{fh21000ffPhotodesk

{fb1886600     MONTAGE MODE

{fb1000000In this mode, a whole set of different tools appears on the toolbar, and these give you control over a wealth of cutting and pasting facilities and you'll find most of what you might need here somewhere.

You can hold lots images at once, as long as there's enough room on the disc you are using for virtual memory, and can cut and paste between them as easily as within one image.

The sort of thing that it's really good at is cutting out a face from one picture and pasting into another. Then telling it to make a mask from the last operation. You can now apply Illustration mode effects inside or outside the mask until the face matches the background in terms of contrast, sharpness, bright- ness, graininess etc.

Operations in both modes are fast when the whole of the image happens to fit into real memory. When making sweeping changes to images much larger than physical memory there are some delays, but it's still fast enough that this doesn't become a problem.


{fb1886600  IMPORT AND EXPORT
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{fb1000000It accepts TIFF, GIF, IMG, JPEG(JFIF), PBM, CLEAR, PhotoCD and DRAW files. It ignores the aspect ratio of sprite files, so if you've got a mode 12 or 15 sprite it will appear at half height, but its easy to scale it up. Photo CD images can be imported at six different resolutions.

Photodesk accepts OLE calls from Impression Style and Publisher for any bit-mapped graphic (e.g. TIFF image), and can grab an image directly from a scanner with a TWAIN interface.

You can use a pressure sensitive penpad graphics tablet instead of a mouse.

It saves 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit sprites, and 24-bit CLEAR, TIFF and JPEG files. You can save an image as four 8-bit true-colour sprites, one for each of the CMYK colour layers.

Photodesk has special techniques for printing which produce higher quality reproduction than normal, printing directly from the 24-bit image. Best results are achieved when used with Computer Concepts Turbo Driver. The depth of colour and vibrancy which can be achieved is wonderful.


{fb1886600   NOT QUITE PERFECT

{fb1000000A program of this complexity is rarely free from glitches of one sort or another, but most of the ones I noticed were quite minor.

One major problem area, in this version (v1.21) is the poor handling of disc full situations in the virtual memory. Given the size of the image files that this program happily handles, this is likely to be a problem encountered by many users and the program should fail more gracefully.


{fb1886600           OVERALL

{fb1000000Anyone with any aspirations to professional graphic mani- pulation on an Archimedes MUST get this package.

On a professional setup, with a Risc PC, high-resolution monitor, big discs, lots of memory, a pen pad, and a BJC-800 with Turbo Driver, I would imagine that this package could take on the world.
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{fb10000ffProduct:{fb1000000 Photodesk
{fb1000000Price: {fb1000000199.69
{fb1000000Availability:{fb1000000 All Acorn 32-bit computers with at least 4Mb and RISC OS 3.10+
{fb10000ffContact:{fb1000000 Spacetech (0305) 822753

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