eCover Engineer Review:: Introduction

Product: eCover Engineer

Version: 5.0

Company: Adolix

Price: $38 USD

Date: Information correct as of 31/12/2007

 

 

eCover Engineer is produced by Adolix, a young company, launched in June 2003. As well as eCover Engineer, Adolix also sell a range of other Windows Utilities. This review looks at eCover Engineer version 5 in depth.

 

eCover Engineer is a good name for a product that provides a competent and workman like approach to box design. The demo downloads fast but isn’t signed and looks as though it uses Inno setup without any branding or adornment to the installer. eCover Engineer installs quickly and ships with a small range of demo eCovers and presets.

 

eCover Engineer :: Interface

The eCover Engineer interface is well laid out a pretty intuitive to use, if a little drab. There are no icons on display, just buttons and tabs to click, and sliders to drag. The program employs nice intuitive mouse control over the view port with both left and right mouse buttons letting you rotate and zoom the box shot. You won't have trouble getting to grips with the program quickly. Here’s a screenshot of the interface. Don’t forget to click on the thumbnail for a full screen view.

Note that you can only select Front, Side and Top panels. If you were planning to produce a close up shot of the back of your box, then forget it!

 

eCover Engineer :: Demo Restrictions

The demo version of eCover Engineer is good for 15 days. During this time the program will export watermarked images as seen in the screen shots. The watermarks are well thought out and unobtrusive.

 

eCover Engineer :: Features and Benefits

eCover Engineer is one of the only box design programs I’ve seen that enables you to create a slip case for between two and four books. I’m not sure how useful or popular this feature is likely to be, but it’s certainly nice to see something a little different.

The CD / DVD case option is worthy of mention, since it includes the nifty ability to open the CD case to the precise angle you want in order to display the CD inside. This rather nice feature is let down by the inability to select the spine image of the CD case. This is a rather puzzling omission, since it dramatically restricts the type of shots you can create.

It would also be nice if the program made the CD case look more realistic, with some scanned CD case plastic textures. Having said this, I really liked the way the program automatically converts an image to a CD Cover.

 

The complete range of presets offered by the program includes:

1. Standard Box
2. Thin Box
3. Wide Box
4. Custom Box
5. Book
6. Magazine
7. Spiral Note Book
8. Wide Spiral Note Book
9. CD/DVD Case
10. Box with 2 Books
11. Box with 3 Books
12. Box with 4 Books

This is all well and good, but what really matters is image quality. Pictures speak louder than words, so let’s take a look.

 

eCover Engineer :: Image Quality

As the screen shots show, I found the image quality is pretty good. eCover Engineer is a WYSIWYG box design program, which means it directly copies the content of the viewport to an image file. There are some strange graphical quirks in the program that I found irritating. Take the “Box with 4 books” for example. When this is rotated the slip cover case disappears when you look between the books:

It struck me as strange that the program goes out of its way to ask for tiny images, eg “Optimal Size 400 x 400”. If you load bigger images than this, it does nothing to improve image quality. This isn’t a problem if you just want to use the program to create thumbnail images, but is less than ideal for print.

 

eCover Engineer, like the majority of Box Shot programs, doesn’t include any design tools to help you create the panels of your box shot. You need an image editing program like Paint Shop Pro, or Photo Shop to make these. The example eCovers that ship with the program are bland in the extreme and do very little to inspire the user with design ideas. However, this is an issue that Adolix have addressed else where. eCover Engineer does feature an anti aliasing system that can smooth out jaggies on an image. You can see the difference this makes:

There are perspective controls in the program, but they are tricky to use. Having the eCover placed in a “scene” with ground and sky makes it difficult to create an exact match for a solid background colour, since the sky ends up being a different shade from the land:

During the time I spent working with the demo version of eCover Engineer, I couldn’t figure out a way to match the land and the sky while maintaining a shadow and a reflection. In most cases box shots are going to end up on websites, this means you’ll have to spend a lot of time editing files created in eCover Engineer in order to make them work on the web. This can be such a fiddly process that it has to rank as one of the program’s biggest faults. Having said this, having the ability to change the floor texture is actually quite nice. Especially if you use a seamless texture:

eCover Engineer will only export images in .BMP format without transparency. This isn’t a big deal if you’re planning to edit the images, since you can copy the image to the clipboard from the program and paste it directly into your image editing package.

The rotation and zoom controls do sometimes seem rather clunky as the program has a very clear idea of what it thinks you should do with it. For example, you can’t rotate the box to look under it and you can’t zoom in for a close up shot of your box without tweaking Front / Back, Distance and Field of View controls. However, with a bit of work you can produce some nice set peice box shots with the program:

 

 

eCover Engineer :: Documentation

Hats off to the Adolix Team. eCover Engineer has and very nice manual, that covers most aspects of the program in some depth. Lets take a look at the help menu:

The "Visit Tutorial Page" is a broken link. The page no longers seems to exist on the Adolix website. However, the "Visit Free eCovers Page" links to an impressive range of sample covers. These take the form of downloadable eCover Packs. Some of these designs look quite nice and are a big improvement on the example covers shipped with the demo.

 

eCover Engineer :: Conclusion

eCover Engineer has a lot of potential and some nice features, but also has some annoying quirks. It lacks some of the features required to make great looking box shots and complicates the design process by having tricky controls for perspective. The program can only export images as big as its main view port which effectively rules it out for creating print quality images.

 

Despite all this, the program does have a lot of merits and I’d say that with a few major tweaks eCover Engineer could be one of the best still cover generation tools on the market. However, at the moment in terms of usability, eCover Engineer leaves the distinct impression that it was designed by an engineer, rather than a designer. But don't let that put you off. It's well worth trying.

 

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