This quick tour will give experienced Amiga users a brief overview of some of the features of Photogenics.
Some things may be a little unusal at first - if you find anything that you don't understand then please read the Common Questions section in the back of this manual.
Start Photogenics and we'll begin by creating a picture within the program:
1. Select the New page option which appears under the Windows menu, Select a size of approximately 100 by 100.
2. Open the Effects window, which can be found in the Windows Menu and Click on the Plasma Effect with the right mouse button. (Photogenics uses a new window system called Widget for user interface control. These pop-ups will disapear if you just click once with the left mouse, selecting the effect but not actually calling it - so you'll need to use the right mouse button to open up the options pop-up. There is a good reason for this seemingly strange behaviour, best explained by reading the Widget documentation.)
3. Click on Apply from the new 'pop-up' window.
When complete you should see your first Photogenics image appear in a window - a 24-bit colour plasma.
You have seen just one of the powerful features of Photogenics which allows you to create images within the program with no effort at all. There are a number of Effects similar to Plasma which create images rather than load them. These can be used to generate images in their own right or as ways to add special effects to other images.
Paint can be applied to the plasma image with the left mouse button and removed with the right button. The colour shown in the Toolbox will be applied with the default drawing tool - Airbrush. The Airbrush applies your colour in the same way as a real airbrush does - a smooth flow of paint that increases the longer you hold it. It also has smooth edges so you can blend colours into each other.
Another powerful feature is the ability to change the colour of the area we have just painted. Open the Palette by clicking on the colourbox in the Toolbox or selecting it from the Windows menu. Here we choose the colour to paint with. Colours can be chosen using RGB (Red, Green, Blue), HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) or CMY (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) colour models. Spray some colour onto your image. Now select a different colour and click on the Use button in the Toolbox. You should see the area you p ainted change to the new colour.
When you are happy with the paint you have applied then clicking on the FIX button in the toolbox will make our changes permanent. You can now choose a different colour and paint with that over the first colour.
Please note that after FIXing, we cannot remove paint with the right mouse button or change the colour of that paint, however, If you have enough memory you can use the Undo menu option to reverse a fix.
Close the plasma image and we will load a picture from disk:
1. Select Open from the Project menu.
2. Choose the directory Graphics, then inside that, the directory ExampleImages, then load the image Girl.JPG
3. Apply some paint to the face with the left mouse button.
Let's change the way that the paint is applied to the image :
4. Click on the Mode button in the Toolbox.
5. Choose Negative.
6. Add or remove more paint.
Note that we are now applying a different sort of paint that is making the image Negative.
7. Choose Tint.
Every time we change the Mode, Photogenics will "redo" the paint we have applied with the new effect. Tint has a kind of transparency that allows us to see the original image under the paint we have applied.
This tour is finished now. You may continue adding/removing paint and changing the mode. Experiment - some things may look better than others. Remember that once you are happy with an effect then you must FIX it, and then you can add paint and different effects.