The fun begins once you have an object or two to play with. ImageStyler includes more than 100 different surface styles, such as wood, lava, and metal with raised, depressed, and shadowed textures, and complex gradients. Each style is actually a set of layered effects, so if you have a button that has been beveled, outlined, given a drop shadow, and overlaid with a gradient, you can turn each of those effects on or off independently. This offers the flexibility of applying only some of the elements of a style to an object, and the freedom to experiment without destroying your previous edits. ImageStyler also has multiple levels of Undo: A drop-down menu lists all the effects applied to an object, and you can select which effect to eliminate. If you change your mind, any action reversed can be redone later on.
Double-clicking a style promptly applies the corresponding effect (some elaborate effects took several seconds to appear, even on our 400-MHz Pentium II with 256 Mbytes of RAM), so dozens of looks can be previewed almost as rapidly as you can click their icons. Styles can be customized, using any of ImageStyler's full complement of effects tools. For example, you can apply gradients, control an object's opacity, and add filters such as Twirl or Spherize, and then save the combination as a new Style that can be applied to different objects in subsequent editing sessions.
Each object is also placed in its own layer, so you can add text, apply effects, or perform other manipulations, yet edit each object at any time. Objects can be stacked, grouped, aligned, rotated, skewed, or resized using commands familiar to Adobe Illustrator users.
