Deluxe Paint V


The Amiga's oldest paint package just doesn't know when to lie down and take a count, as Stevie Kennedy found out...


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A new soft-edged airbrush is a welcome addition to DPaint V. It adds considerably to HAM and HAM8 drawing power, and about time too!

Just when you thought that Brilliance, Photogenics, and Personal Paint had punched the life out of Deluxe Paint, Electronic Arts have slapped the old bruiser across the face a couple of times, given him a few new moves, and pushed him back into the ring. He might have one eye shut and a nasty cut below the nose, but if George Foreman can do it...

Deluxe Paint hit a high on version III when it appeared in just about every software bundle sold with an A500 and became the standard for Amiga art. For animation, the program's Move requester was hard to beat and it had several powerful features, not the least of which was the Perspective tool. Things change, however, and when people started to clamour for HAM and even HAM8 support, Electronic Arts released version IV to a waiting world. The result was a mixed bag. Although some interesting features were added, the speed of DPaint's operation (in HAM and HAM8 modes at least) was so slow as to be unusable on anything less than a 68030.

In its favour, the package is one of the most easy to use, but modern Amiga style guides overtook it a couple of years ago and when the competition started to offer more features, the EA program's dominance of the low-end graphics market was at an end. As an upgrade, version V goes a fair way towards redressing the balance, and offers more than the missed opportunity that was DPaint IV.

Speed, however, is not one of the improvements in DPaint V. The documentation claims that it is faster in some operations, but the only real improvement I noticed was where proper Amiga gadgets and requesters have been used to replace the old-fashioned DPaint efforts. Choosing a font or using one of the many requesters is made a lot quicker and easier simply by making full use of keyboard short-cuts, and EA should be applauded for taking on board the standard approach. In other areas, especially when working with HAM and HAM8, the package seems to trundle along at much the same speed as its forebears. Using flood fill on a HAM8 image is still a good way to make time for a tea break. Another irritating foible they haven't cured is the habit of ignoring the area below the tool bar on the right-hand side of the image.

Loading and saving images is aided by a new embedded preview feature and the use of a faster Amiga file requester

In other areas, there have been some solid enhancements to the existing tools and features. The tool bar itself holds a few of these, and rather than the pointless extras people shove into packages, EA have included some seriously useful stuff.


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