{fh4000000Pro Artisan 24
{fb1000000The ProArtisan series from Clares has been going some years now, starting life as Artisan, then progressing to ProArtisan and now ProArtisan24. The previous packages, although very good, were not really up to editing photographs because of the limit of 256 colours (this wasn't ProArtisan's limit, it was the limit of the Archimedes computers). However, now that the RiscPC has arrived with its 24-bit palette (sometimes called "true-colour"), profess- ional photo retouching is possible, bringing Acorn computers further into the realm of professionals.

The package comes on three discs, the main disc containing the program, and some pictures, and two tutorial discs. Installation is simply a matter of running the program on the floppy, entering your name and address, and saving it to your hard disc. As the floppy disc is slow, I would recommend copying the tutorial's over too, as they are much more accessible there.
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{fb1800000EASE OF USE
{fb1000000After booting up the package, I found that it was one of those package you can just go into and play around for hours (which is one of the reasons why this article took so long to write ;-) ), rather than those you have to read the whole manual five times before you understand how to create a new canvas! Having said that, I recommend scanning through the manual at first, to get a feel for the package, and then using it as a reference when you are using it to make your own works of art.

Creating a new canvas is easy, you simply go to the "create" menu, and setup the options as you want them. I was very impressed by the memory icon, which shows how much RAM the picture will take up, and how much you have left.

However, being a reviewer, I decided that instead of doing what I would normally do, I'd do things that normal users would do; ie. Read the tutorial. The first few tutorials introduced me to what the package could do, and I was quite amazed at what seemed only a few clicks of the mouse could produce! I was soon progressing to filling in backgrounds of sprites with textures, making them look totally out of the ordinary.

{fb1800000ARTISTIC FLAIR
{fb1000000Many of you will know that I don't have much artistic flair (I can get a good idea of what an art package is like though), and I was very impressed at how much I could do, without having to say that it'd be better if a proper artist had done it. I do think that for various tools in the package, you need some sort of artistic flair though, if only to give it that human touch.

The pictures that can be produced are truly stunning. The illustrations on this page, although giving a good idea of what can be done, don't give the package justice at all; these pictures had to be cut down from 32,000 colours, 800 by 600 display to a tiny mode 15 graphic (256 cols).
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The palette selector itself is worthy of a mention too; it allows you to select from 32 defined palette types (ie. grey/ aqua/autumn etc.), and is very sophisticated, but easy to use.

{fb1800000GENERAL USE
{fb1000000I was rather surprised when the manual said that ProArt24 was best suited to computers fitted with 8Mb DRAM and 2Mb VRAM; hey, which computer package do you know that doesn't like working with masses of memory! Joking aside, I did find it a bit tight on memory on my 4Mb/1Mb RiscPC and I'm sure that other photo- retouching packages for Acorn machines aren't that hungry, so if you want to use this package, you'll need a substantial amount of RAM to do anything decent with it. This is why I was very surprised to find that this package didn't offer any kind of virtual memory facility.

At first I found the user interface slightly clumsy to use, but as time went by, I found I got more used to it, but I still sometimes got slightly mixed up when things didn't work!

Graphics of most types can be imported directly into ProArt- 24, which is very useful as I am increasingly having to load up JPEGs and TIFFs, and it cuts out the hassle of using ChangeFSI.
