F1 Licenseware/F1 Licenseware - Volume 1.iso/disks/049a.dms/049a.adf/articles/direview.asc

Text File | 1993-09-09 | 7KB | 143 lines

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               Review of Digital Illusions (Shareware version)
               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                           Reviewed by Andrew Smith

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It's very rare to find a really good image processor in the P.D.  It's
even rarer still to find one that is written in AMOS, which is exactly
what this program was written in.  I can now imagine all the sneers from
the non-AMOS fans who quite wrongly will say "It's written in AMOS so
it'll be slow with an appalling user interface".  They couldn't be further
from the truth.

Upon loading, perceptive users will notice a lean towards the user
interface of Art Department professional, the way in which it looks,
but not how its laid out.  The first thing I noticed was the Image
Operators panel featuring 12 buttons.  A fair few operators for a
P.D. Image Processor I thought.  Actually, there are a lot more
operators for you to use.  The raised bar where it says 'Image
Operators' is actually a clickable gadget, although this is not
immediately obvious.  Clicking here will reveal another set of
operators.  There are 27 different operators in all, and to be
perfectly honest there are some really good effects.

The most dramatic effect (and the best one in my opinion) is the Spiral
operator.  It's really an operator that makes your picture look like
it's being sucked down a plug-hole.  Firstly you have to click the LOAD
gadget to load an IFF picture.  Next, your ready to process your picture.
Upon clicking on the Spiral operator, you are presented with a requester
with 5 gadgets at the bottom and a slide bar in the middle.  It is here
where you set your 'Spiral Twist'.  Basically, the higher the
setting the more dramatic the effect.  When you've made your setting,
click the Execute button (Most of the operators use this same
requester).  I hope your a patient lot because it really does take a
long while to process the image.  When complete you have to click the
'GO!' gadget to display the picture.  There is another wait here while
it is 'Computing New Palette', or so it says.  Afterwards, your processed
image is displayed on the screen.
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Perhaps the worst operator is splatter.  What it does is remove pixels
from your image at random and it makes the final image look tacky.
This is the only poor effect but the others are really quite superb
although they do take a while to process.

Of course when you've processed your picture, you'll want to save it.
To do this you click on the SAVE gadget.  When the file requester appears,
you should give your new image a filename and click OK.  Your file will
be saved out as a standard IFF picture file.

Considering the author decided to use AMOS to write his package, I
cannot understand why he didn't include the option to load and save images
as AMOS packed pictures.  The reason why this would be useful is twofold:

*    Packed Pictures are a lot smaller than their IFF equivalents and
    therefor less disk space is used.

*    There would be no need to convert images from IFF format to ABK format.
    AMOS programmers could load their newly processed images directly into
    a memory bank.

In fact, you can only load and save IFF files.  I think more work is
needed here.  At the very least it should support IFF, ABK, PCX and GIF
picture formats as most image processors include the facility to load
pictures from other platforms.
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What else does Digital Illusions offer?  Well you can dither your picture.
Unfortunately you only have two modes of dither i.e. none or Floyd
Steinberg, but do you really need other methods of dithering?  You can
use the different screen resolutions of your Amiga.  Lowres and Hires
screen modes are supported and they can be interlaced if you so wish.
The maximum number of colours you can use is 4096 which is HAM mode
(Hold And Modify) which can only be used in Lowres, as most people know.
Because the package is written in AMOS, there is no support for the new
AGA screen modes or even the older ECS chipset that was introduced with
the A500+ .  AGA support WILL be included in the next version of Digital
Illusions but the program is being recoded in C (Get a move on with that
AGA extension Europress!  We cannot afford to have AMOS programmers
moving to other languages!).
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Perhaps the best part about this program is the animation.  It's quite
difficult for the beginner to get to grips with so he/she should have
a good read of the on-disk documentation.  But if you keep trying,
then some really good looking results will be your reward.  With the
spiral operator (that I mentioned before) and the animation combined,
you can make an animation that sucks the picture into the centre of
the screen.  I myself have tried this and it looks stunning!  This
feature is so good you can easily spend hours creating strange anims,
it is so much good fun!  When it comes to saving your animation, it
will not be saved as a standard IFF ANIM file.  Instead, each frame
of the animation will be saved out as a separate IFF picture.  Each
filename of the animation will look something like this:

    anim001
    anim002
    anim003
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Luckily, Deluxe Paint can load an animation like this.  (Look out for
a tutorial on this sort of thing soon)  As everybody owns DPaint,
there shouldn't be too much hassle in loading your animation.

Okay then, I've waffled on long enough about its features, but how well
does it perform?  As expected, image processing is no quick business,
be prepared to sit around doing nothing for great lengths of time.
Most of the operators yield great results if you're prepared to
experiment.  The requesters in the program are very good, especially
the palette requester, it is hard to tell the program was written in
AMOS - until you press Left-Amiga and A.  If you are interested in
animation then a hard disk is essential as the animations are played
directly from hard disk, this is because the programmer hasn't
supported IFF animations.  This is not really his fault as AMOS doesn't
support IFF animations either.  This does mean, however, that your
animations can be as big as disk space allows.  According to the author,
this program requires 1 meg of memory, but he recommends 2 megs.
Personally I think this is unrealistic as the program is a real
memory-hog when it comes to animating.  Personally, I recommend that you
have at least 4 megs to use the animation feature comfortably.  Of
course if you don't intend to create anims then you may be able to get
away with just 1 meg, but don't expect to process a 320*512 HAM image
using one of the more complicated operators.
@2
To sum up, Digital Illusions is definitely one of the better image
processors out there and is definitely worth a look.  The operators
give good results and the user-interface is quite good, although
no-where near as good as one that runs under Intuition.  The lack
of ABK support is a major omission but the other missing formats such
as PCX, GIF, BMP, TIFF etc. is less serious.  Be prepared to wait,
it's not the fastest image program around.  The lack of AGA is also
dissapointing, but again it's not the fault of the author.  The
animation however is nothing short of superb.  My advice is, get it!
@1

Program rating : 85%

Price   : $15

Author  : Tonny Espeset

Address : Postboks 183
          1301 Sandvika
          Norway