Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

As with most programs today,
to get the best out of
ArtEffect, you need a relative
ly high specification Amiga -
preferably an 040 Amiga with
a CyberCraphX card
that's me being picky.
^fother than the tool box, normally you
Will have a brush window, which again I
mink it a little on the large side, a universal
ption window that works very well. For
ach drawing tool you select this changes
So you can leave it open and have access
to all the options at any time. For colour
selection you have quite a choice - RGB,
HSB and CMYK slider along with a HSB
colour range and a configurable colour
Colour change
The sliders are very well implemented, as
you adjust them the actual slider container
changes colour, showing which position
corresponds to which colour, taking out
some of the guess work. The one thing not
available is the normal circular Amiga
colour selector, which I do find quite easy
to use and would like to see added.
Different paint packages expect you to
work in different ways, the older or more
traditional style Amiga paint package gen
erally only allowed you paint on direct
colour or play around with gradients work
ing on the pixel level. With the arrival of
Photogenics you had an awful lot more
power as it allowed you to both paint
directly onto an image with its effects and
also mask out areas with its alpha channel.
With Photoshop, as with ArtEffect,
You will be able to run ArtEffect
on any public screen that has
more than 16 free pens
RUSH WITH DEPTH
Fancy effects and composition tools are all well and
good and have their place in any self-respecting art
package, but if they are not backed up with decent
drawing and brush tools, the program will always
seem to be lacking something. For example, ImageFX's
painting is far from perfect and Photogenics does not
allow you to grab brushes from other images.
Well ArtEffect certainly does not disappoint with its
brush support. To start you have three
different drawing modes - pen, brush
and airbrush. All giving you a slightly dif
ferent control over how colour is spread
onto pictures.
The real power of ArtEffect's brushes
lies in its brush manager and the univer
sal settings window. The brush manager
is the part you will use the most and is
where all your brushes ate stored.
If you are familiar with Brilliance, you
will know this had a brush store where
all the loaded brushes were graphically
stored. ArtEffect is a little different, not
only can brushes cut from images be
stored here, but you can create your
own brush styles. Using the brush cre
ator it is possible to alter the size, shape,
density, dithering and brush spacing. As
a result you can create a brush for what
ever type of situation you wish.
effects are applied to the entire image,
unlike Photogenics in which you can 'paint
on' these effects. Obviously there are times
where this is not what you want, you may
only be interested in a specific area or por
tion of an image.
To help you here ArtEffect has a stencil
A new MakeTile plug in copies Photoshop's seamless welder
Things do not just stop here though, when it comes
to actually drawing with brushes, you have a whole
myriad of additional control over how the brush affects
your picture. Most basically you can adjust the hard
ness of the current brush but extras like darken, light
en, process hue/saturation/luminance, blur, smooth
and sharpen all add up to give you a lot of control over
your drawing.
Create j Add | Rern | Pic~> | ->Pic |
and allows you to create continuous Web backdrops with ease
Using the brush creator you can knock
up almost any type of brush you like
Amiga Computing
MARCH 1997
tool, If you have ever used DPaint or
Brilliance you would have more than likely
come across their stencil functions. With
these programs you can select certain
colours in a picture and protect them from
being drawn over. The main point being
L