REVIEW: Personal Paint 7

by: Pauli Porkka


Personal Paint 7


Publisher

Cloanto

First thing to notice on this particular CD is the size o the CD. It is physically 8cm wide, not hte usual 12 cm (or whatever the normal CD is). Ofcourse this also means that there isn't over 600 MB in the disk but 62 instead. I don't know why Cloanto chose this CD format but atleast I didn't have any problems with it. With the small cardboard cover it came with it only takes about 1/4 of the space normal CD takes (after you have around 300 CDs you WILL notice that they do take space, and lots of it).

Personal Paint 7 in the CD format is so called Click'n'Go program. You can just insert the CD and click the programs icon and you are ready to go.

There are several drawers on the CD containing Animations, stencils, palettes, rexx scripts and some example pictures. Also provided is the FontTutorial animations which also comes with The Kara Collection CD. These animations familiarizes you with the Color Fonts and ColrType-program in the Kara Collection CD.

The Personal Paint itself looks a lot like the famous DeluePaint with the toolbar positioned to left edge of the screen. I am not going to go on details with the controls since they are propably very familiar to everyone ever done any graphical work with the Amiga. I'll just point out that it is very easy.

One real nice feature of PPaint is that you can change the language of the program on the fly. By default the PPaint supports 17(!) languages which can be selected from the menus and take effect immediately. PPaint comes with variety of different loades and savers and also supports Amiga Datatypes and the 'Superview' library concept which provides a lot of savers and loaders of its own. All the major picture formats are supported and if it is't internally just get appropriate datatype or superview library which most likely then supports needed file format.

PPaint comes with variety of image processing 'filters' which you can use to process your image. There are for example things like blur, sharpen and water color operators to go with your image processing. I won't go on detail on these, they work and do what they are supposed to do. Some are a bit slow on my A4000/030/25Mhz, but maybe I should upgrade anyway :).

PPaint also supports arexx commands which can be used as macros. There is lot of very usefull macros provided and if there isn't one you can always create one. You can for example convert all the gifs in a directory to png equivalents or apply image processing filter on all the images on a single directory. Lots of things can be done with the macros especially where the same change has to be done on multiple files.

All in all the PPaint seems to be very stable program, I couldn't get it to crash at all, not a single time. I don't have any doubt which program I'll start using when I need to do some painting or drawing with my Amiga PPaint jsut about does most of the things needed and I haven' even yet discovered all the features in it. Unfortunately I don't have graphics card on my Amiga (atleast not yet) so I couldn't test the PPaint using RTG which it also supports. Now that I think of my first time running PPaint I notice that it was THE first painting program which automatically started on exactly right screenmode and size. Not a single program has managed to do this before, I have always had either wrong resolution (I use 800x600 Interlaced/72Hz SuperHires mode) or wrong size of a screen. Great!


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