EZ-ART PROFESSIONAL

BY RICHARD STOCKDALE AND BOB CHEWTER

EZ-ART PROFESSIONAL came about as a result of a comprehensive study of the top graphics packages on the ST and Amiga. It appeared that the programs which were most desirable to the public were those which offered thousands of colours on screen. Due to the architecture of the ST, these type of packages were only ever seen on the Amiga, although a few are starting to appear for the Falcon now. They were great for creating realistic effects but would eat up huge amounts of RAM and were cumbersome to use. When developing EZ-ART PROFESSIONAL, we decided to go 'back to basics'. The obsession with lots of colours has clouded everyone's judgement to such an extent that they have come to accept the fact that you cannot create a realistic looking picture in 16 colours. This is a myth when you consider that the average game title screen and backgrounds are done in 16 or 32 colours. With this in mind, we have created a graphics package which is very easy to use, yet produces realistic effects through the use of specially developed proprietary algorithms. We have dispensed with the limited size of the low resolution screen and given the user, perhaps the most comprehensive, yet simple to use, editing tools available on an ST. The program is icon driven and includes a built-in Help feature to guide the user as to the function of each and every icon. EZ-ART PROFESSIONAL is exactly what its name suggests, it is EASY to use and can generate PROFESSIONAL results. ART HAS NEVER BEEN SO 'EZ'! Here's a brief list of some of EZ-ART PROFESSIONAL's features.

• Fully supports the STE's extended 4096 colour palette.
• Easy conversion between standard Atari, EZ-ART Professional and EGA palette modes as well as custom written palettes for Sepias and Grays.
• Quantising and remapping are fully supported. Supports the independent loading and saving of palettes, although the palette in use is always saved with a file.
• Separate control of brightness so that you can make a colour a tone lighter or darker without having to fiddle around with RGB sliders.
• Over 20 different types of shapes can be created by EZ-ART Professional. These range from standard boxes and circles to arcs, discs and shaded polygons. EZ-Art's range editor allows pseudo ray traced effects to create realistic looking 3D objects.
• EZ-ART Professional's flexible zoom mode supports several different magnifications and smooth scrolling whilst in zoom mode. The zoom window always shows exactly where you are in relation to the full picture.
• Full implementation of keyboard shortcuts for most commonly used functions when the menu is not visible.
• Built-in STe 'emulation' for STFM users!
• Built-in Interlace emulation lets you see what an interlaced picture really looked like on the Amiga!
• 256 colour pseudo palette available for most operations.
• Irregular blocks may be 'carved' out of your picture. Carve out a block and leave its silhouette behind.
• Over 20 different effects may be applied to blocks. These include re-size, scale, remap, rotate, skew, shatter, soften, pixelate, outline and much more.
• EZ-ART Professional has extensive font support. A number of example fonts will be included on the distribution disks or you can create your own using FaST Club's Fontkit. Fonts can be used at a wide variety point size and numerous text styling attributes may be easily applied to any font.
• EZ-ART Professional has its own built-in Fill Designer which allows you to load, save, grab and edit both mono (2 colour) and 16 colour fill patterns. Naturally we have supplied a number of these with the package.
• There's a special picture preview mode which lets you view pictures which are larger than the standard screen size.
• Up to a maximum of ten workscreens are available to the user, subject to the size of pictures loaded and available memory. Extensive control is allowed over the size of these workscreens and they can be re-sized at any time or removed to free up more memory for other operations.
• EZ-ART Professional has almost twenty drawing tools and modes. These range from the commonly used brush, line and point tools to the less common but equally effective bezier curve, carve block, roller and tape measure. Yes, you can actually measure lines and shapes as you draw them in cases where accuracy is of paramount concern.
• As well as its own EZA format, EZ-ART Professional loads numerous other formats including NeoChrome, Degas (compressed and uncompressed), Crack Art, Tiny (TNY and TN1), Spectrum 512 (compressed and uncompressed) and IFF (including ILBM and HAM). The most useful of these are also supported for saving your pictures.

EZ-ART PROFESSIONAL comes on two double sided disks and has a comprehensive fully illustrated 60 page manual. The first disk comprises of the program and system files along with numerous pictures, fonts and fills. The second is filled with a multitude of pictures in standard IFF and HAM format, which you can load directly into the package and render to your own specifications.