Another oddity is that many widgets rely upon "gestures". To rotate a gradient, you can either type in a rotation angle, or you can "draw a circle" with the mouse while holding the left mouse button down over the angle type-in box, to adjust the angle. Again, huh? Many other numbers can be adjusted with "gestures" too, over UI elements that are actually sliders, but do not appear as such. On the other hand, the UI was very smart; "skew" is at the same level as resize or rotate, in terms of, "bring the mouse near a point on a shape and you can do it." But the places where it was smart hardly compensated for its drawbacks. Most of the UI drawbacks come from trying to make a pretty design that tramples the standard widgets toolbox.
Finally, the price. Expression Design 2 is not available standalone, although its demo it. If you want to buy it, you need to purchase the full Expression Studio 2 product. Granted, it is part of the suite, and it is geared towards the XAML/WPF/Silverlight stuff that Microsoft is pushing. And yes, that suite costs about what a full copy of Photoshop CS 3 costs (which is a bit more than the full Corel suite). But unless your plan is to dive deep into XAML/WPF/Silverlight, this product is not worth buying the suite for just to have this one product (the suite itself is a good price, in my opinion, especially since Expression Web 2 is a great product). Compared to Photoshop, this is not a very good raster editor at all. Indeed, I think that the free Paint.Net is a much better choice for standard image/photo editing. I can't compre it to any vector tools, but I suspect that it won't matchup well against them either.
J.Ja