Although it was one of the first Mac color painting programs, PixelPaint has languished in recent years. But after major renovations by its original developers, PixelPaint Pro 3 offers professional-level painting and image processing tools at an attractive price.
Not Just a Maintenance Upgrade
In version 3.01, those niggling little bugs that hampered release 3.0 have, as far as I could determine, been squashed. Also, support for pressure-sensitive tablets, such as those from Wacom, has been improved. And time-consuming operations, such as rotating images, moving layers, and applying special effects, have been optimized, making the program more responsive.
However, beyond tweaks and fixes, PixelPaint Pro 3.01 adds compatibility with System 7.5 and full support for the Pantone Open Color Environment (POCE), a color-selection and -management system. Consequently, this version constitutes a fairly significant upgrade, especially for professional users needing precise color matching.
Pantone Open Color Environment
Matching screen colors to printed output has always been a problem, due to the inherent differences between the way computer monitors and printing devices reproduce color. With POCE, you select colors using the new Apple Extensible Color Picker, which lets you switch between color models. Pantone provides two models: one for the Pantone Matching System and another for the Pantone Process Color System. The colors in the Pantone pickers are calibrated to the monitor and output device you select using the Apple ColorSync Profile and Pantone Profile control panels. Slider gauges tell you if a chosen color is out of gamut, letting you correct color problems on the spot. And buttons let you select your output stock: coated, uncoated, or film for separations.
You can associate specific ColorSync and Pantone profiles with individual documents and then preview the output colors on your screen. Although the preview cannot exactly match what the output device will produce, it can provide a decent approximation. You can then isolate any out-of-gamut colors using masks and correct the colors before committing your creation to print.
A Traditional Interface
Bucking the trend toward natural-media simulation, PixelPaint Pro 3 doesn’t even pretend you’re working with real materials. Without apology, it offers a traditional Mac environment that relies on unobtrusive tool icons and functional conservatively sized floaters. Extra brushes, gradients, patterns, papers, and color palettes are available as plug-in extensions either from floating palettes or by using keyboard commands.
PixelPaint Pro 3’s Expressionist Brush floater is particularly impressive. These brushes produce many different painting and rubber-stamping effects, and they’re completely editable, letting you alter their size, angle, and various other parameters.
Also excellent is PixelPaint Pro 3’s Wet Paint feature. It lets you edit brushstrokes as objects before painting with them. Like an illustration program. Wet Paint lets you define a path and edit control points before finalizing the stroke. In addition, the ReShape command lets you return the last painted object to Wet Paint mode, even after the object has been set down in the image.
PixelPaint Pro 3 lets you define selections as floating objects, called PixelLayers. These remain active until you drop them onto the document image. With the Layer Control palette, you can soften the edges of a PixelLayer to composite images without telltale edges. PixelLayers can be created only by specifying areas with the selection tools. So if you build a Wet Paint object, you must set it dowTi on the page, select it, and then transform it into a layer. The ability to define a PixelLayer directly from a Wet Paint object would be a slick enhancement.
In addition, PixelPaint Pro 3 provides a useful array of filters for image processing functions and offers a scripting capability that allows you to record command sequences (but not brushstrokes) and replay them on other images. You also manage both imaging filters and scripts as plug-ins, letting you easily customize the program’s feature set.
PixelPaint Pro 3’s manual is well organized, readable, and a good source for background information. If you’re a color-imaging novice, reading this manual provides a quick education. The program’s built-in virtual memory scheme for document management makes it usable with RAM-challenged Macs, but relying on virtual memoiy makes for slow going. One solution is a fat memory allocation (a minimum of 8MB to 12MB). Another is to get the fastest Mac you can afford. My recommendation, especially for professional users, is to do both. By the way, the Power Macintosh-native version should be available by the time you read this.
The Last Word
Although surpassed by Adobe Photoshop in imaging prowess and by Fractal Design Painter in natural-media simulation, PixelPaint Pro 3 strikes a good balance between the artistic demands of color painting and the technical precision of image processing. That balance, and first-rate color-matching resources, make PixelPaint Pro 3 an excellent choice for professional artists and illustrators.
Martinez, Carlos Domingo. (March 1995). PixelPaint Pro 3.01. Macworld. (pg. 55).
Pixel Resources Inc.
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PixelPaint_Pro_3.02.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
