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I have Dynascape and color now and the difference it has made in landing jobs has been tremendous. People rave about how the designs look and showing people examples seems to help them visualize a design of their garden. Plus I can lower my price to design and still make additional profit because I now take a lot less time, so I am doing more of the work I love.
The color is pretty good, looks a bit cartoony to me but really seems to help people visualize things better. The drop shadows help it look classier for sure.
Most of my designs have fairly simple lines, so making new polylines for coloring isn't too hard now that I know how I need to prep things for it - like to have every shared line just be its own line to begin with so I can copy it separately and make a separate shape of it. I didn't do that on my first designs.
Also, I discovered a flaw, support says. Don't cluster the small ferns for coloring as they kind of come apart in color. They'll fix that for the next update I think.
I have a color example I'd like to share but I need to make it into a jpeg with photoshop first. Color's "make it into a jpg" function makes a really crappy picture, so I'd rather use photoshop to convert my pdf into a jpg. Can't believe how blurry and funky the DS jpg looks when I save it through the program. Looks fine when I convert it with photoshop. I'll do that soon.
Jodi, I have enjoyed using the quote software in my limited way so far! I found it really, really easy to set up, but I have only used it for plant quotes. You just import a drawing and it lists everything for you with the number of them, and either you can manually adjust the prices on everything after importing, or you can, prior to designing, set up your encyclopedia with th sizes and prices of everything, and then it will all import correctly.
They say you can export into Word and that has not worked for me (I'm using 64-bit Vista and they say DS isn't 64-bit compatible, so this may be one of the bugs - I don't know). But just printing out the info you choose (prices, sizes, botanical names, etc) for each person works great. I print out one copy for me with the price of each thing, but just give the client the copy with the total cost (labor and plants) and the sizes and names.
I work with a contractor who does the installs and I only handle the plant shopping and placement portion. He's been happy to have the square footage of each element to bid from.
I believe I have seen the area where you input the man hours involved for each item and it was simple. I would seriously just jump in. I can't believe how intuitive it's been.
I wish I had done this sooner, but then, I probably couldn't have afforded it sooner.
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