USER NOTES: BUTCHER by Barry Ekstrand (PLINK: BARRYX) (GEnie: B.Ekstrand) Every once in a while an Amiga product will come out that is unquestionably great. Deluxe Paint was such a product; it probably sold more Amigas than all of Commodore's ads. Other products that come to mind are the Digi-View video digitizer and the first Cinemaware program, Defender Of The Crown. Products that fall into my "Great Category" are any that allow the easy use of the Amiga's capabilities (Deluxe Paint, Digi-View), or are simply put together so well that everyone has to have it (Defender Of The Crown). It is always enjoyable to see such a product come out; to me, it is doubly so when the company that puts it out is new or small. We tend to expect great things from Electronic Arts and other "large" companies, so it is refreshing to be reminded that quality is not limited to the biggies only. I have been using Butcher from Eagle Tree Software and can honestly say that, in my opinion, this is the best graphics software to come out since Deluxe Paint. What Butcher Is --------------- Butcher is not a stand-alone paint program, although it does have some simple painting capabilities for working on existing pictures. The program really is a collection of IFF graphics conversion utilities. Butcher gives the ability to manipulate pictures in many ways, and it makes changes FAST. Butcher is very user-friendly, running from the Workbench environment or from CLI, whichever you choose. The routines are chosen by mouse/menu operations. Many of the choices in the menus have keyboard equivalents. The package that I received contained the Butcher disk, a manual, and a registration card, all packaged together neatly. The manual, while not flashy, is one of the best I have ever seen. Eagle Tree has done a very good job of documenting their product. Besides covering the program extremely well, the manual also contains an appendix explaining how the Amiga bitmapped displays work, as well as a glossary of terms. The Menus: An Overview ---------------------- Butcher contains five menus to choose from: the Project Menu, the Tools Menu, the Process Menu, the Convert Menu, and the Slice Menu. The Project Menu contains such operations as loading or saving files to disk, printing, and quitting. The Tools Menu contains Undo, Draw, Reverse, and Flip operations. These operations are self-explanatory: Undo undoes many of Butcher's operations; Draw contains the simple drawing tools; Reverse reverses the screen horizontally; and Flip flips the screen upside down. The Tools Menu also contains palette controls: you can make up to three separate palettes and choose which one you want to use (switching back and forth if you want). The Make Palette operation contains a variety of tools for manipulating the palette such as Copy, Spread, Exchange, and Map. The Process Menu contains image processing operations. These operations are quite interesting and useful. The first is Edge, which will outline the edges of your picture. Full control is given to you: you choose whether the outline will be in color or in the darkest or lightest color on the palette. You also choose whether you want to Enhance, which outlines all contours on the picture, or Map, which outlines the edges on a blank background. The second image processing operation contained in the Process Menu is Filter. This operation is great for anyone that uses digitized pictures. What it does is filter out unwanted pixels and replace them with a neighboring color. For example, if Digi-View is used to digitize a photo that contains blue sky, you will find that the resulting image will have various colored pixels in the sky besides blue. The Filter operation makes it simple to get rid of unwanted stray colors. It works very well. The Process Menu also contains Mosaic, Slice Plane, and Density Slice operations. Mosaic will create a new picture using blocks of colors from the original picture. It can create interesting variations of the original picture. Slice Plane lets you remove any of the bit-planes from the picture. With it you can examine each bit-plane or, by removing selected bit-planes, create yet another interesting effect. The Density Slice is an operation that lets you deal with the palette as a scale of color intensities, allowing you to adjust the intensity scale as you see fit. Using Density Slice on pictures with low contrast can allow you to highlight features and thus make them more prominent. The next menu is the Convert Menu, which contains some VERY useful operations. The first operation choices are Histogram and Quick Merge. Histogram counts the number of pixels of each color from the palette and displays the relative totals in a bar chart for you. You can perform some valuable operations in Histogram, such as Merge, Exchange, Sort, Blend and Use. The Merge operation allows you to take the pixels of one color and have them merged into another color on the palette. Exchange rewrites the pixels of one color into the position of another, and vice versa. Both colors are also exchanged, so the picture itself appears unchanged. It simply lets you exchange palette positions without altering the picture. Sort will do as the name implies: sort the colors by number of pixels. Sort actually rewrites the pixels so that their counts are in descending order, starting with color number three (colors one and two are not affected). Blend performs an operation similar to Merge, except the two colors are blended based on their colors and their relative pixel counts. Use will give you the usage of a color in both number of pixels and in percent of total pixels. Quick Merge is a modified version of Histogram. The main difference between the two is that when Histogram first opens, it takes a few seconds to count each pixel in the picture. Quick Merge does a fast sample of the picture instead. This means the Quick Merge count is not really accurate, but that you get to the tools of Histogram faster. The next choice, Auto Merge, allows you to specify the maximum number of colors for the picture. It will then merge, blend, and sort colors until no more than the specified maximum is used. Auto Chop allows you to specify a lesser number of bit-planes for the picture than are currently used. It then does an Auto Merge operation to remove colors so it can reduce the number of bit-planes. Change Depth allows you to change the number of bit-planes used with no regard for the information in the discarded bit-planes. The last two Convert Menu choices, Lo-Res to HAM and HAM to Lo-Res will convert low resolution and HAM pictures to one another. The last menu is the Slice Menu. The operations in this menu allow you convert the picture to any resolution. This is done by changing the horizontal resolution (320 pixels to 640 pixels or vice versa) or the vertical resolution (200 pixels to 400 pixels or vice versa) or both. Thus, you can have any combination to form all resolutions: Lo-Res (320 X 200), Med-Res (640 X 200), Interlace (320 X 400), or Hi-Res (640 X 400). Using Butcher ------------- Okay, I've given you a pretty good description of the menu choices, and I've told you that I think very highly of the program. Now its time to explain why I feel that way. The first use that I found for Butcher was using the Merge command in the Histogram / Quick Merge operations (Convert Menu). I had used Grabbit to "capture" a screen of the Boing ball, which I wanted to use as a brush in another picture. Unfortunately, although the Boing ball only uses three colors (red, white, and a pink), Grabbit used all 32 palette positions. What I ended up with was a palette that had about 12 positions of red and 12 of white and 4 of pink, the rest being grey and purple. If I was to have a useful brush I needed to combine the like colors into one palette position. I did this by hand in DPaint prior to getting Butcher and it took me about 2.5 hours (!) as I had to literally redraw nearly every pixel. After getting Butcher I re-did the process, this time using Merge. It took me a grand total of 8 minutes (!!). About half of that 8 minutes was looking at the manual before I did anything. I was impressed, to say the least. If a person does any work of this type at all I think Merge by itself makes Butcher well worth the price. Some of the graphics work I do is in converting pictures to Med-Res so that it can be used in Deluxe Print. Both Deluxe Paint and Deluxe Paint II have tools to double the horizontal and vertical resolution of a brush, so I can take a Lo-Res brush to Med-Res or Hi-Res in DPaint. I cannot, however, take a Hi-Res brush down to Med-Res or Lo-Res. Furthermore, DPaint will do this on brushes only, and the brushes cannot be too large. Butcher will go any direction on full screens. This means that I can take my picture with my desired brush and use Butcher to fix the palette as needed and correct the resolution, then take the resulting picture into DPaint where all I have to do is pick up my brush and save. The bottom line is that Butcher allows me to use almost any IFF picture as a source and it speeds up the process of conversion. The one resolution Butcher 1.0 does not handle properly is the loading of 320 X 400 interlaced pictures. These screens load only the top half of the image and stretch it over the whole screen in low-res mode. I found some other interesting uses for Butcher. By using the Map feature of the Edge operation (Process Menu) with the pen set for dark, I found I could create good monochrome renditions of color drawings. This allows you to create very good Deluxe Print clip art very easily. The other image processing tools contained in Butcher give you a nearly infinite range of effects for your art; the potential is awesome. The Final Upshot ---------------- Every software package usually has a negative side to it. I have one complaint about Butcher and one recommendation for an update, but I want you to understand that I am stretching to find anything to complain about. My only complaint about Butcher is that every so often, maybe once every ten or twenty times, it takes an extremely long time to save a picture to disk. This "long time" has been up to 2.5 minutes. During this time the disk drive is active, with red light and gronking noises. There was not any problem with the saved file, it was always perfectly intact. Again, the slow save occurred only a small percentage of the time, so I was not able to determine any particular reason for it. My one recommendation to Eagle Tree is to add the ability to work with brushes to the program in a future update. I did, in fact, speak to Jerrell Nickerson, the author of the program, and he indicated that there is a good chance that the program will be updated to include this and other suggestions from users around the country. The other suggestions come from people with specialized uses for their graphics; Jerrell told me that he has found people using their Amiga graphics in ways he never imagined. Apparently Eagle Tree is going to try to add as many of the suggestions as is feasible. One of the benefits of being a "small" company is that they can react to customer suggestions very quickly. Overall, as I have already stated, I have found Butcher to be an extremely useful program. After looking at the price ($37.00), you may feel as I do: that this is the bargain of the year. I recommend Butcher to anyone that does any graphics work at all on their Amiga. Butcher, $37.00 Eagle Tree Software P.O. Box 164 Hopewell, VA 23860 (804) 452-0623