Gray-scale image processing with Digital Darkroom has just become more powerful with the release of version 2.0. The new package adds a wider variety of selection and painting tools, new colorization features, and a revamped interface that delivers easy access to the program's beefed-up functionality.
Although color image-processing packages such as Adobe Photoshop and ColorStudio have received a great deal of attention recently, not everyone needs the power of these more expensive packages. If you're on a tight budget and you don't own a color monitor, there's not much sense in spending an additional $500 or so on a color package when the new version of Digital Darkroom can handle your gray-scale images quite nicely.
To use the new version of Digital Darkroom, you need a hard drive, System 6.0,4 or later, and plenty of RAM (we recommend at least 4 megabytes). Digital Darkroom loads its images entirely into memory, so a 1-megabyte image requires, naturally enough, 1 megabyte of RAM. Additional RAM is needed for undo and transformation operations such as scale and skew.
Pop-Up, Tear-Off
New pop-up palettes provide easy access to Digital Darkroom's new tools and options while preserving the program's uncluttered interface. Silicon Beach has built plenty of flexibility into these palettes by letting you tear them off and move them around. You can minimize the screen space palettes occupy — but still keep them handy — by hiding everything but the title bar, using the window-shade control.
Previous versions allowed only 1 open file at a time; version 2.0 lets you have up to 20. This version includes five new selection and editing tools for enhancing images. Among the most impressive are a selection brush that lets you select part of an image simply by “painting” it and a new polyline tool that creates a selection one pixel unde. One of the program's palettes lets you control modes (New, Add, Refine, or Subtract) for the selection tool you're using, A new eyedropper tool picks up grays or primary colors from the foreground or the background of an image.
New painting tools abound in version 2.0. A brush tool lets you paint with selected portions of images. There's also a paint-bucket tool and a pop-up brushshape palette with 32 default brush shapes. You can also create, edit, save, and load a library of custom shapes. New 8-bit brushes provide a large selection of gradient blends, Another pop-up palette gives you a selection of nine brush modes: Replace, Blend, Texture, Blur, Stamp, Lighten, Darken, Smudge, and Sharpen, Yet another brush-control palette features various slide controls and a handy scratch pad that lets you test your changes to current brushes before using them on the image itself.
Other noteworthy additions to Digital Darkroom are the text module, new layout tools, and colonzation controls. The text module, which supports ATM and TrueType, lets you create text strings and stamp them into images. The program's layout environment is substantially improved by the addition of rulers and cross hairs to the work area. And last, but not least, the program's colorization controls let you apply color washes to selected portions of an image, much as you place a piece of tinted acetate over a black-andwhite photo. You select the desired lint with the program's proprietary color selector or through the Apple Color Picker. Digital Darkroom's colorization is no substitute for the power of a true color application such as Photoshop, but it provides a fun and easy way to enhance black-and-white images. (You need 32-bit QuickDraw 1.2 — which also improves overall performance — to take advantage of this feature. Some of the newer Macs — the IIci, IIfx, and the LC — have 32-bit QuickDraw built in to ROM. If you don't own one of these models, however, you can use the 32-bit QuickDraw INIT distributed with Apple System software.)
In order for other applications to recognize the color washes you apply lo your images, though, you must export the images in TIFF format. This creates a bit of a problem if you want to edit the colorized image further in Digital Darkroom, because the program opens exported colorized TIFF files in gray-scale format. So you must also save the image in Digital Darkroom's native PICT2 color format.
Version 2.0 provides new calibration controls that let you compensate tor any shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of your printer or scanner. You can save specific settings to disk and use them later with other images. Version 2.0 also has a new on-line help feature that explains the new tools and operations.
The Bottom Line
Silicon Beach has done an admirable job of expanding Digital Darkroom’s features and versatility without sacrificing ease of use or tacking on a painful price hike (the price is still $393). The program is an excellent choice for users who don't need the power of more-expensive packages, such as Adobe Photoshop. Although you won't find the program setting any speed records, even on faster Macintoshes such as the IIcx, it’s well behaved and reliable. If your image-processing needs are limited lo gray scale. Digital Darkroom is an excellent choice.
Wasson, Gregory. (June 1991). Digital Darkroom. MacUser. (pgs. 85-87).
Silicon Beach Software, Inc.
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digital_darkroom_2.0_d_1990.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
