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Landscape software review

Landscape software was designed to help you visualize future landscaping projects. Often highly realistic, many include a 3D walk through of design plans, allowing you to place photos of trees, shrubs, flowers, and water features into your existing yard. Here's how it works.

Getting the full picture

Upon installing the software, the first thing you might want to do is import an existing photo of your home and yard. This makes a lot of practical sense, as the exact dimensions are available to work with.

Now comes the fun part! Search through the software's database of trees, flowers and plants to find possible additions to your landscape. Then, drop them into a place to get the visual effect. Many programs will also include a plethora of information about plant types, including botanical name, planting zones, and size. Then, zoom in and out when plants are in place, viewing them from different angles and distances.

Next, play around with software water features, such as gardens, pools, ponds, small streams and the like. Many software programs have realistic water designs where you get a 3D view of water flowing over rocks and koi swimming in water gardens.

You can also incorporate slopes and hills into your 3D landscaping design. Terrain can be adjusted to fit the height of a driveway or a sloping hill. This software feature is also good for planning straight and curved retaining walls.

Popular landscaping software programs

Some popular software programs on the market are Punch! Master Landscape Pro, Realtime Landscaping Pro Landscape Design, SmartDraw 7 Landscape-Design, Water Garden Studio, Dynascape Pro, and 3D Garden Composer. These range in price from $20 to $80, depending on the features included. Most programs run on a Pentium III and use a Windows operating system. There are also free programs on the internet that can be downloaded, but many of these are not as complex as a software program for purchase.

The pros and cons of trading pencil for mouse

There are both advantages and disadvantages to using landscape software. Here's what we found:

Pros

  • Realistic presentation tools. Landscape design software used to be criticized for its poor visual images, which looked cartoonish in nature. Technological development, however, has allowed for more life-like and realistic landscaping imagery.
  • Nighttime viewing. This feature allows you to view landscaping after the sun has set. You can then add different lighting techniques and types of lights to the area.
  • Projecting into the future. That's right; higher end programs have a function that allows you to see what your landscaping will look like in 25 years. This is great if you are curious about tree growth. Otherwise, you'll probably (hopefully!) make many changes before then, which makes this feature a little impractical.
  • Viewing all seasons. Looking at landscaping plants and trees in summer, fall, winter, and spring conditions gives you a good idea of the changes that will take place.

Cons

  • Difficulty of use. Some, but not all, software is not entirely user friendly. Menus, toolbars, symbols and wizard boxes can fill the screen, making it feel cluttered. No one wants to use the "Help" feature every five minutes!
  • Shortage of plant types. While this seems to improving rapidly, some software has a very small selection of plants to choose from. Before purchasing software, make sure it contains at least 1,000 species of plants.
  • Software that doesn't allow picture importation. There are still quite a few landscaping programs that don't allow you to use a picture of your home. Because of this, they are rather impractical.