| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ CREATION GRAPHIQUE ★ THE IMAGE SYSTEM ★ |
At first sight this one seems a bit of an oddity - a new art package offering relatively few of the facilities of other programs. Drawing aids are confined to Plot, Line, Rectangle and an unusual Circle/Ellipse-producing method whereby the figure is drawn inside a chosen square or rectangle.
There is a fairly speedy and efficient Fill but if there is a leakage it can only be stopped, not aborted, so it needs to be used with great care. It is possible to re-design Textures, for which purpose you must leave a 16 x 32 pixel area free in the top left-hand corner of the screen. However, these have the limitation that they may only be used to fill areas of a colour different to any of those used in the texture. Add to this the fact that there is no facility for the addition of text and only Mode 0 is available and you could write this one off. Persist though, and you'll discover that while it may not be the world's greatest drawing program, it has enough interesting and ambitious features to keep you occupied for many a happy hour. And there are possibilities for producing some very effective screen displays. If you can ignore a certain amount of confusion between the Tab and Escape keys, the manual explains clearly what can be done with the Image System. A step-by-step exercise introduces many of the commands available and how they can be used to create special effects. The principle on which the program is based is the saving of defined areas of the screen as separate pictures, which can subsequently be recalled, re-coloured and manipulated in a variety of ways. Suppose that you draw a leaf in four colours and save it as Picture 1. You can then clear the screen, change all four colours to blue and print it on the screen as a blue silhouette of the original. Changing the colours back to those in the first drawing and making the background transparent, you can put the leaf back on the screen, offset slightly from the blue shape to give the effect of a shadow behind it. Alternatively, your picture can be Moved, Rotated, Reduced, Enlarged, Stretched or Compressed in either direction, or even Twisted before being placed on the screen. And, since your one original drawing can be used an unlimited number of times in a variety of shapes and colours, you can quickly fill the screen. When a picture is altered in shape or size, several pixel-size holes can appear in the resulting image, and depending on the style of design it may be necessary to do some repair work to produce a satisfactory result. Up to 255 pictures of at least 2x2 pixels may be stored in the memory - an indicator bar shows how much has been used. As the available memory dwindles, some or all of the previously saved pictures may be Erased. However, since the program crashed on several occasions after erasing pictures, I found a safer method was to save the screen, reload the Image System then reload the screen thereby freeing all the memory for further use. This is tedious, but better than losing several hours work. Pictures stored in memory may also be saved as a separate file. These can be re-loaded and used to add previously drawn elements to a new picture, creating startling or amusing effects. I did find it necessary to make a separate note of picture details I had saved, and the colours in which they were drawn. A note book is handy for listing file names, since there is no built-in catalog option and attempts to load an incorrectly named screen or picture file can return you to Basic. A menu bar at the foot of the screen gives details of the colour palette available, in which any of the 27 Mode 0 colours can be substituted for an existing colour. An arrow points to the current drawing colour, selected with 1-8 and SHIFT/1-8. A lower colour band shows the colour currently chosen for parts of a picture originally drawn in the colour immediately above it, and shows a 'T' on those colours chosen to be transparent when placing a picture on the screen. A message area gives information regarding current commands in use, and displays the X and Y coordinates of the cursor. A useful optional zoom window at the right-hand end of the menu bar enables accurate plotting and facilitates texture design. The whole bar may be moved to the top of the screen or removed altogether. The manual also has some interesting ideas regarding drawing techniques and the use of finished pictures as a basis for photography. Other suggested applications are for needlework (this is a uni-sex program), screen-printing, using pictures in your own programs and use of the printer dump routine. The program does lack much of the sophistication of the previous utilities if you are looking for a straightforward drawing tool, and I would certainly advise care with the Fill and Erase Picture commands. But I found it very-easy to use and it could provide a lot of fun for the less serious user who wants to create colourful designs quickly. It has an addictive quality which I find hard to resist. ACU #8611 |
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