Tour for Beginners


This tour is intended for Amiga beginners and casual users

Experienced Amiga users should skip to the Tour for Experienced Users, which is essentially the same as this chapter but there is no extra explanatory text.

Some things may be a little unusual at first - if you find anything that you don't understand then please read the Common Questions section in the back of this manual.

Let's create a picture within the program:

1. Select the 'New/Black Page' menu option which appears under the Project menu or hold down the right Amiga key and press `N'.

The Photogenics image size requester will appear. From this you can select the size of image to create. Lets create a small one for now -

2. Move the sliders by holding down the left mouse button when the pointer is over the 'knob' in the slider and moving the mouse. Make the X and Y numbers indicate approximately 100.

3. Click on OK and a progress indicator will appear showing how long the loader will take to complete. This can be interrupted by clicking on CANCEL - let's allow this one to finish.

4. Open the effects menu in the windows menu, click with the right mouse button on the 'Plasma' item in the list. (NOTE - make sure you choose the right mouse button, otherwise the next 'popup' window won't appear!)

5. A new pop-up requester will apear. There are several options but for the moment you should select 'APPLY'.

6. Once again a progress indicator will appear which can be interrupted by pressing CANCEL - We'll leave this one to run too. What you've just done is told Photogenics to apply this particular effect (Plasma) to all of your new, blank image. This effect will replace the entire image with the plasma pattern, other effects will do different things!

When complete you should see your first Photogenics image appear in a window - a 24-bit colour plasma. Congratulations! You've just created a new image and applied an effect (in this case the Plasma fractal) to it.

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 similar Effects to Plasma which create images rather than having to draw them from scratch or load them from disk. These can be used to generate images in their own right or as ways to add special effects to other images.

We can paint on your plasma by holding down the left mouse button and drawing over the window. 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. Using the right mouse button we can "un-spray". This can be used to remove any paint we have added.

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 - dont worry about these for the moment because you have a large list of colours to choose from and a colour wheel where you can see the colour you want. Spray some colour onto your image. Now select a different colour and click on the Use button in the Palette window. You should see the area you painted 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.

Close the plasma image by clicking on the top left of the window.


Part 2. Let's load a picture from disk:

1. Select Open from the Project menu.

2. Choose the directory Graphics, then inside that, the directory ExampleImages, then select the filename Girl.JPG

3. Click on OK.

4. Photogenics will load the image and you will see a face appear in a window.

5. Apply some paint to the face with the left mouse button. Don't forget we can remove paint with the right mouse button!

Let's change the way that the paint is applied to the image:

6. Click on the 'Mode' button in the Toolbox.

A window will appear showing all the different ways that paint can affect your image.

7. Choose Negative.

This works just like a photographic negative, making all your colours 'opposite' - blue becomes yellow, green becomes magenta, etc.

8. Add or remove more paint.

9. Click on the Mode button again and 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. Then you can add some more paint and a different effect.

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Copyright © Almathera 1996