aic@pucc-i (Craig Norborg aka Doc Pierce) (12/17/85)
Review of Deluxe Paint
by Dan Silva
Copyright 1985, Electronic Arts
Just thought you all might like some impressions of Deluxe
Paint by Electronic Arts. First off, the usual disclamers, I do
not work for EOA in any way (although I do work for the Computer
Art Center at Purdue University) and don't really care if you buy
this product!
Lets see, the basic stats on DP, supports all the basics as one
would wish for, the 32 colors (with the full palate to choose
from), the good old RGB sliders to change them, along with 3 new
ones! They are labeled H, S, & V for hue, saturation, and value of
the color. (What they say is comparable to the tint, color and
contrast controls on a TV). They also make it easy to copy a color
to another palatte selection or swap the palatte selections, etc.
In the color selection menu they also give you a few other nifty
options. One of which is called "spread" where if you are using
lets say three colors where two are of different shading, and you
want the third to be somewhere in-between where it will be pleasing
to the eye. Well, instead of trying to find where the midpoint
between these two colors is, just click on the first color, hit
spread and click on the third color and presto! You have a color
in-between the two shades!
As for brush or shape control, the DP has all the basics. It
has about 10 built in brushes to chose from. You can draw in
freehand, dotted freehand, with an airbrush, straight lines, curves
(you pick start and end points and then the arcing point on the
curve!). You can draw hollow boxes/circles/ovals/polygons or
filled ones. You can put in text in a number of built in fonts.
But, the creaping featurisms strike again. Of course you noticed
that I said there are 10 'built in' brushes. Well, just about
anything can be used as a brush! All you do is take your little
"brush selection tool" (which is more or less the cut-n-paste box
from you-know-who!) and cut out a "brush" which you can then use as
a brush! Doesn't matter what it is or how big it is! Lets say
that it is too big for your purposes. Have no fear! You can make
it twice as small, twice as big with the halve or double feature,
or if that isn't enough control, use the stretch command and make
it whatever size you want! You can flip it, rotate it, bend it at
any angle you want! What else can you ask for, eh? Well, how
about being able to store brushes on disk and reload them into
another picture. It does that too! Well, what happens when the
two pictures are of different palattes? All you have to do is
choose the "remap" option and it will adjust it as best as it can
to the new palatte your using. Another nice feature is that it can
tell what is supposed to be in the background and what is not, so
all these potentially large brushes won't go pounce on your drawing
space. (BTW, they include a number of "brushes" of things like
Xmas trees, fires, dragons, wizards and lots of other neat things
along with template pictures that they go nicely into). Other nice
feature that are included are little things like being able to
shift up or down your palatte one color by hitting a keystroke or
if you hit "," (comma) it will then allow you to select a color
right off the picture for you to draw in (very useful when using
touchy shading!)
They also put in a little mode that puts a little animation
into your drawings. They call it their "cycle" mode where they can
cycle through a series of colors making rivers start to run, fires
burn, stars twinkle and all sorts of other neat effects! You can
have up to three different cycles going at the same time all going
through different colors. The effects are really amazing!
Also, the magnification mode (FatBits to some of you) is
awesome. First you select the place you wish to magnify from and
it puts you in its "default" magnification which you can raise or
lower as much as you will ever desire. You also get a scratchpad
to work in if you have 512K, which allows you to store temporary
brushstrokes or just draw two pictures at once. You can also merge
the two pictures into one if you like making for some really neat
effects! They also give you some symmetry controls where you can
draw awesome symmetrical pictures in seconds! It gives you control
over the center of symmetry and how many points of symmetry (up to
40!).
To sum things up quickly, I find this to be a rare breed of
drawing programs. Being familiar with MacDraw and MacPaint and
several of the PC paint programs (PC paint, Dr Halo, several
customized programs...), I find Deluxe Paint to be more than worth
the money (about $80 I think, from what I hear, going up to $100 in
February) even though I don't really get into art very much (I like
the computers!). The manual is informative, yet easy to read.
They highly stress just fooling around and give several "hints" on
"neet" things to fool around with. There are plenty of
pictures/brushes to fool around with and create very neat pictures
so you can get started right away!
As a side note, it also works wonders with color printers such
as the OkiMate 20. Didn't get a chance to see what it does on B&W
printers. Feel free to write me for more details! I would love to
meet others interested in computer art so we could possibly get
some sort of art exchange going. By the way, I have only had
Deluxe Paint for three days now and feel totally comfortable with
the program. Its kinda like VI, user freindly and all sorts of
feature that you keep on learning.
---The above opinions are definitly my own, if you disagree, oh well!---
--
Craig Norborg (aka Doc Pierce)
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