What is Photon Paint?

Color paint applications will soon be one of the most crowded categories of Mac software. Photon Paint is one of the latest entries. Though it isn't the equal of Studio/8 or PixelPaint, Photon Paint does offer a workable painting environment, multiwindow capability, some interesting special effects, and, perhaps most importantly, a more affordable price.

Photon Paint was originally written for the Amiga, and MicroIllusions has done a creditable job of transforming it into a Mac program that's generally faithful to the Mac interface.

The Photon Paint environment is dominated by five palettes (tool, pen, color, pattern, and status) in floating, movable windows. Only the color palette is sized appropriately for its function; the others are excessively large. On a 13-inch monitor, they can cramp the drawing area. The pen and tool palettes are resizable; the pattern and status palettes should be.

In comparison to other Mac applications, Photon Paint is limited. For instance, only 14 standard pens are available, and the spray can is adjustable only to those pen sizes. Also, although pattern palettes can be saved, they can hold only 16 patterns. And though discontiguous selections are possible (Command-click), the lasso and rectangle cannot “cinch down” on a selection.

On the other hand, any Clipboard image may be used as a brush, and the RGB and HSV (hue, shade, value) tools provide an easy and powerful way of revising the color palette. Just click on two colors and Photon Paint calibrates the values between them, creating intermediate shades for all the intervening steps, (Custom palettes can be saved.) Palette changes are instantly reflected in the current document. However, although the palette can be restored with the Undo command, the change in the image is irreversible. Exercise care with unsaved documents.

Photon Paint supports five graphic modes: normal, add, subtract, blend, and wash, a watercolor-like effect. It also incorporates a number of dynamic effects: bend, twist, tilt, and rotate. Controlled from dialog boxes, dynamic effects can be calibrated precisely (e.g., 43 degrees of rotation), but since you're not getting any visual feedback, precision doesn't necessarily translate into accuracy. The dynamic effects, however, do work with lassoed objects — without a fleeting any unwanted areas outside the selected item. Selections so modified can be dropped in the image (to test the fit) and still be undone.

The most eye-catching dynamic effect is the ability to “wrap” a selection to create three-dimensional-looking shapes, such as cones, spheres, and cubes. Lighting (direction, distance, and color of a spotlight) can be altered to enhance the 3-D effect. The results are pretty good with patterns, but with colors, color banding can diminish the effectiveness of the wraps. Although most shapes are created fairly quickly, some can take a bit of time to be produced.

Perhaps most useful in day-to-day operation is Photon Paint's multiplewindow capability. Any number of documents (limited only by available memory) may be open simultaneously.

A handy Send to Rear button on each window lets you shuffle the stack. Palettes are loaded with each document, but a link is not maintained when another image with a different palette is opened. So the last palette loaded will always be active. Bringing an image to the front will shift its colors to the currently active palette. If you forget about this potentially disastrous feature and have saved your file in a previous version, there is a Revert to last saved option. But if you don’t save often and you open an old document while working on an unsaved image, watch out. Your unsaved file will take on the color palette associated with the incoming document, and you can’t undo this effect.

Also, you may open several windows into the same document with Photon Paint’s magnification tool. Click and it creates a four-times enlargement in a separate window. Click again and zoom to eight-times enlargement (Fat-Bits size) in yet another window. Zooms of 16- and 32-times normal can also be attained. Intermediate magnifications are possible with the plus/minus buttons at the lower left of each window. Changes made in one view are updated in the others. However, the windows aren’t linked. If you scroll around in one image and switch to another, you’ll have to center again. Also, Photon Paint does not remind you if a magnified view is already deployed; it simply creates another window, leading at times to a stack of multiple — or even identical — zoom-windows under your drawing. Still, the ability to display multiple, magnified views is valuable.

Photon Paint reads and writes only its own format. Luckily, that format is PICT2, although the program’s Paint icon with PP superimposed gives no clue of this. Transportable files are a plus.

The Photon Paint disk also includes a black-and-white version. Only a shadow of the color program, it will not displace any of the black-and- white paint applications already in existence. And colors cannot be assigned to a document on standard Macs to be viewed in color on Mac IIs. The monochrome version’s saving grace is its ability to view Photon Paint files (it only reads PICT) on standard Macs. Finally, Photon Paint’s manual is nicely designed but woefully short on information about the program. The generally clear and concise version 1.1 update booklet is better.

Photon Paint 1.1 isn’t the final word on color painting. However, it operates reasonably well and, at $299, is priced at substantially less than its competitors. If you’re on a budget or don’t need all the features found in the higher priced programs, Photon Paint could be your paint program.

Martinez, Carlos Domingo. (May 1989). Photon Paint. MacUser. (pgs. 45-46).

Download Photon Paint for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II