In this era of ever-expanding, feature-crammed graphics applications — HSC Software’s Live Picture, Adobe Photoshop, and Macromedia FreeHand, to name a few — it’s refreshing to come across a program that does one thing and does it well. You can’t get much more focused than Colorize, a program whose only goal in life is to let you add color to bitmapped, black-and-white TIFF files (clip art, scanned images, and the like).
Although Colorize’s domain is narrow, its simple, easy-to-follow interface and sophisticated tools give it wide appeal. Regardless of your graphics skill level. Colorize makes sprucing up a black-and-white image with color as painless as possible. Colorize is a breeze to install, and its manual is clearly worded, with good, basic explanations of trapping and calibration. The online help manual and on-screen tutorial will get you up and running quickly.
After launching Colorize, you open the bitmap you want to color. A dialog box pops up detailing the image’s dimensions in pixels and its size in megabytes — a nice touch. Drag the colors you want from the Color Families libraries to the Shades Palette, or create custom colors. Then select the paint tool from the toolbox, adjust its size by dragging while holding down the ⌘ key, and start coloring.
A handy paint-to-edge tool makes it difficult to itccidevtally color outside the lines... If you do goof, the similarly constructed erase-to-edge tool helps you clean up your mess without inadvertently rubbing out the colors you want to keej^. For more exact editing, the erase-fragment tool rubs out just what the cursor crosshairs touch, while the despeckle tool lets you zero in on unwanted color flecks and small dots.
Version 2.0 adds a few handy special-effects tools. The main blend tool lets you fill areas with blends and gradients you create using one or two colors. Three airbrush tools — airbrush, splatter, and soft splatter — let you soften colors. You can apply these tools only to CMYK color layers (process colors that typically comprise percentages of several colors) and not, for instance, to spot colors.
Creating custom colors is a snap. The Hue, Saturation, and Lightness slider bars, for instance, let you easily adjust the CMYK percentages of a color; within the same window, a cluster of color hexagons displays your change. And although Colorize can’t actually open EPS files, such as those created in Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand, you can import spot colors from them.
Manipulating colors quickly and easily on screen is great, but what happens when you print? Colorize offers some limited, but useful, trapping controls to adjust for overlapping inks. You can set trapping values from -32 pixels (for an offset trap) to 0 (for no trap) to +32 pixels (for a maximum trap). As you paint. Colorize automatically traps the color you’re adding to the image’s Source Color (you can change from the default black), and you can preview the trapping on screen.
Though capable, Colorize has some room for improvement. Many clip art packages offer line art only in EPS or PICT format, which Colorize can’t open. The program’s single level of undo does not exactly encourage experimentation. And some simple functions — such as cut, copy, and paste — are grayed-out in the Edit menu (meaning they’ll be available in a future version).
The Last Word
Colorize’s $495 retail price seems a bit steep for a program that’s essentially a one-trick pony. But if you have a regular need to colorize black-and-white artwork, this narrowly focused program is well worth the money.
Martin, James A. (December 1995). Colorize 2.0. Macworld. (pg. 81).
Graeme Dykes
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Colorize_2.0_Ger.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
