ali@polya.STANFORD.EDU (Ali T. Ozer) (05/05/88)
[] Last night two EA people gave a demo of Deluxe Photo Lab at the FAUG monthly meeting... Some impressions - First of all, the program is actually three different programs --- One paint program, one color palette maniulation program, and one poster maker program. The color program lets you mix/match/reduce palettes of IFF pictures, and the poster program lets you print any IFF picture at any size --- covering multiple sheets of paper, if necessary. The paint program is interesting. From what I could tell, it provides all the features provided by all the paint programs currently out there, except for texture mapping (a la Photon Paint & Express Paint). It supports all Amiga modes, and can work on truly large IFF pictures, in all modes. Unlike DPaint II, it can swap in an out of chip RAM. The menu bar even had the commands "Save At" and "Load From," which seemed to indicate you could Read/Write portions of IFF pictures. If it can do that --- Wow! You can open multiple pictures of different resolutions at the same time, and cut and paste between them. You have brush tools, like DPaint II, and apparently automatic anti-aliasing on rotations. They claimed the program will handle many fonts at once (unlike DPaint II). Also provided is operations between the brush and the background, a la DigiPaint --- blending, adding, and so on. The only problem I have with the program is it's price --- $149. One way I look at it, the program looks like DPaint II with all problems fixed and HAM thrown in. Not really too many new features. So it should maybe cost no more than DPaint II, and DPaint II owners should maybe get an upgrade for a reasonable cost. But, the program *does* look like a rewrite, and it does come with the other two programs, so it's hard to say it's just "DPaint III." It also combines all the modes in one program, which is very convenient... I was disappointed in Photon Paint that it did not support the hires modes. I guess when the program is out we'll be able to tell if it's worth the price. Release date was quoted as 60 days. For someone without a paint program, this one may just be the best choice, especially if it was to be available for under $100... Interesting to note that the demo machine was a 2000 with the Hurricane 68020 board and 3 Megs of memory. The EA people said "oh-oh, we never tried this on a Hot Rod!". They tried to boot, and the program wouldn't boot. Finally they got it booted, and the machine hung as soon as they clicked the disk icon. Finally they got it working by running it from the CLI. After that they had no problems and it didn't crash at all. I just hope the program is indeed as bug-free as it looked at the demo... Ali Ozer, ali@polya.stanford.edu