Multimedia Corner

Paint the Town

Most multimedia presentations include both drawn art and photography. In many cases you need two separate products to produce the final output for your project. The Paint Shop Pro from JASC, Inc., offers photo retouching, painting, image format conversion, and image browsing. It allows you to edit images wider than normal screens and it supports the input from more than 60 scanners.

The package includes image enhancement, photo editing, color enhancement, image viewing, image printing, screen capture from concurrent programs, scanner TWAIN support, and batch conversions of file formats. The $70 program has much lower hardware requirements than its competitors, and includes numerous high quality sample images to use when you practice techniques.

The image enhancement features include flip, mirror, and rotate in one degree increments. You can crop, add boarders or frames, resize, resample, or pass the image through 20 different filters to create special effects. The package supports third-party plug-in filter packages like Kai's Power Tools. (See your back issues of the column for our review of Kai's Vector Effects program.)

The color enhancement features include altering the RGB levels, changing the hue, saturation, or lightness and colorizing to add an overall hue to grayscale images. You can adjust the brightness and contrast of photos, change the highlight, shadow or midtone, and make Gamma corrections. Tools of the system allow for color reduction, pallet editing, and a histogram-like aid to use in making color adjustments. You can make color changes globally or to specific areas of the image.

The image viewing utility allows multiple windows at a time, thumbnail views of a group of pictures, two directional zooming, full screen display and zoom with panning abilities. The browser allows you to search directories for those lost images, select images for full loading from their thumbnail views, and a file data base for your custom or CD-ROM stock images.

The photo retouch element allows a clone brush for easy duplication of image areas, a push brush for retouch, a sharpen brush to enhance small area detail, and a smooth brush for easy image blending. The eye dropper' tool allows the user to sample and analyze the color elements at a point in the image. Once detail work has been done on a portion of the image, the magic wand' tool allows other similar areas to be automatically manipulated.

The paint subsystem has eight different brushes including pen, pencil, marker, crayon, chalk, charcoal, airbrush, and paintbrush. You can define your own brush with the qualities of any of the other eight types. The fill tool fills large blank areas. The color replacer brush easily replaces one color with another. Simple, filled, or hollowed objects can be created using the oval, rectangle, or line tools. Anti-aliased text can be created and edited with the text tool. All paint elements can be undone with the undo' brush.

The package requires an IBM PC compatible with 4 Mb of RAM, an 80386 CPU or better, Windows 3.1 or higher, a hard disk with 7 Mb of free space, and a VGA or SVGA graphics adapter and monitor. The program's compact code seems to operate well on older machines. We also tested the product on a Windows 95 machine without any problems.

If your multimedia efforts do not require cross platform compatibility with the Macintosh, this is a good stand-alone package for paint artwork and photo retouching. One of the strong suits of the program is its ability to read and write a large number of formats. If you wish to select a half dozen inexpensive programs to do all your multimedia work, this should be the one you use for your photos and still artwork.

Contributed by C. W. Mann, who also writes
the syndicated computer column, BuzzBytes.

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