What is Amazing Paint?

The amazing thing about Amazing Paint is the plethora of features it offers at a relatively low cost — $79,95. The black-and-white program offers more than 75 features, many of which are paitemed after those of more-expensive, high-end illustration programs. There isn’t enough room to list them all, but the most noteworthy are multiple undos and redos limited only by memory; editable brush and shape patterns: and a slew of effects options, including slant, flip, mirror, trace, invert, and dision. The package also lets you print poster- or bill board-sized versions of documents.

The multiple undo function is a boon, because the fun of using a paint program has always been altering pictures lo see what outrageous effects you can create.

Amazing Paint supports some glitzy text funtions; If you can stomach a 999-point plaid letter over a herringbone background. Amazing Paint won't stand in your way. The program also supports ATM and TrueType.

The only fly in the Amazing Paint ointment is a poorly written manual, an all-too-familiar occurrence these days but one that's unexpected from CE Software. We are firm believers in tutorials, especially when it comes to paint programs with lots of tools. If ever a program needed a tutorial, Amazing Paint does. But with only 45 typo-littered pages (6 of which are dedicated to Mac basics usually ignored in other manuals), the manual provides only a terse, cursory explanation of the program's many features.

On the other hand, the manual invites you to experiment and explore, albeit out of necessity. And what's most apparent about Amazing Paint is that the CE Software people had a great time developing the program. A sense of goofy fun pervades the entire package.

If you're looking for a powerful, inexpensive, fun paint program that gives you the most features for your money and runs even on a Mac 512K, Amazing Paint is for you.

Gruberman, Ken. (October 1991). Amazing Paint. MacUser. (pgs. 87-88).

Download Amazing Paint for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac