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By Colin Fisher-McAllum

Every so often there is a new piece of software announced that we eagerly read the previews for, then sit back and wait... and wait... and wait... for the program to be released. Positive Image is one of these packages. I have read, and even written, the news items about PI for a number of months and have been waiting patiently for it's release. Well, it's here, has it been worth the wait?

Positive Image is, it says on the box, a "24-bit Professional Image Processing and Retouching for any Atari ST, STe, TT or Falcon". Programmed by Stephen Found and distributed in the UK by Floppyshop, PI is a huge package. I don't mean that it is huge in a 10-HD-disk-PC sense, (in fact the whole thing is not much over a megabyte) but huge in a range of features sense. For this reason I have decided to split the review into two parts. Part one will cover the package, it's installation and the basic functions. In part two I will go into more depth testing the processing and retouching power.

The first thing in Positive Image's favour is it's packaging. It has a moulded plastic case, of the type that story book cassette tapes come in, but this is moulded to hold the two DD master disks in one side and the A5 manual in the other. This cover image is on the exterior making it an attractive as well as a practical package. The plastic comb bound manual, (so it can lay flat on the desk when open) is well written with all the tools and options described in an easy to understand manner. Some operations are more convoluted than others and this is reflected with some options having just a line or two and others having a page or more dedicated to them. There is even a 21 page glossary of over 250 words and phrases that are used within the manual. I was surprised there was no index, however I later found that the Help key calls a dialog containing an alphabetical listing together with relevant page numbers. Finally the manual has a description of various image file formats and a section on troubleshooting.

Installing the program could not be easier, you must first run a program on the master disk that will initialise the programs with your personal information and then you copy the contents of the two disks to a folder on your hard drive. Having said that, I must point out that you can run Positive Image on a floppy disk system, even a with only one drive, but a hard drive is recommended. The program is memory intensive, therefore a minimum of 1Mb RAM is required. Obviously I cannot try them all, but PI is said to run on any display medium from a TV to a MultiSync monitor including the SM range of mono monitors. All the usual software and hardware screen enhancers are said to be compatible as well as the most popular graphics cards.

There are two versions of the program, the standard one and an 030 enhanced one, obviously you run the one that is suitable to your system. There is only one dialog to call to set your personal preferences. Two of the options help Positive Image run efficiently in a multi-tasking environment. I found PI to be very stable running under MagiC 4. Disabling background redraws on a single-tasking system speeds things up if you have multiple windows open. The graphics mode should be set according to your system and the memory management will need to be set by those with TT or fast RAM. The final option, Image Swap File, is the most interesting. PI has it's own "Virtual Memory" feature built in. It's not as fast as the 030 dedicated VM program, Outside, but it is available to all machines with a hard drive. The built in system is even usable in conjunction with Outside. Basically, this option lets you define a folder on your hard drive where PI can store information it would normally store in RAM. There is an option I would like to see added here; the chance of defining a default image path.

Before I run through the image formats that Positive Image can handle let me say that the biggest disappointment I had was when I found it couldn't load and save in *.GIF format. In these days of web site production, GIFs are prevalent. See "GIF us a reason" where Steve Delaney of Floppyshop sheds some light on this. There is a nuisance value to the lack of GIF support, however as in the past I had to use Imagecopy to interlace GIFs, I now convert the image format at the same time.

Take a deep breath, here are the supported import formats taken direct from the press release: AIM, Degas, Windows and OS/2 Bitmap, EZ-Art Pro, IFF (including Deluxe Paint ST, standard HAM, high res HAM, HAM6, HAM8, HAM12 and 24-bit HAM), IMG (including HyperPaint X-IMG and conventional X-IMG), InShape, Imagelab, JPEG, MTV Raytrace, NeoChrome, PC Paintbrush, Photochrome, Portable Network Graphic (PNG), Prism Paint, True Paint, Spectrum 512 (both 50hz and 60hz pictures), TrueVision Targa, TIFF v6 (including CCITT fax and JPEG support) and Tiny.

You want to save a file? Well one of these should suit you: TIFF, BMP, JPG, PNG, TGA, XIMG, EZA, P?1, P?3 and NEO

From two colour to true colour [mono to 24-bit] Positive image can handle it all. The conversion from one type to another is astoundingly fast and useful. Load a mono picture, convert it to true colour and edit, it's that simple to colour in piece of clipart. There are other advantages, take the two images to the left.
The bottom image was converted to greyscale and the top one was left in mono before being reduced to 12% of the original size. CAB does not display images too well in all resolutions, but if you view them in a graphics utility you will see the greyscale image is less harsh and has more depth. To use some of the editing tools you will need to convert an image to either geryscale or true colour, you can, of course, convert back after you have completed the editing.

Blocks, (cut, copy and paste) are handled via the Atari Clipboard. It's worth mentioning that if you intend to copy large blocks, and your C dirve (the usual path for the CLIPBRD folder) is tight on space, it's worth using one of the Clipboard CPXs to route it to another partition. Each block is saved in a special file and can be reloaded at any time, however they all appear in PI's clipboard loader with the name of the graphic it was copied from. It is possible to have many clips with the same name, so it's worth making a note of the clips as you take them, they are displayed in order.

All the tools are available from a toolbar. The top six icons remain the same and the bottom nine change to give access to the functions relevant to the selected mode.
Pixel Tools: where you can effect all the pixels in an image or a selected block area. One of the options is to create a Sterogram!
Filter Tools: the filtered images or blocks can be output to separate windows or direct to your working image.
Geometric Tools: is a fancy name for resizing or manipulating the image, including control point and object warping.
Block Tools: blocks can be rectangular, elliptical or irregular shape. There is a magic wand for auto-tracing areas of the same colour.
Text Tools: Positive Image supports GDOS and the replacement font handlers like NVDI, so you can use your favourite vector fonts.
Retouch Tools: there are all the usual picture editing tools here. Holding the control key while selecting some of the icons toggles it's mode.
Blur becomes Sharpen and Dodge becomes Burn. OK, I had to look up the last two... Dodge = lighten and Burn = darken.

The printer support appears to be quite extensive. Positive Image can print with or without GDOS loaded. The advantage of this is that you may be able to use a printer that is not supported directly by PI if you have a GDOS driver for it. The size, brightness and resolution of the printed image can be set as can the position on the page. Printing position is limited to Top/Centre/Bottom Left/Centre/Right. This is not a problem for me as I tend to use a DTP package for final layout if the image is needed as part of a document. The quality of the output to my Hewlett Packard DJ560c was excellent.

I have only had Positive Image for a week now, [a good reason for splitting the review as it gives time to fully test the processing options before part two is published, FFF] however, before I close part one I had better make some mention of PI's processing ability. As a small example you will see below three pictures of Terri Hatcher [a personal favourite of Colin's, FFF]. The first is the original, in the second she has been turned into a redhead and the third is a greyscale of the second picture. The changes were simple to do and took only seconds to complete.

Finally, in case you can't wait for the final part of the review and wonder what I think of Positive Image, I can tell you that I have already told Floppyshop that I do not want to return the review copy. So far PI has coped with everything I have thrown at it. Sometimes a little slowly, but the results are excellent. I'm now off to pick my pixels, correct my contrast and master the art of masking...

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