What is Studio/32?

Success breeds success. Studio/32 is Electronic Arts' worthy 32-bit successor to Studio/8. Studio/8’s strength is its thoughtfully designed interface; Studio/32 maintains and expands that interface, providing access to 16.7 million colors and an assortment of new features and powerful tools.

In Full Color

Studio/32 supports the Pantone and CYM (cyan, yellow, magenta) color models commonly used in graphic arts and printing, as well as the RGB (red, green, blue), HSV (hue, saturation, value), and HSL (hue, saturation, luminance) models used by the Mac and other video-display systems. The program lets you work in 8-, 16-, 24-, or 32-bit color.

For convenience, Studio/32 provides four 256-color palettes per painting, but that doesn't mean you're limited to 1,024 colors. You can custom-organize palettes, save any number of them, and switch among them freely without changing any colors already in your document. And if you're working in 24- or 32-bit mode, your colors don't have to appear in a palette at all. To match a previously used color, just click on it with the eyedropper tool.

If you need more choices, you can select colors from a screen version of the Pantone 747 XR Color Formula Guide, the color square (which automatically generates color gradients between colors of your choice), or Apple's color picker or you can mix custom colors much as you would with tubes of paint. You can also control any color's transparency.

Using color effectively, however, often means restricting your color usage. Studio/32 provides powerful selection tools for selecting or excluding areas or colors for editing. Masking lets you protect either an area or a specified selection of colors.

The Right Tools

All of Studio/32's tools are responsive. Besides standard shape tools, the program provides two curve tools: One draws single curves between two endpoints, and the other draws complex Bezier curves. You can edit Beziers repeatedly until you select another tool.

In addition to behaving as they always have, the standard lasso and rectangular selection tools can be set to expand or shrink to include or exclude specified colors. You can even specify that any occurrence of excluded colors that appears within a selection (those completely surrounded by colors you want) becomes transparent.

The magic wand, an additional selection tool, lets you make selections by color. Click on a color, and all the contiguous pixels of the same or similar colors are selected. In the Tolerance dialog box, you can set a width for the range of colors that will be included. With any of Studio/32's selection tools, you can also select multiple separate parts of your painting simultaneously and treat them as a single selection.

Selected areas can be filled; colorized; merged into other images at any transparency setting or transparency gradient; shadowed; embossed; traced; blended; flipped; rotated freely or by degrees; resized freely or by percentage; and distorted, bent, and stretched in several ways. In addition to using the standard 1- and 2-point perspectives, you can predefine any perspective by adjusting the x-, y-, and z-axis settings of a fiat plane in a dialog box and apply that perspective to your selection. A unique effect is spherization, which turns a non spherical selection into a spherical one. There are two types of spherization: One is like creating a globe by wrapping a flat world map around it; the second looks more like the distorted effect of a fish-eye camera lens.

Studio/32 provides airbrushes that are reminiscent of the real thing. Eight different airbrushes are available at any time, and you can edit them to produce new effects as needed. The up and down cursor keys switch sequentially among the current eight airbrushes — a decided convenience.

Gradients and Blends

A 32-bil-color program's greatest strength is its ability to render smooth gradients from color to color. The virtually unlimited number of in-between shades available among 16.7 million colors makes this possible. Studio/32's Define Gradient dialog box lets you configure and store up to eight gradients per document, each of which can contain up to 32 colors. As with color palettes, you can later edit any gradient without affecting your document.

When you specify one of your gradients as the foreground color, the gradient fills your filled shapes and shapes that have been filled with the paint can. You can specify either linear gradients or gradients that follow the shape you've drawn, and you can also set the angle at which the gradient will flow. The gradient also becomes the current paintbrush.

The water-drop tool blends or sharpens the differences between adjacent colors. The smudge tool acts like a finger with a dollop of paint on it. When you push it through other colors, the color on the finger mixes with them — at first visibly but then less so as the paint on the finger is used up. These effects are nearly impossible to achieve with 8-bit-color programs.

You can select among three levels of anti-aliasing — none, low. or high — for the drawing tools. This helps minimize the jaggies in diagonal and curved lines, even in low-resolution pictures. The antialias brush is an alternative paintbrush that paints without any jaggies and also doubles as a clone tool for precisely reproducing previously drawn parts of your painting that are located elsewhere in your document.

In addition to the standard text-handling method that most paint programs use, Studio/32 provides an additional text layer. Text in that layer continues to be editable via normal word-processing methods yet prints as pan of your finished document. This feature ensures high-quality text on PostScript printer regardless of the resolution of the bit-mapped pan of the document. You can mix fonts, sizes, and styles within text blocks.

The Bottom Line

As an artist, I regard anything that diverts my attention from my work as an irritant. The best tools become extensions of me, and I use them without thinking. Studio/32 comes closer to being the perfect computer-art program than anything else I've used. Its clean interface and powerful tools combine to do the one thing an excellent graphics program should do: empower the artist without getting in the way. If you want the ideal 32-bit painting program, this is it.

Lewis, Darryl. (January 1991). Studio/32. MacUser. (pgs. 52-53).

Download Studio/32 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II