@2{Review of Digital Illusions (Shareware version) @3 }Reviewed by Andrew Smith @4 It's very rare to find a really good image processor in the P.D. It's even rarer still to find one that is written in AMOS, which is exactly what this program was written in. I can now imagine all the sneers from the non-AMOS fans who quite wrongly will say "It's written in AMOS so it'll be slow with an appalling user interface". They couldn't be further from the truth. Upon loading, perceptive users will notice a lean towards the user interface of Art Department professional, the way in which it looks, but not how its laid out. The first thing I noticed was the Image Operators panel featuring 12 buttons. A fair few operators for a P.D. Image Processor I thought. Actually, there are a lot more operators for you to use. The raised bar where it says 'Image Operators' is actually a clickable gadget, although this is not immediately obvious. Clicking here will reveal another set of operators. There are 27 different operators in all, and to be perfectly honest there are some really good effects. @4 The most dramatic effect (and the best one in my opinion) is the Spiral operator. It's really an operator that makes your picture look like it's being sucked down a plug-hole. Firstly you have to click the LOAD gadget to load an IFF picture. Next, your ready to process your picture. Upon clicking on the Spiral operator, you are presented with a requester with 5 gadgets at the bottom and a slide bar in the middle. It is here where you set your 'Spiral Twist'. Basically, the higher the setting the more dramatic the effect. When you've made your setting, click the Execute button (Most of the operators use this same requester). I hope your a patient lot because it really does take a long while to process the image. When complete you have to click the 'GO!' gadget to display the picture. There is another wait here while it is 'Computing New Palette', or so it says. Afterwards, your processed image is displayed on the screen. Perhaps the worst operator is splatter. What it does is remove pixels from your image at random and it makes the final image look tacky. This is the only poor effect but the others are really quite superb although they do take a while to process. Of course when you've processed your picture, you'll want to save it. @4To do this you click on the SAVE gadget. When the file requester appears, you should give your new image a filename and click OK. Your file will be saved out as a standard IFF picture file. Considering the author decided to use AMOS to write his package, I cannot understand why he didn't include the option to load and save images as AMOS packed pictures. The reason why this would be useful is twofold: @3 * Packed Pictures are a lot smaller than their IFF equivalents and therefor less disk space is used. * There would be no need to convert images from IFF format to ABK format. AMOS programmers could load their newly processed images directly into a memory bank. @4 In fact, you can only load and save IFF files. I think more work is needed here. At the very least it should support IFF, ABK, PCX and GIF picture formats as most image processors include the facility to load pictures from other platforms. @4What else does Digital Illusions offer? Well you can dither your picture. Unfortunately you only have two modes of dither i.e. none or Floyd Steinberg, but do you really need other methods of dithering? You can use the different screen resolutions of your Amiga. Lowres and Hires screen modes are supported and they can be interlaced if you so wish. The maximum number of colours you can use is 4096 which is HAM mode (Hold And Modify) which can only be used in Lowres, as most people know. Because the package is written in AMOS, there is no support for the new AGA screen modes or even the older ECS chipset that was introduced with the A500+ . AGA support WILL be included in the next version of Digital Illusions but the program is being recoded in C (Get a move on with that AGA extension Europress! We cannot afford to have AMOS programmers moving to other languages!). Perhaps the best part about this program is the animation. It's quite difficult for the beginner to get to grips with so he/she should have a good read of the on-disk documentation. But if you keep trying, then some really good looking results will be your reward. With the spiral operator (that I mentioned before) and the animation combined, you can make an animation that sucks the picture into the centre of the screen. I myself have tried this and it looks stunning! This feature is so good you can easily spend hours creating strange anims, it is so much good fun! @4When it comes to saving your animation, it will not be saved as a standard IFF ANIM file. Instead, each frame of the animation will be saved out as a separate IFF picture. Each filename of the animation will look something like this: @3 anim001 anim002 anim003 @4 Luckily, Deluxe Paint can load an animation like this. (Look out for a tutorial on this sort of thing soon) As everybody owns DPaint, there shouldn't be too much hassle in loading your animation. Okay then, I've waffled on long enough about its features, but how well does it perform? As expected, image processing is no quick business, be prepared to sit around doing nothing for great lengths of time. Most of the operators yield great results if you're prepared to experiment. The requesters in the program are very good, especially the palette requester, it is hard to tell the program was written in AMOS - until you press Left-Amiga and A. If you are interested in animation then a hard disk is essential as the animations are played directly from hard disk, this is because the programmer hasn't supported IFF animations. @4This is not really his fault as AMOS doesn't support IFF animations either. This does mean, however, that your animations can be as big as disk space allows. According to the author, this program requires 1 meg of memory, but he recommends 2 megs. Personally I think this is unrealistic as the program is a real memory-hog when it comes to animating. Personally, I recommend that you have at least 4 megs to use the animation feature comfortably. Of course if you don't intend to create anims then you may be able to get away with just 1 meg, but don't expect to process a 320*512 HAM image using one of the more complicated operators. To sum up, Digital Illusions is definitely one of the better image processors out there and is definitely worth a look. The operators give good results and the user-interface is quite good, although no-where near as good as one that runs under Intuition. The lack of ABK support is a major omission but the other missing formats such as PCX, GIF, BMP, TIFF etc. is less serious. Be prepared to wait, it's not the fastest image program around. The lack of AGA is also dissapointing, but again it's not the fault of the author. The animation however is nothing short of superb. My advice is, get it! @1 Program rating : 85% ... Price : $15 ... Author : Tonny Espeset Address : Postboks 183, 1301 Sandvika, Norway.