PixelPaint Professional is the more colorful cousin of PixelPaint (see “Digital Palettes” October '89). It can still handle 8-bit (256) color and grayscale work nicely, but you should consider it only if you need 16-, 24-, or 32-bit color capabilities. With 16.7 million colors at hand and an impressive collection of tools, PixelPaint Pro reaches some mighty heights, even though it does stop short of the summit.
WHAT IS IT PixelPaint Pro provides for 256-co1or palettes per document, and you can swap or edit them at any time. Unlike in the 8-bit Color mode, when you work in 16-, 24-, or 32-bit color, changing a palette has no effect on the colors already in your image. Palette editing controls for darkening, lightening, and contrasting are also available. You can choose colors from the System color wheel or specify Pantone colors. There’s also a Pop-Down megapalette where you can mix and choose colors in a scratch pad area. A straightforward control lets you set paint transparency.
With unlimited colors, its tools work realistically. The airbrush can lay down smooth fills, the water drop softens any area it contacts, and the finger (smudging) tool pushes colors into each other as expertly as any first-grader. The brush, finger, and water-drop tools can also trace out a polygon or curving path. With their variable effects, you can use them as well-controlled tools for smoothing, darkening, and tinting any kind of shape.
The lasso can also work as a selection polygon or as a spline (smoothed curve). The Polygon mode is great for capturing odd-shaped irregular areas. Each tool remembers its most recent modes and options.
PixelPaint Pro can help reduce jaggies by softening, or anti-aliasing, the edges of two adjoining areas. This effect can be applied to both graphics and text. When you copy a selection, you can have PixelPaint Pro soften its edges so that the selection pastes seamlessly. You can also make a selection partly transparent so it looks ghostlike when it is pasted. Merging lets you import a document — which can be cropped or resized to fit a given frame and may be partly transparent — into a designated area.
Selecting a multicolored area from a multicolored background is no easy task.
The tolerance of PixelPaint Pro’s selection tools can be customized so that they grab (or ignore, depending on the mode) one or many colors when determining the edges of a region. Choosing Select Last automatically selects the last object you painted so you can process it further.
In the Painting mode, you can select one or more areas and dub them masked. There’s a special mask layer in which you can further develop a protective shield for parts of your painting. You can elect to modify the mask, using the painting tools. To mask a specific range of colors, you drag the eyedropper tool over all the colors you want to protect. When you’ve finished, those marked colors, which can be anywhere in the document, become masked.
You can use the paint bucket to mask a contiguous area automatically.
The program works with PixelPaint/PICT2, TIFF in 8-bit gray scale or 24-bit color, EPSF, and MacPaint files. Its printing options include gray scale, full color, spot color, or color separations, A scanner utility program, PixelScan, drives the Sharp JX450 or Howtek Scanmaster 24-bit color scanners. It can save images in well-dithered 8-bit or in 24-bit color.
HOW IT WORKS PixelPaint Pro's selection mechanisms are powerful but far from perfect, which weakens the package substantially. Scrolling, zooming, or setting a transparency deactivates the selection. Distorting and then moving a selection rips its background off the canvas. Lassoed selections can't be processed with dynamic effects such as distortion, rotation, or slanting. Overlapping pans of selected areas become deselected. Selecting or dragging a selection past the edges of the visible area doesn’t autoscroll, and you can’t push a selection partly off the canvas. When pasted, a transparent selection becomes permanently imprinted with whatever it first lands on, so when you reposition it, you also drag away an unwanted imprint. SuperMac knows about these (and a few more) glitches and is working on them.
PixelPaint Professional’s uncluttered interface is nice, but I'd like to see onscreen information on matters such as line width, fill mode, indications of what special effect is in force, and whether your current tool has been set to use it. Some tactful additions to the tool palette — or tear-off windows — would help. But even with PixelPaint Professional's first-release shortcomings, you can easily adapt. Right now, no serious pixel artist should be without it.
Panascandolo, Salvatore. (December 1989). PixelPaint Professional. MacUser. (pgs. 62-63).
Pixel Resources, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
15 / 
2015-08-13 / 
bb44f57d9c74efc4812c1be82b8433843490f123 / 
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Pixel_Paint_Professional_1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
