Path: menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: barrett@cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Imagemaster version 9.21 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Date: 19 Jan 1993 16:13:30 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 380 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1jh9baINNa54@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: barrett@cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: graphics, image processing, morph, paint, 24-bit, commercial PRODUCT NAME Imagemaster version 9.21 BRIEF DESCRIPTION Imagemaster is an image-processing program with hundreds of capabilities and special effects, including the ever-popular morphing. It supports ARexx and many image file formats. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Black Belt Systems Address: 398 Johnson Road Glasgow, Montana, 59230 USA Telephone: (800) 852-6442 (Sales) (406) 367-5509 (Tech Support) BBS: (406) 367-2227 E-mail: blackbelt@cup.portal.com LIST PRICE $249.95 (US). I received my copy for free directly from Black Belt. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE The box states that Imagemaster runs on the Amiga 500, 2000, and 3000 series computers. I am fairly sure it runs on the new AGA Amigas as well (A1200, A4000). Image processing uses a lot of RAM. Imagemaster requires at least 4 megabytes. Also, image processing is computationally intensive. An accelerated Amiga is recommended by the manufacturer. SOFTWARE Imagemaster is AmigaOS 2.0 compatible. I did not test it under AmigaOS 1.3. COPY PROTECTION None. The program installs very easily on a hard drive, thanks to an excellent installation program. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000T (25 MHz 68030 + 68882), 8 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM, Quantum 200 MB hard drive, AmigaOS 2.1. OVERVIEW Before I begin, I want to say that I have very little experience with image processing. Imagemaster is the first such product I have used. On the other hand, I am a very experienced Amiga user and professional programmer, and I enjoy playing with graphics as a hobby (who doesn't?), so I think my review can serve a useful purpose. If you are a graphics professional who is trying to decide between several Amiga image processing programs, this review will not help you compare their features and power. However, if you want to have some fun with graphic processing and do some real work too, this review should help you to understand what Imagemaster is all about. Imagemaster is a 24-bit image processing program. This means that it stores the images internally using 24 bits per pixel. However, your Amiga does not need 24-bit hardware in order to use Imagemaster, because the program can display an approximation of the the image using HAM mode. To use Imagemaster, you load a graphics file (often created by another program, such as a digitizing or paint program) and then alter it. Imagemaster can be used for simple "touch up" operations as well as very complex transformations of the image. Imagemaster is a HUGE program, both in actual size (the executable program is 1.3 megabytes) and capabilities. It has so many different image processing operations that if I typed in all their names, my fingers would fall off! Imagemaster separates the processing effects into Standard Adjustments (Contrast, Brightness, etc.), RGB Corrections, Filters (sharpen, contour, smear, remove pixel/streak/chunk/feature, anti-aliasing, low/highpass filters, etc.), Geometric Transformations (flips, rotations, blurs, spirals, mirrors, wave "ripple" effect, zig zag, etc.), Special Effects (tile, pseudo-color, pixelize, melt, blueprint, etc.), analysis of the image, clipping, ...whew! I am not even done describing the Process Panel yet!!! I give up. Seriously: there is a LOT of power here!! So, does all this processing work? Are the results interesting and effective? YES!! I had great fun taking my favorite pictures and turning them into bizarre images. My favorite effect is called "Caricature." It is designed to alter an image of a face (you supply the picture) to look "cartoonish" -- big nose, funny eyes, and so on. It works great!! Another great one is "Relief" which finds the highlights of the image and make it look like it has been carved in stone. In addition to special effects, Imagemaster is a paint program. You can draw all the usual shapes (lines, rectangles, ellipses, arcs, etc.) and use images as brushes. The user interface is nowhere near as streamlined as Deluxe Paint's (see LIKES AND DISLIKES, below), but it is usable. Realize that Imagemaster is *not* a real-time paint program. After you draw, the program takes a few seconds to update the image. Imagemaster's user interface consists of "control panels" which are sets of gadgets lined up in rows. Clicking on one button of a control panel causes a new panel to be displayed. For example, to use the "Caricature" effect I described above, from the main panel you click on: "Process Panel", which opens a new panel. Click on... "Geometric Transformations", which opens a new panel. Click on... "Caricature", which opens a new panel. This is... The "select region" panel. Select one, and... A panel appears for selecting the effect intensity. Set it and click "DONE", and the processing begins. (Note there is no "Cancel" at this stage.) When finished, you are returned to the main control panel. Each panel has anywhere from 2 to 50 (!!) buttons on it. This hierarchical panel approach allows Imagemaster to conceal its vast number of options. (This has disadvantages, though, as I describe later.) Imagemaster supports dozens of file formats: all of the Amiga formats, plus JPEG, GIF, Targa, various Amiga graphics boards, and others. Much of this support is implemented in ARexx, so it's certainly possible for the user to make Imagemaster support other formats. Imagemaster read every image I threw at it. Speaking of ARexx, just about every aspect of Imagemaster is accessible by ARexx. There are somewhere around 300 commands! This makes the potential of Imagemaster truly awe-inspiring. If I were a graphics professional with a programming background, I'd be blown away by the potential. I did not experiment with the ARexx interface, though, mainly because this is just a hobby for me and I didn't have the time to spend. Judged only on its image processing capabilities, Imagemaster is amazing. There is real power here. However, I have a lot more to say about Imagemaster's user interface, so please see LIKE AND DISLIKES, below. DOCUMENTATION Imagemaster comes with a beautifully typeset, 200-page manual with a thorough index. I found the text fairly easy to read, except that a few operations were not explained enough to satisfy me, and I would have liked more example pictures for the effects that had none. Unfortunately, the manual is for an older version of the program, so Imagemaster 9.21 comes with a 250 Kilobyte "addendum" on disk. I found this arrangement inconvenient; a complete manual would have been far better. I can understand that if Imagemaster is updated as often as the company indicates, then it's probably not cost-effective to print a new manual for each version. If this is the case, then Black Belt should consider using a ring binder for the manual and distributing new pages as needed. By the time the "addendum" file gets to be 7000 lines long, it's definitely time to print a new manual! There are many grammatical errors in the manual, but the writing is fairly clear and understandable. LIKES AND DISLIKES My main "like" is the sheer power of the program. There are so many combinations of effects that I could use Imagemaster full time and not exhaust the possibilities. And this is not even counting the ARexx port, which lets you effectively design your own image processing commands. In a word: wow! I also liked the painless installation. With regard to the user interface, I particularly like the "Previous Region" button which saves me the trouble of reselecting the portion of the image I want to use. My main "dislike" is the user interface. In my opinion, it is quite poor. In the following paragraphs, I will describe my complaints in detail. Needless to say, Imagemaster does NOT conform to the guidelines established in Commodore's User Interface Style Guide, but this is not the worst of its problems. Imagemaster's hierarchical menu interface is, I am sorry to say, virtually identical to the menu system on my Dad's 15-year-old, dedicated IBM word processor. The IBM displays a menu of numbered choices, the user types a number and presses ENTER, the next menu appears, and the process repeats. As a result, even simple operations like copying a file require the user to traverse 3 different menus. With Imagemaster, you get the same interface, except instead of typing numbers, you click on gadgets. To do a simple operation like drawing a line, you have to move through 3 control panels! This kind of interface is outdated, inefficient, and difficult to memorize. Compare it, say, to the original Deluxe Paint, now 7 years old, and you'll see how cumbersome Imagemaster's interface is. A problem that goes hand-in-hand with the hierarchical interface is that Imagemaster is very "modal." This means that depending on "where you are" in the hierarchy, you can access only a small set of operations. This modality is contrary to the principles of modern user interface design found in many Amiga and Macintosh programs. There is no real reason, for example, why Imagemaster should force the user to exit the Processing Panel in order to draw a freehand line. In a non-modal (or less modal) interface, as many operations as possible are available at all times: just use the menu bar and choose what you want. If you want to perform the same operation several times in Imagemaster, you must traverse the same path through the control panels over and over. This gets boring really fast. In addition, the buttons in each control panel do not appear to be in any particular order. To my eye, it looks like Imagemaster's designers were more concerned with making the buttons line up perfectly on the left and right sides of the screen than ordering the buttons in any logical way. My next gripe concerns a fundamental design error in Imagemaster. In order to perform an operation on an image, the user first selects the operation, and then outlines the region which should be affected. But this ordering -- selecting the operation before the region -- is markedly inferior to the opposite ordering found in so many programs today. It is far more convenient, not to mention safer, to select the region first and THEN choose the operation. Under the current system, if you mess up while selecting a region, the operation (already chosen) often begins processing immediately. The user can only cancel the operation and try again. If Imagemaster had reversed the operations, the user could spend lots of time selecting and reselecting the region until he/she got it right, and THEN invoke the operation. Once again, this design decision illustrates an obsolete view of user interfaces. After all, when was the last time you saw a word processor that makes you choose the "delete" operation BEFORE you select the text to be deleted? A similar problem is found in Imagemaster's (non-standard) font requester. The moment you click on the font name, you've chosen it. There should at least be "OK" and "Cancel" buttons! Speaking of "Cancel" buttons, Imagemaster's use of "Cancel" is inconsistent from panel to panel. Sometimes, clicking "Cancel" will take you back to the top-level control panel (e.g., Special Effects/Asterize/ Entire Image/Cancel). Other times, it will take you back to the previous control panel (e.g., File IO/Set Amiga Render Mode/Cancel). In addition, often the "Done" button really means "Cancel" (e.g., Macro Panel/Execute Macro/Done) because it returns you to the previous panel without doing any operation. Black Belt should make up its mind just what "Cancel" means. Another user interface problem is that there are two kinds of gadgets that look identical but act differently. There are toggle gadgets, which change state (on/off) when you click them. And there are action gadgets which initiate an operation as soon as you click them. On some control panels, I could not tell (without trying first) whether a given gadget would exit the panel or not. For example, when doing a "Render to File", the button "Hold Aspect From Current" is a checkbox, but "Entire Image" initiates an action. I had a lot of difficulty saving images as files, and I think the process of doing it -- while very flexible and powerful -- is more difficult than necessary. Your current image is displayed in whatever resolution you choose. Before saving it to a file, you must choose the output format (HAM, IFF24, etc.) and the resolution (hires, lores, interlaced, noninterlaced, etc.) to be stored. However, as far as I could tell, there is NO simple way to tell Imagemaster, "Save my current image in the same format as it is now being displayed!" Personally, I found it easier to save the screen image directly using a 3rd-party screen saver commodity. The above problem is complicated by the fact that the "Save Setup" command does not save your current display preferences. So if you do a "Save Setup", exit the program, run it again, and reload your image, the image is not guaranteed to look the same as before you exited. For example, Imagemaster doesn't remember whether you want an interlaced screen or not. (Default is "not.") Imagemaster's overall feel is "jumpy" when you click on gadgets in control panels. This is because the next control panel's buttons are drawn BEFORE the panel background is moved to accommodate them. The effect is that the panel full of buttons "pops upward" slightly (or a lot). I'd suggest moving the panel background first and then rendering the buttons. Along the same lines, Imagemaster's mutual-exclusion gadgets are very slow, even on a 68030 Amiga. Try switching between Hi-Res to Lo-Res on the "Set Render Mode" screen and you'll see what I mean. From my above complaints, it should be obvious that Imagemaster does not conform -- even slightly -- to Commodore's published user interface guidelines. But the real problem is that the interface is just plain sloppy and archaic. Designing a useful interface for a program as huge as Imagemaster is certainly a difficult task. But I can't help wondering how much more streamlined the interface would be with standard Amiga menus and gadgets instead of the current overly-modal menu hierarchy. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS I have not used any other image processing programs, other than traditional paint programs (Deluxe Paint, etc.). Imagemaster is a different kind of program entirely. BUGS o The "load image" file requester generates 5 Enforcer hits and pops up on the Workbench screen instead of Imagemaster's screen. o Imagemaster crashes the Amiga when I try the "Melt" special effect on an entire image. It generates dozens of Enforcer hits, and the machine hangs. o Click on "Set Amiga Render Mode". If "HAM" is currently the default, then the first 5 "Bit Depth" gadgets are enabled. However, if you then click "Register" followed by "HAM", the 5 gadgets are now disabled! o While rendering in 4-bit hires noninterlaced using "Render to File", while it is rendering to the screen (full image, keep aspect), drag the control panel screen downwards using ALT-LMB (as set in SYS:Prefs/IControl). When the rendering finishes, the computer hangs. I think Imagemaster doesn't expect the user to drag its screens around. o If you click "Cancel" during "Render to file" while rendering, you still get a file requester which you must also cancel. It's even worse when rendering a multi-frame sequence -- you must click "Cancel" after EACH frame!! o Imagemaster activates its screen several times while an image is loading (and during other operations). This makes it impossible to get any other work done while Imagemaster is in the background. It keeps stealing the active screen away from you! Then there are some minor nits: o There are no version strings in imf nor filmview. o The copyright notice is not legal. It must be: "Copyright ." SUPPORT Several months ago, I contacted Black Belt to ask some questions about Imagemaster. To my surprise, they sent me a free copy. If that isn't great support, I don't know what is!! I tried to send in a bug report by e-mail to a Black Belt representative. He told me to call their Tech Support line to report it. Since this is a long-distance call, and bug reports benefit Black Belt, I would have preferred if the BB rep had forwarded the bug report to his company himself. But this is only a minor nitpick; it's good that they have someone on the Net answering questions. CONCLUSIONS Imagemaster is an astoundingly powerful package which is unfortunately combined with a cumbersome, outdated user interface. The product is fairly stable and produces some amazing image effects. I have had great fun using it, and I have barely scratched the surface of its potential. On a scale of 1 (terrible) to 10 (perfect), I rate the image processing software as a "9" and the user interface as a "3". COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1993 Daniel J. Barrett. All rights reserved. This review may be freely distributed as long as it is distributed unmodified and in its entirety. It may not appear in any publication without the author's written permission. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu