PixelPaint Pro 2.0 is not just another upgrade to the first 24-bit-color painting program For the Mac — it's a major revision that adds new tools and a spanking new interface. The result is a refined painting program that rivals Studio/32 and Oasis,
New Look and Feel
PixelPaint Pro 2.0 eliminates the restrictive, single-document windows and the fixed palettes of its predecessor. The new version lets you open multiple documents simultaneously (memory permitting) and adds new floating palettes for tools, color mixing, and coordinate display, in addition, new painting implements, including charcoal, pastel, and rubber stamp as well as new selection tools such as magic wand and cropping allow more-sophisticated techniques.
Professional graphic artists will welcome PixelPaint Pro's new Bezier-curve tool. For ease of use, new tool modifiers, visual effects, and fill effects tire now located on convenient, context-sensitive pop-up menus accessible from buttons on the Tool palette. The ability to select different path modes (continuous, polygonal, spline, discontinuous, and random) for all painting tools is also particularly useful.
Even with mouse input, PixelPaint Pro capably mimics the real-life effects of pressure on the process of media application. The use of PixelPaper, a collection of nine template documents that simulate the texture of painting surfaces, heightens the illusion. In addition to this, PixelPaint Pro’s painting tools respond to pressuresensitive graphics tablets, such as those from Wacom and Numonics. Altogether his combination makes PixelPaint Pro 2.0 an excellent emulator of traditional media and methods.
One of the best new features of version 2.0 is Wet Paint, which gives the forms you create more flexibility and mantpulability by mimicking drawing in an objectoriented program. When you draw a line or geometric element, it appears on-screen as an editable line object with control points. When you're satisfied with its placement, you can click a second time to merge the object into the bit-mapped image below.
Although PixelPaint Pro offers various dynamic transformations, such as flips and rotations, it's still not as quick or versatile as Studio/32 in this regard. Complex effects such as scaling, distortion, and free rotation, for example, are still off-limits to images selected with the lasso. On the other hand, Studio/32 lacks PixelPaint Pro's excellent mesh-warp effect, which overlays an image with a matrix of control points, letting you gradually distort it.
Zoom views now extend over an entire window, replacing the split-screen approach of earlier versions. The larger magnification area is welcome, but what's still missing is an actual-sized view, which is particularly useful for large images.
Text handling in PixelPaint Pro is flexible but cumbersome. Each letter has control points for individual placement while text is still “wet.” But you're required to enter text and set ils characteristics in a dialog box. As a result, testing different sizes and styles of text can be tedious. Anti-aliasing and support for Adobe Type Manager produce sharp, high-quality results. And early converts to TrueType will be interested in Pixel PaintPro 2.0's support for Apple's new outline-font format. The program also supports balloon help and System 7’s publish-and-subscribe, which lets you post updates to your image directly to other applications such as pagelayout programs. As a bit-mapped graphics program, PixelPaint Pro does not support the object-oriented subscribe function.
Color Support
As with previous versions of PixelPaint Pro, you access the program's 256-color Color palette via the Tool palette. Five new gradients are available, as is a slider control that lets you adjust transparency on the fly. In dialog boxes, the program provides sliders for brightness, contrast, and color balance.
PixelPaint Pro’s restyled Color Editor lets you switch to any of 16 preset palettes, and you can also customize your own. You select colors by using the Mac color wheel or pickers based on traditional color theory: RGB, HSV, CMY, and the Pantone Matching System. If you’re using SuperMac’s SuperMatch Display Calibrator to correlate on-screen colors with colors produced by specific output devices, the TekColor picker replaces the Mac color wheel as the default selection method.
With all these options, it’s surprising that PixelPaint Pro 2.0 cannot save custom color palettes, especially considering that earlier versions had this feature. Because palettes reside with documents, they can be preserved in template files, but saving palettes independently was a better solution. Graphic artists who need to work repeatedly with specific colors will miss this convenience.
A real plus for professionals, however, is PixelPaint Pro’s new color-separation support. Although such support is common in image processors such as ColorStudio and Photoshop, PixelPaint Pro is currently the only color painting program to support color separations. In fact, the complement of available printing options, including halftones and duotones, in PixelPaint Pro 2.0 is one of the program’s distinguishing strengths.
PixelPaint Pro is adept at reading and writing graphics file formats besides its native format (PixelPaint 2.0). It can read the original PixelPaint format, PICT, paint, and TIFF and write to PICT, TIFF, EPS (PostScript), and Scitex CT file formats. The Scilex CT format is especially significant for many professional publishing environments.
Virtual-Memory Scheme
PixelPaint Pro’s virtual-memory scheme is a mixed blessing. Because 24-bit color requires copious amounts of memory (multimegabyte files are common), PixelPaint Pro retrieves portions of open documents from disk when needed, rather than keeping entire images in RAM. As implementations of virtual memory go, this is a good one. Documents can be as large as 4,000 x 4,000 pixels, and users can scroll to off-screen image segments without changing view modes.
If you don’t have enough RAM, virtual memory is a godsend, but there are tradeoffs in operating speed and disk utilization. Programs that use virtual memory must access the hard disk as mandated by image changes, and the temporary files required for virtual-memory documents are large.
PixelPaint Pro reserves RAM for documents, so it goes to disk for everything from Clipboard operations to dynamic transformations of on-screen image segments. Never the speediest program, it suffers from the resulting continual disk accesses.
Moreover, PixelPaint Pro’s virtual memory is always on. So instead of being restricted by RAM, the program is constrained by disk space. Even with 8 megabytes of RAM at its disposal, PixelPaint Pro couldn’t open a 500K image without approximately 3 megabytes of available disk space.
As a concession to simplicity of operation, an on/off toggle for virtual memory was removed from the program before release. Granted, some novices might be flustered by memory-management issues, but the freedom to allocate RAM and disk space according to the task at hand would make PixelPaint Pro more useful.
In delivering professional rewards, PixelPaint Pro makes decidedly professional demands on both hardware and memory. The minimum configuration for running the program is a Mac II with 4 megabytes of RAM and System 6.0.5 or later. For effective MultiFinder use, you need 8 megabytes. And to make full use of the software’s functions, a 24-bit-video card (preferably with built-in acceleration) is required. One caveat: SuperMac reports PixelPaint Pro incompatibilities with Apple’s Macintosh Display Card 8•24 GC. And finally, you need a high-capacity hard disk — the bigger the better. Although SuperMac recommends a minimum of 3 megabytes of free disk space for PixelPaint Pro, professionals will likely end up devoting an entire disk drive to it.
The Bottom Line
Although late in arriving, PixelPaint Pro 2.0 nonetheless feels a little rushed. For example, when you magnify an image, horizontal lines are draped across the screen, and painting tools in Zoom mode also leave a trail of lines. These apparitions don’t affect images, but they really shouldn’t be there. There’s no question that PixelPaint Pro 2.0 is a vast improvement over its predecessors, but it doesn’t always look as if it’s completely finished.
That said, PixelPaint Pro 2.0 is a valuable renovation of one of the Mac’s most popular painting applications. Although not as crisp in operation as Studio/32 and perhaps not as artistically intuitive as Oasis, it’s a worthy competitor with some special features. Mac graphic artists tend to collect programs the way traditional artists collect brushes. Most won’t be able to resist this one.
Martinez, Carlos Domingo. (October 1991). PixelPaint Professional 2.0. MacUser. (pgs. 66, 68).
Pixel Resources, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
41 / 
2015-08-13 / 
72cd83361a8dd9de5a075815c52abb4ee0f6cab5 / 
/ 
Pixel_Paint_Pro_2.0.1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
