Tired of your dull, lifeless, hazel eyes? Think your complexion is too light? Well, before grabbing a pair of colored contacts or trying out a no-sun tanning lotion only to find that it turns your skin a hideous bright orange, take a look at Chromatica. The biggest downside of Chromatica, when used for the purposes mentioned above, is that it can only change scanned photos and not your actual physical appearance. That’s great for online GIF-based romances, but it does nothing for nonelectronic encounters.
Chromatica is a plug-in for Photoshop (and other software that supports the Photoshop API) that consists of two filters: ChromaColor and ChromaPalette. Don’t let the name of the second filter fool you; it’s a color palette within a dialog box, not a floating palette within Photoshop. (In the imminent version 4.0, plug-ins will no longer be limited to modal dialog boxes.) While both filters affect the color of the selected image, they work in entirely different ways.
ChromaColor contains a special color selection section (annoyingly and inaccurately referred to on the CD case as a separate filter) called ChromaMask, which provides a painless way to select the precise edit area. For those Photoshoppers who have spent way too much time selecting areas using Photoshop’s various tools, this is a godsend. Then, within the selection, ChromaColor can replace one color with another, using several criteria to determine the amount and intensity of the replacement. In addition, an option called EdgeWizard lets you control the smoothness of the edges.
While ChromaColor has some good, usable stuff in it, ChromaPalette is the crossbred cousin filter. Here’s how it works: First, you either use an existing palette (1,000 are included on the CD-ROM, though only about 20 are given to you on a standard install) or you create a palette from one of your existing images, using as many colors as you like. Creating palettes is frustratingly time consuming, however, even with the “Automatic” option set (it calculates the number of colors to map on the palette). Once a palette for the current image has been created, you load a “Destination” palette. The colors from this palette replace the colors from the original, and boom! your image looks like: (1) Hell, (2) Predator-Vision, or (3) a dramatic difference, which may look good. The problem is, ChromaPalette replaces colors in the order of the original image’s palette; it doesn’t attempt to match colors or maintain relative hues, brightness, or any of that good stuff. After countless hours of creating palettes and then applying them to other images, only a few of the resulting images garnered a Save As.
Chromatica’s interface is just average, but a real standout is its ability to dramatically increase the Preview size, although even this is limited by the lack of an auto full-size button. (I guess the engineers blew off the Basic Mac Interface Elements seminar.) I would have found the ChromaPalette filter more useful if I could have used the ChromaMask feature within it, but alas, that feature only works within ChromaColor. Fortunately, Chroma has introduced a fix (available from their Web site) that provides a workaround to creating selections with ChromaMask.
One drawback is the lack of a printed manual. The help within the filters is adequate; and there’s a PDF manual on the CD-ROM — although it is not installed during the standard program installation — which does little good when another CD-ROM is being used as a source for images, and even less good when you’re in the dialog box, which doesn’t let you out to check the online manual.
Chromatica is a worthy addition to your Photoshop filter library if you’re dissatisfied with your current color modification capabilities, or if in the near future you’ll be working on special effects for the long-delayed “Aliens vs. Predator” film.
Alspach, Ted. (November 1996). Chromatica. MacAddict. (pg. 60).
Chroma Graphics, Inc.
Applications
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2014-08-23 / 
b67403286fa3a96a499b505088a8ce63fd051655 / 
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Chromatica.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
