rnollman@maxzilla.encore.com (Richard Nollman) (12/08/90)
I am an illustrator who wants to produce high resolution printed images. I want to use my Amiga to generate images that I can send to a service bureau to be printed. A talked with someone at my local Amiga store (a software developer who is releasing an image processing package for the Amiga next month). He seemed pretty knowlegeable. He suggested that I needed to stop focusing the resolution of the video display. He suggested that the best way to accomplish my goal was to use medium resolution with a large bitmap in a program like Digipaint3 (he said that 24-bit would be better, of course). Compose my image in sections using the automatic scrolling feature of Digipaint3. To get an approximate view of what the final image would look like printed, he suggested that I import the image to Art Department. Art Department would allow me to see the whole image in one screen (similar to the Show Page function in DeluxPaint III). I tried to do this. When I imported the file to Art Department, I only saw a section of the entire image. I thought maybe that I needed to scale it, but the scale function produced a message that there was no 8 or 24 bit data present, and suggested that I load the data. I have no idea what this means or what the person suggesting this technique meant for me to do. A recent article in AmigaWorld (Jan/90) described a similar process. It was written by noted Amiga artist Brad Schenck and presented a step-by-step demonstration of how to produce a very professional, high-quality piece of finished artwork. He used Turbo Silver to generate the image, Art Department to convert to 24-bit, and Delux Photo Lab to retouch the image (because it allows work on very large bitmaps). Then he used various desktop publishing programs to add the text and shipped the final image off to a photographic house to create a slide (from which the image can be printed as an illustration, poster, on tee-shirts, etc.). He had traditional color separation done on his image because he felt that the quality was much better than digital separation. I am still very confused about the process, but need to know more about it. I would appreciate any responses that could demystify this process or some suggestions of publications that might help. Thanks. Rich Nollman