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The Amiga has seen many paint packages around since the demise of Commodore. Most of them have been
seriously flawed but mighty powerful, perhaps more powerful than similar packages on other platforms.
But we have to face it. Commodores departure was very unhealthy for the Amiga market, and developers
that had the qualities to make great applications disappeared. One by one, the software companies left the
Amiga, and homegrown developers took over the market. Today we have few good graphics suites left.
ArtEffect, ImageFX and Personal Paint are amoungst the few.
It is great to see new packages introduced, and Perfect Paint is one of the better examples. It
arrived as freeware - handling 256 colours and a vast range of effects. News has it that it is going 24-bit,
and it may very well become one of the best applications the Amiga has seen in a long time. This
is the review of Perfect Paint 1.1.
 At first, when you open the program, you
get a screen requester. When you have choosen the suitable screen mode, you are presented with a toolbar
on a grey background. The program instantly reminded me of a mix between Personal Paint and TVPaint -
and it really suits the description perfectly.
Perfect Paint is as I mentioned above, a bitmap paint package, presently. It has all the tools you
need to create stunning artwork, but in practical use, it is best used as a design package. This
is where the true strength lies. Perfect Paint has an immense user interface that is very easy
to use. Antialiasing, transperancy, airbrushing... you name it. Even the font handeling is top quality.
Font handeling is something most Amiga paint programs have a hard time accomplishing, but PP can
use fonts like it was the native language! Everything works perfectly with
a few mouse clicks on the interface panels. All tools can also adopt effects like drop shadows and
light glows to name a few, and you can even draw with AREXX scripts!
Because of the 256 colour limit, there are
some limitations to creativity. If you have not customized the palette to fit your work, you
may run into some colour problems, especially when using effects. But this is under the authors
attention, and will be fixed in a future version. You may also miss the layers that has become standard
in Amiga paint packages, but since PP is freeware, this really is no problem.
Perfect Paint can save your work as Gif, and when you use the animation feature, which is almost
identical to DPaint's system, you can save the animation out as a gif animation, or as the
in buildt animation format. The hotkeys for animating are also the same as in DPaint, using the
keys "1" to "6" for navigation and playback.
 The PP package can use AREXX, and this means
alot for the user's freedom. Scripts can be either downloaded from the net or written by the user.
The scripts can then be executed as standalones or with the tools. Say you make an effect with
AREXX and then apply the script to the drawing tool - voila. You can make all kinds of
scripts, and they can be applied to most drawing tools.
In general, Perfect Paint can become the next hit in the Amiga world of graphics and design.
Soon, we may also be able to download Perfect Paint 1.2 or 2.0 - 24-bit enabled. This will
be an upgrade so important that it can make the package the best alternative on the Amiga platform,
maybe even surpassing TVPaint. But as it stands presently, Perfect Paint is a very strong
paint program that can be of great help to Amiga users generally and specifically!
This program is a must have, and it is totally free!
 Download the binaries here.
Download the English docs.
Download the French docs.
Visit the homepage now!
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