What is Studio/8?

Color paint offerings for the Mac are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Take Studio/8, for example. This new bitmap color painting program from Electronic Arts has a multitude of powerful painting tools and special effects that will delight any digital artist currently using programs such as SuperMac s PixelPaint and Computer Friends Modern Artist. It’s rich in features and boasts an excellent user interface and respectable performance.

A Palette of Choices

Studio/8’s Tool Palette contains many of the standard drawing devices (rectangles, circles, lines, paint bucket, paintbrush) plus features usually found only in object-oriented graphics programs. The familiar spray can is absent; instead, you get a programmable airbrush with adjustable flow rate and dissipation, which more closely approximates the functionality of its real world counterpart. You get the normal polygon tool as well as a variable-side polygon (triangles, hexagons, and so on); and you can add vertices and reshape the polygon immediately after creating it. The program also incorporates a bezier tool with fully adjustable control points, like the one found in Adobe Illustrator. Besides the standard lasso and marquee selectors, there is a polygonal selector, which works exactly like a polygon drawing tool, except that it selects the region on the screen that falls inside the polygon you draw.

The brush tool is unique in the diversity of operation it offers: besides standard single-color brushes, any selected area can be turned into a brush, and documents stored on disk can be loaded into the program as brushes. Also the brush editing dialog box shows the last eight custom brushes that you created. One of the program’s main menus is devoted entirely to special-effects modes for the brushes, including unique goodies such as neon and watercolor brushes. Using some of the special-effects brushes exposed one of the program’s principal problems: the brushes respond so slowly that the familiar wristwatch indicator appears now and then during the process. For artists who depend on a quick and responsive paintbrush, this could prove to be a major drawback.

Below the main tool icons in the tool palette are nine tool modifiers that change the way many of the drawing and selection tools function. The tool modifiers include controls to toggle the grid, fill/frame, selection, constraining, transparency, and FatBits modes, among others. The tool modifiers, which are linked to the numeric keypad on the Mac II keyboard, allow you to toggle the modes while drawing.

Independent vertical and horizontal line weights, zoom magnifications (1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 times), fill patterns, gradients, and the main color palette are all implemented as tear-off menus that can be placed anywhere on the screen. (And the program can save the positions of the default drawling window, tool palettes, and tear-off palettes for future work sessions.)

Printing images is a straightforward process, but while I had success printing Studio/8 images to a variety of color output devices (including the Tektronix 4693D color thermal-wax printer and Presentation Technologies’ Montage film recorder), some of the printouts had vertical white streaks running the entire length of the printed page. The problem occurred randomly, so I cannot attribute it to any specific sequence of actions or conditions.

Color My World

Studio/8 doesn’t skimp in its colorhandling capabilities. You can work with either a default Apple system palette, 256 gray shades, or a custom color palette (Studio/8 also works with 4-bit/16-color Mac II video cards). Colors can be created in a number of ways, including a unique Color Mixer window that allows you to smear various colors together to create new shades, and a color table that automatical h* creates intermediate shades between a number of fixed base colors. Custom color ranges and gradations can be named and saved in the program’s Preferences file (where they are maintained independent of any particular document).

Color gradations are easy to create and edit, and you can use either the existing colors in the current color palette or create new colors, depending on the beginning and ending colors of a gradient range. Each gradient can also have a texture value, which provides a grainy texture to an otherwise banded gradation between colors. There are two gradient modes: shape fitting and uniform, which can be interchanged to achieve a number of 3-D shading effects.

A pickup, or dropper tool, lets you select a color on the screen and make it the current foreground, or painting color.

While most other color painting programs offer a similar tool, Studio/8’s dropper adds some special capabilities: by double-clicking on a color on the screen, you bring up a dialog box that allows you to change the selected color to any other while viewing the results on the screen. Also, clicking on a color in the color palette with the dropper tool causes the color to flash anywhere it appears on the screen — a color “find” function not available in any other Mac color painting program.

Very Special Effects

Studio/8 is capable of some stunning visual effects, including some in 3-D. A perspective dialog box allows you to set a three-dimensional vantage point by rotating a grid-plane in any axis. You select any object on the screen, it can either be individually mapped onto the perspective plane, or the perspective plane can be filled with the selected image (with one of three user-selected rendering qualities) — rotation, distortion, and bending tools allow even more manipulation, resulting in some breathtaking visuals.

The masking feature is extensive and well implemented: any color or selected area (or combination of the two) can be set to a mask. When the mask is activated, any drawing tool or special effect will work only within or outside of the mask area. Masks can be saved to disk as permanent stencils and can be loaded into any document. With a separate Slip Color dialog box you can choose a color or range of colors for selection by the lasso, marquee, or polygon. By using the tool modifiers that apply to the mask and slip colors, you can exercise extremely precise control over what portion of an image the drawing and selection tools affect.

Studio/8 pays close attention to small but important details: when selecting a document to open, you can view the image in a small, scaled display (Studio/8 can open PICT II, MacPaint, and color TIFF images; and I was successful in opening a 24-bit scanned TIFF file that Studio/8 converted into 8-bit format, with exceptional color optimization). When creating custom grids, you can select an object on the screen and use the rectangular horizontal and vertical dimensions as a basis for the grid constraint, an immensely useful feature. The FatBits window is movable and resizable, and you can switch the view to have the actual size of the image appear in the FatBits window, while the magnified view is visible everywhere else in the main drawing window. A Trace With Brush command traces a selected area automatically with the currently selected brush shape and color; by using this command with neon brushes, you can create special type and border effects that would otherwise be difficult to create.

The documentation is well illustrated, with exceptional organization and clarity. There are even some color plates explaining how color tools work. The program itself has a complete, illustrated, online help facility. Also included in the five-disk set are scanned marble and wood textures, a selection of custom brushes, and an excellent slide show program that you can use to easily create slick full-screen presentations with an assortment of fade and dissolve effects.

Pick Up That Brush

Studio/8 is a powerful color painting program that addresses most of the needs of the color artist — anyone interested in producing color bitmapped images on the Mac II should consider it. If you spend a little time learning to use its vast number of capabilities, you will be rewarded by all the colors at the end of the rainbow.

Biedny, David. (March 1989). Studio/8 1.0. Macworld. (pgs. 156-158).

Download Studio/8 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II