Review of XiPaint 3.2

by: Pauli Porkka

These are my experiences using this particular software/system with my Amiga setting No guarantee is given that this software/system works the same with other hardware settings.
Contents
Introduction
Installation
Running the program
Summary

INTRODUCTION

This part is from the manuals.

Xi-Paint is a 24 bit paint program for manipulating true color pic- tures in 16 million plus colors. It has been written to be hardware independent, meaning it can support special features of hardware display devices when available. These features are described in the appendix.

To give you a better understanding of 24 Bit graphics let's take a look at what is involved in the creation and manipulation of these images. A 24 bit picture with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels is an extremely large file and we can see this by calculating its' size in bytes. To calculate the file size, multiply the ho rizontal resolution by the vertical resolution times the number of bits per pixel divided by 8 (the number of bits in a byte). Given this formula H*V*24/8 the above file would be 1,440,000 Bytes in size requiring almost 1.5 megabytes of storage. This would be true whether it is being stored on a Hard Drive or in memory.

When you wish to work with this file Xi-Paint loads the image from the hard drive into RAM where Xi-Paint is capable of manipulating the image directly at high speed. One thing you will need to re- member is that the formula just described gives the file size in RAW format. This means that an IFF, DEEP, ILBM or even a JPeg file will all be smaller as they all do some form of compression. As you can see, for a file of 1.5 megabytes we will require at least that much memory be available after we run Xi-Paint, or we will not be able to load the image into Xi-Paint to work on it. What this means for our system requirements is that we will require memory for the Program to run (1 megabyte).

We will need memory for the image to be loaded by Xi-Paint (1.5 megabytes) and then we will also require memory to use specific features. To cut and use brushes you must also have at least 1 megabyte available. As you can see, when manipulating such large images the more Ram available - the faster and more productively you can work.

Now that you are familiar with the size of 24 bit images you can see that there are a few considerations to be made concerning storage. The image that we used for the example came to approximately 1.5 megabytes in size. This image must be stored on a computer medium other than RAM when your computer is not turned on.

Normally images of this size are stored on a hard disk connected to the system. When purchasing such a hard drive it is important to remember the sizes of the files you plan to use. A 40 mb hard drive would be insufficient for storing programs and the data you create with them. You will quickly run out of room on such a small hard drive. If you intend to do animation in 24 bit then you will require a very large storage device and should look at drives 500 megabytes and larger. The last thing to under stand is file compression. The image used for the example was in RAW format. Most file formats available for the Amiga include some form of compression, This com pression enables you to store large amounts of information in smaller areas and to make more efficient use of your hard drive. It is important to realize that image com pression will not help with the amount of RAM needed as the image is not compres sed when it is being worked on in Xi-Paint.

A few of these formats are IFF, ILBM, DEEP, JPeg, and others. For you to have access to all these image formats you must have a conversion program such as ADPro from ASDG. While Xi-Paint incorporates the IFF and the JPeg file formats we suggest you startwith the IFF format. This will compress your images approxi- mately 30 while capable of tremendous compression ratios, is a lossy compression. This me that image quality may be sacrificed for compression. You should play with the JPeg format to determine its usefulness for your particular purpose.

Xi-Paint is fully compatible with all versions of AmigaDOS 2.0 or higher and will not run under AmigaOS 1.3 or previous versions of the AmigaOS. Xi-Paint is compatible with most IFF formats inclu- ding 8 and 24 bit. Xi-Paint is also capable of rendering all AMIGA- DOS 2.0 and above compatible outline fonts. The ability to use all AmigaOS compatible fonts sets gives you access to high quality out line fonts from several third parties such as Soft Logic and Gold Disk. Many hours have been spent on the creation of this program and manual. While we have endeavoured to create the most error free software package available - inevitably some things do get by. If you experience any problems/bugs or find errors in the manual we would appreciate your comments.

INSTALLATION

Installation was your basic "piece of cake-no sweat" installation. After double clicking on install (You can select two installations, german and english) standard installer program opens up. After selecting the drawer to install XiPaint to and selecting the language from three different languages which are English, German and Italian installer opens up XiPrefs program where you can choose the display type.

After doing above the installation is ready.....BUT..After trying to find manuals from my harddisk I couldn't find any. Apparently manuals are not installed by the installer as they should in my opinion. I wouldn't want to load cd rom every time I need to consult the manuals.

RUNNING THE PROGRAM

After running the program I spent a few seconds wondering why nothing happened after the screen was opened. You were left to watching an totally empty screen. After wondering a while I found out that you are supposed to use the menus (quite obvious after thinking about it) . It would have been nice to have some kind of an toolbar to use though (Toolbar is available after you open it from the menus).

The second problem arised when I tried to load jpg and iff images which I have "some" in my hard disk. XiPaint just informed that somekind of an error happened in Targa driver. What an earth is this I wasn't loading targa?? If I had read the manuals AS I SHOULD HAVE and not asked from the author as I did, I would have known that I should first go to menu: Menus/Settings and select a page 'load' and then select multi loader. A bit complicated for the beginner. It was explained in the documents but as I have so used to a programs running without reading a manual I ofcourse didn't. I know better now. Anyway, from this same place you can forexample instruct XiPaint to use standard ASL requester instead of its own which looks like something from DPaint. This setting thing was buried to a too obscure place to be logically thinking found IMHO.

After I got over the initial problems to actually using the program, I found out the program to be very stable. I haven't crashed it a single time although I have been trying to do my best :).

As I do not have good comparison base against this program (like ImageFX) I can't say how they would match eachother. After trying out some of 'non-standard user interface' paint/image handling programs I liked XiPaint's standard style. There could have been more operations to perform to objects. The ones available were the standard color changing schmes like saturation, contrast, negative and so on. From the filters window you can find things like mosaic, gradient, emboss, smoothing and some more. Only problem with these filters was that I couldn't adjust the level which they performed the operation. For example I would have wanted to use 3x3 mosaic instead of 5x5 and I jsut couldn't do that..

What amazed me a lot with this program was that the HAM 8 seemed to be a lot faster to use than 256 color screen. Maybe it requires less converting between 24bit and HAM8, I don't know. Anyway use HAM 8 instead of 256 IMHO it seemed to do more justice to a program.

I am sure this program would get to a much higher level and would get a lot more positive judgement from me if I had forexample CyberVision or some other Fast 24-Bit Graphics card. After all XiPaint is designed specifically for 24-bit operations and AGA just isn't top of the line anymore.

SUMMARY

+

Easy Installation

-

Manuals weren't installed (a very small minus, installer could have asked for this)
Most things were hidden on one menu, hard to find (one gets used to this though, no problem)

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