DIGI-PAINT Reviewed by Graeme Whittle.  Digi-paint first came to my attention as an unfinished public domain program. I fiddled around with it for a while until it gurued my machine a few times and promptly gave it up as a bad joke. It's difficult to believe that NewTek's current release of Digi-Paint is in any way related to the earlier version, it is so much better. With Digi-Paint NewTek have come to grips with the advantages and limitations of the Amiga's hold and modify mode and have produced software which is powerful and easy to use. Digi-Paint is also the perfect compliment to their other excellent program Digi-View.  HOLD AND MODIFY  So what are the advantages and limitations of hold and modify? The really great thing is that in HAM mode you can have all 4096 of the Amiga's colours on screen at one time. The drawback is that an effect called "fringing" occurs at the edge of any given area of colour. Digi-Paint is attractively packaged and comes with a brief but adequate manual. It is not copy protected but after booting the user is asked for a password from the manual. I find this an acceptable means of protection since whilst preventing a degree of piracy it also allows the legitimate user to make a backup or install the program on a hard disk. Once in you are presented with a black screen which has a rather unusual (for the amiga anyway) menu strip across the bottom. Oddly the menus are in medium resolution while the working area can be in either lo-res or interlace. On the left of the menu strip is a is a pallette of sixteen colours, these colours can be user defined and differ from the other colours in that when used there is none of the "fringing" effect described earlier. This is a tremendous advantage especially when introducing parts of a picture which require clarity such as text.  TOOLBOX  In the centre of the tool box are three squares with portions of the 4096 colour pallette and to their immediate right are three calibrated colour sliders. Brush colours can be picked either by selecting from the 4096 colour pallette, by adjusting the sliders, by using the sixteen colour pallette or by choosing "pick" from the menu and selecting from the screen. To the right of the pallette is the brush and tool selection area. There are eleven different brushes as well as tools for defining squares, rectangles, circles and ellipses. One rather irritating limitation of the circle tool is that the edge of the picture plane limits the edge of the circle. You just can not draw a circle or ellipse larger than the screen. Also included in the toolbox is a magnification tool and "scissors" for clipping parts of the picture. The clip function is very flexible, although this is not immediately apparent because the full instructions on its use are not in the manual but are included in a loose sheet which comes with the package.  MODES  Digi-paint has twelve different drawing modes. It is these modes which give this program its real power, I shall deal with them one by one. 1> Solid This mode is exactly that, solid. When used the selected brush paints the selected colour without change. 2> Blend Blend averages the R.G.B. values of the pixels on the screen with those of the currently selected colour. The effects obtainable are not unlike smoked glass or sheer fabric. 3> Tint The tint mode is similar to blend, only this time the brush colour is dominant. What you get is an effect much like a watercolour wash, very nice. 4> Light Tint Like tint but much more subtle. 5> Minimum This mode picks the lower of each RGB value between the paint and the screen. The results are usually wildly unpredictable and some experimentation is recommended. 6> Maximum Picks the higher of the RGB values, once again experimentation is necessary. 7> Add Adds the RGB values of the paint and screen together. Often the result will be white but some very pleasing effects can be obtained with this mode 8> Subtract Subtracts paint and screen values. Black is often the result but once again pleasing effects are possible. 9> Xor Pronounced exor this mode acts on the RGB values as binary numbers. Generally speaking depending on the selected colour Xor produces a negative image. 10> And This mode pushes the screen colour in the direction of the brush colour. It is possible (at least according to the manual) to produce colour separations for printing applications in this mode. It is especially useful for removing unwanted colours and for harmonizing jarring images. 11> Or The last of the logical functions, usually adds the brush colour to the image or lightens it. Once again somewhat unpredictable. 12>Shading Shading is perhaps the most powerful feature of Digi-Paint. When painting with this function the brush colour is gradually diffused towards the edges into the background colour. In this mode there a slider for adjusting the amount of dither as well as two gadgets for changing the position of the selected colours maximum density. When used with the fill gadget on it is possible to create spheres and beautifully graded backgrounds and skies.  GADGETS  The menu strip also contains a number of gadgets. Some of which amiga users will recognize immediately, others which are unique to Digi-Paint. PickColour and CopyColour are used for assigning colours to and from the the sixteen colour pallette. Again repeats the last move. This is very useful for increasing the depth of a tint especially light tints. The fill gadget when activated fills any shapes drawn on the screen in the currently selected mode. It does not work like the DPaint fill function, this is not a disadvantage however as quite complex shapes can be drawn and filled. There are also a number of functions available through pull down menus. You can soften the image, split the image, change the size of the image and flip the image. You can not rotate the picture or custom brush through 90 degrees and if anybody out there has a program which enables this to be done with a Ham image please let me know.  SPARE SCREEN  Like Deluxe Paint, Digi-Paint allows you to put an image on to a spare screen and work on two pictures at the same time. The amazing thing about Digi-Paints spare is its ability to be merged into the on screen picture. This enables global changes to be made one of the logical functions such as Xor, copy it to the spare screen then reload the original image and merge the two pictures. If the pictures are merged in more subtle modes such as blend or tint very beautiful and surprising results can be achieved. There is also a rub through function which when used eats away the pixels revealing the spare screen. When the spare and rub through are used together the results can be stunning and these modes alone make Digi-Paint worth the money. Digi-Paint is an excellent addition to the already substantial range of Amiga paint software. The only other HAM paint package that I am aware of is Prism which is just not in the same league. I found Digi- Paint to be very stable (no gurus) and while there are a few shortcomings they are outweighed by the many excellent features of this program. It is not for those interested in prescision drawing but is more for the user interested in "painterly" effects and the reworking of digitized images. It is my belief that NewTek have on their staff some of the finest designers of software for the Amiga around and they are fully deserving of your support, At around $160.00 Digi- Paint is good value.  END OF DIGIVIEW.RVW