Plug-in architecture has been a real windfall for digital artists. Third-party plug-ins load into the main application (such as Adobe Photoshop and other image processors), providing filtering, file-format conversion, and other functions. Xaos Tools’ Paint Alchemy is virtually a super-plug-in, giving users the ability to create an infinite variety of looks.
When called up from the host application’s filter menu. Paint Alchemy resembles a small application with its own compact interface. It comes with 36 brushes and 75 preset styles such as vortex and threads, and you can purchase 50 additional brushes for $19.99. These presets, however, are only a point of departure for daring alchemists. Parameter “filing cards,” which group setting categories such as color, stroke size, opacity, brush angle, and brush shape, let you numerically control via slider every variable in the brushing engine. The brushing engine lets you save any gray-scale PICT as a brushstroke and apply it across an image. Other parameter controls let you introduce randomness and variation into your brush to simulate the look of traditional painting.
You can set a brush to change angle or opacity according to hue, saturation, or brightness so that it appears to interact intelligently with a source image. For example, you can set the bright green grass of an image to receive long, angular strokes while the pale blue sky gets small, even strokes. Varying stroke density and the way the strokes layer enables you to create three-dimensional textures such as fur and bubbles. Users of Adobe Premiere and CoSA After Effects can take advantage of Paint Alchemy’s ability to randomize a brush’s behavior across time, using it to create dynamic animation effects.
The product is blemished by slow processing speed, the inability to automatically scale filters, and an overly complex interface. Because Paint Alchemy’s effects are calculation-intensive, large images can take a while to process; you might easily wait 45 minutes for a 10MB file to finish, though Macs with a floating-point unit will fare better than those without. By working intelligently you can cut down on a great deal of hang time. For example, lowering brush density as much as possible reduces the number of strokes needed to produce the effect. According to Xaos Tools, a patch that doubles processing speed (and adds a few other enhancements) will be available by the time you read this.
The absence of scaling is a significant hindrance to people who like to experiment using a low-resolution image and then operate on the fullresolution image when the look has been worked out. Because brush size is fixed, each stroke covers a larger area on a lower-resolution image. You can get around this by creating a higher-resolution brush for a high-resolution image. Finally, Paint Alchemy’s interface would benefit from a summary listing of all the parameter settings, so that users could easily keep track of their modifications.
Paint Alchemy’s phenomenal results outweigh a bit of CPU drag; besides, the company promises to release a patch soon that significantly improves speed. Ultimately Paint Alchemy is a professional tool, but at a suggested retail price of $99, it’s a tremendous value that both casual users and professional artists can use to design a little chaos into their work.
Hoffer, Avi. (May 1994). Paint Alchemy 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 63).
Xaos Tools, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
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2014-04-14 / 
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paint_alchemy_1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
