Deluxe Paint

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Deluxe Paint

About dialog
Developer:	Dan Silva
Latest release:	5 / 1994
OS:	Amiga
Use:	bitmap graphics editor
Website:

Welcome screen dialog

Deluxe Paint (DPaint) is a bitmap graphics editor originally created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts (EA). The original version was created for the Commodore Amiga and was released in November 1985. It was eventually ported to other platforms, but only had killer app status on the Amiga.

1 History
2 Functionality
3 MS-DOS (PC) version
4 Trivia
5 See also

[edit] History

DPaint was the product of an in-house art development tool called Prism. As Silva added additional features to Prism, it was turned into a showcase product to coincide with the Amiga's debut in 1985. After release, it was quickly embraced by the Amiga community and became the defacto graphics (and later animation) editor for the platform. Amiga manufacturer Commodore International later commissioned EA to create version 4.5 AGA for bundling with the new AGA-chipset (A1200, A4000) capable Amigas. Version 5 was the final release after Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994.

With the development of Deluxe Paint, EA introduced the ILBM and ANIM file format standards for graphics. Although widely used on the Amiga, they never gained widespread acceptance on other platforms. The PC conversion was used by Lucasarts to make graphics for their adventure games such as Monkey Island.

Some minor legal controversy surrounded images created with early releases of Deluxe Paint. EA argued that they held the copyright on any image created with DPaint since they held the copyright to the tool itself. The courts determined, however, that they did not own the copyrights of works created with the program. If so, makers of compilers or other software tools could claim ownership of properties created with their products (and by extension, makers of pens and paper could claim copyrights on any books written with their tools). EA's case, while not groundbreaking by legal standards, was interesting nonetheless.

Interestingly, early versions of Deluxe Paint were available in both protected and non copy-protected versions, the latter retailing for a slightly higher price. This copy-protection was later dropped. Deluxe Paint was part of a series of products from the Electronic Arts Tools group -- later moved to the ICE (for Interactivity, Creativity, and Education) group -- which included such Amiga programs as Deluxe Music, Deluxe Video, and the Studio series of paint programs for the Macintosh.

[edit] Functionality

Unlike modern graphics editors, such as Adobe Photoshop, most Amiga graphics editors were heavily oriented towards the bitmapped and bitplaned display modes of the native Amiga chipset, and in Deluxe Paint this was the most prominent.

The Amiga's chipset only natively supports indexed colour, where a pixel's colour value does not carry any RGB hue information but instead is an index to a colour palette, which contains a limited number of RGB hues. A consequence of this is that changing a hue of a palette entry automatically changes all pixels of that colour in the image. Creative artists could use this to their advantage to create a semblance of animation by using cycling colours.

The final release of Deluxe Paint, version 5, had support for true 24-bit RGB images. However, using only the normal AGA native chipset, the 24-bit RGB colour was only held in computer memory, the on-screen image still appeared in indexed colour.

Deluxe Paint versions prior to 4 did not support the extended set of display modes, such as HAM (Hold And Modify) and Extra Halfbrite, which did not directly translate bitplane data into a colour index.

The heavy reliance on an indexed colour model allowed for a rather different way of working, not generally found on many popular paint programs since. The intimate linking of palette and image data made DPaint an excellent tool for creating bitmapped icons, animation and game graphics in the days before true colour images became commonplace.

For example, transparency was as simple as selecting a background colour index (a single right click on the palette GUI to change). Colours could be locked from editing by use of a stencil (a list of colour indexes whose pixels should not be altered in the image data.) And simple colour-cycling animations could be created using contiguous entries in the palette. It was also easy to change the hue and tone of a section of the image by altering the corresponding colours in the palette.

Brushes can be cut from the background by using the box, circle or freehand lasso selection tools. They can then be used in the same manner as any other brush or pen. This functionality is simpler to use than the "stamp" tool of Photoshop or Alpha Channels as provided in later programs.

Deluxe Paint was one of the first paint programs to support animbrushes. These are similar to The GIMP anim brushes or tubes in Paint Shop Pro.

[edit] MS-DOS (PC) version

The most successfully PC version was Deluxe Paint II Enhanced 2.0, which supports ZSoft's PC Paintbrush PCX image format file and, along with the CGA, EGA, MCGA and VGA IBM-compatible PC graphic cards, the Hercules, Tandy and Amstrad propietary video cards and the main of the first Super VGA video cards (manufacturer dependent) modes, enabling it to support up to 800×600 pixel screen resolution with 256 (from 262,144) colors and 1024×768 pixels with 16 colors.

The MS-DOS conversion conversion was carried by Brent Iverson and its enhanced features was by Steve Shaw.

Its sister product Deluxe Animator (only for 320×200 pixels and 256 colors) was widely used, especially in the videogame industry.

[edit] Trivia

The main character of computer game series Monkey Island, Guybrush Threepwood, derives his first name from Deluxe Paint: When the programmers saved the (until then unnamed) character's sprites under the file name of "guy", DP would automatically add the extension ".brush", thus creating "Guy.brush".^{[citation needed]}