| Deluxe Paint | |
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| Deluxe Paint was a great Pixel-Pushing paint program. All current pallette based tools are based on Deluxe Paint. (Even the one i'm about to start writing. ;) In any event, when it was first released in 1986 by Electronic Arts, it looked like this: |  |
| Not too much there. No extra popup windows, no layers, no wierd fangled effects... just that. And it worked great! In 1987, EA released "Deluxe Paint II", which fixed some bugs, added animation, gradient fills and overscan video modes. Do note that these images are being shown in their original sizes. DPaint ran at 320x200, and various other multiples from there. But on a stock Amiga 1000, it was only really useful in the 320x200 video mode. |  |
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This is the software that Andy Warhol did some images with. I don't have
those images, nor do i know where to get them, but here is one that i
made:
"CityStars" |
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| One technique i came up with back then, was a way to get more apparant colors out of the display. (I could only really display about 32 colors on screen and have it look decent...) What i did was to have a red, a green, a blue and a gray pixel next to eachother, so for any shade, you need just those four colors in the palette. It never worked because the resolution of the display was so low that for the effect to work, you'd have to be about 30 feet away from the monitor. |  |
| Myself and Rob implemented this back in 1996 (10 years later) in our demo, where Rob had called it Pixel Enhancement Technology or "PET" for short. He managed to get 32 bits of color displayed in a 256 color palette. We ran this at a higher screen resolution, and without the extra gray pixel, with damn good results. (I know that link goes to an empty chapter. I'll fill it in eventually.) |  |
| Digi-View | |
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NewTek, a company that eventually came out with the two devices,
the "Video Toaster" and the "Video Flyer", which were meant to enable
people to have professional quality studios in their home for $10,000
rather than the $150,000 that equivalent equipment normally went for,
before they had those products, they had "Digi-View". It was a video
digitizer that plugged into the parallel port. (Similar to "Snappy",
released by the same people in another company.)
The image to the right is of me, taken with Digi-View and an old tube camera back in 1986. "Me 86" |  |
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The way Digi-View sampled the video signal was that it took 5 seconds
to scan across the screen horizontally (or up to 20, depending on
the quality you want.) Then, if you want a full color image, you had
to have this color filter in front of the camera, and you had to
take one image of red, green, and blue... which meant a single scene
could take up to a minute to scan into the computer.
The image to the right is of my then friend Danny Zipkin. Cool guy. He introduced me to "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" and Frank Zappa. "Danny" |
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As you can see in this image to the right, the results can be pretty
damned good. The software was pretty clever in merging the red, green
and blue images together properly. (Yes, that is the proper color for
the couch that the apple is sitting on.)
"Apple" |  |
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And here's an experiment, where i went outside, in front of our house,
and just recorded about a minute or so through each of the color filters,
then digitized and recombined them appropriately when i got back inside,
by just playing back the video tape. It is okay. Nothing special.
The aqua haze in the very bottom right of the screen is where i accidently
blocked the lens from the red filters. hehe.
Incidently, that's our 1980 Toyota Corolla Tercel SR-5. My first car. "SR-5" |  |
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And of course, here's a sample image from a video source. I just
still-framed the image, then digitized red, green, and blue from it.
It really should be completely monochromatic, but due to noise and such
it actually ends up looking like theres some color in there... but there
shouldn't be.
"Edison Carter" |  |