raphics professionals might want to take a peek from behind their screens and look at a piece of software that has just entered into its second generation and could quite possibly offer OS/2 another "Killer App". The software is ColorWorks V2, hailed as "The Artist's Ultimate Power Program", it shows off some features and characteristics that made us blink in astonishment, quite frankly, as you'll soon read why.

SPG Inc., the makers of ColorWorks, are to innovative, compact and versatile software as Porsche is to fast cars. Its RAM footprint is only 1 megabyte, its in-use memory requirements can be halved by switching on DIMIC (Dynamic In-Memory Image Compression) and its speed can be boosted to high-end workstation levels by adding more CPUs. Its power and flexibility have no definite limit since any effect can be combined with others and "painted" to a canvas using any of the drawing tools (text, freehand, geometric shapes, floodfills and splines) and its photographer's-style masking power makes a "magic wand tool" look like a toy.

Strangely enough, those features were already in ColorWorks 1.0.

New in 2.0: Plug-ins

There is a limit to how far plug-ins can go though. They can not be added to the effects stack (explained below) so the artist must resort to using masks if he or she only wants part of the canvas altered.

Gradients

Anti-Aliasing, halfway on the mark

Combining effects and painting with them

In other high-end graphics software like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Photo-Paint you have single tools that do one dedicated task. You get one tool for dodge/burn, one tool for contrast, etc. If that tool only works in freehand style and you want to apply the effect with an ellipse then you're out of luck. Also, take the "magic wand" some users rave about, it's just a tool that selects an area of a similar color. If you want to select more than one area though, the program discards what you had just selected as soon as you try to use the tool a second time.

ColorWorks is different. Your dodge/burn is now an effect that can be painted with using any of the drawing tools, and your "magic wand" is actually the floodfill tool when ColorWorks is in mask mode. You can select multiple areas to your heart's content, invert them and "unpaint" any parts you don't want. When you're satisfied, you can save the mask and perform your operations on it.

Those who work with the same images during different sessions may be irritated by ColorWorks' inability to save its masks to disk though. This is not the case for its 8-bit masks which are used to control opacity when drawing to a canvas, nonetheless, you can't use an 8-bit mask for everything and we'd love being able build libraries of "Cookie Cutter" shapes if we could.

And yet more precision

ColorWorks V2 also has a "one time" drawing feature previously only seen in Ron Scott's QFX (a $795 package): hold down the shift key after drawing an effect with freehand and ColorWorks won't reapply the effect on the area you have just drawn to. Say, for example, you drew freehand to the canvas with the "invert" filter to reverse the colors of an image, you don't want to accidentally re-invert them back to normal on the next pass if the brush strays over the area you had just drawn to on the first stroke.

Lastly, those who have invested in a pressure-sensitive digitizing tablet will be happy to know that ColorWorks will use that too, to vary any combination of opacity, palette color and brush size. You can adjust the way ColorWorks maps the responses as well to compensate for an imperfect tablet or different drawing needs.

But unfortunately...

SPG has admittedly made the interface a little better since the 1.0 version, but we find that the most common annoyances are still there:

• There's no indication that you have any effects enabled except by explicitly checking the "Effects" menu before performing a draw operation. Often we found that after drawing an effect, then going off and searching for another file to work with, we forgot we had an effect switched on and jumped in surprise the next time we used a tool (ironically, this is the source of many pleasant "accidents" where new tricks are discovered that would not have been found otherwise).
• ColorWorks is modal, you're either in the painting mode or the masking mode. This is a trade-off between convenience and power (since after painting a mask you can then make it an image, protection, or distortion mask), however, in ColorWorks you'll find yourself working harder than in some programs to perform some operations.
• Some effects require you to interact with a preview window that's a fixed size. For example, to apply the points for a warping effect you have to work with a preview window that will display a scaled-down image of your canvas. Since this preview is scaled down, the accuracy at which you can place the points is "scaled down" too.
• A canvas must be a minimum of 100x100 pixels in size. While this doesn't prevent you from editing smaller (or narrower or shorter) images, you must still use another program such as PMView to crop it down to the size you want. ColorWorks will load images of a smaller size, but it will paste them into a resized window with whitespace taking up the slack.

We've been told that there is a shareware thumbnail browser plug-in being developed which may help with the WPS deficiencies. SPG also tells us that version 3 will have more shortcut keys, a macro-recorder, and will remove the 100x100 pixel minimums.

Workstation speed?

Of tonal ranges and printing

ColorWorks is the photosetter's friend when it comes to printing too. It has an incredibly wide range of facilities for separating the CYMK layers of an image and for printing and, therefore, is used in print-shops everywhere.

The Manual

It's more than just software documentation too, it's a tutorial on the computer art and photosetting trade. This is the book you use to learn not only what the heck the "Adjust Color Maps" effect is, for example, but how you can use it to compensate for a cheap scanner that gets all the colors wrong.

What's also remarkable about the book is that SPG is using it as the packaging for the software. The idea is that it sits on the shelf without any shrink-wrap so the customer can pick it up and leaf through, seeing if it can do the job he/she wants it to, and make an informed purchase. SPG calls this "Full Disclosure Packaging" and hopes the stores will like the idea because it means less returns of merchandise--the customer already knows that the program can do what he wants because he's had the chance to interrogate The Manual before purchase.

Even though the printed manual is a magnificent feat of engineering, I could still use a simple quick-reference pull out sheet for commonly used keystrokes. The Manual has such a reference in the appendix, but you can't exactly clip the monster to the side of your monitor. Keeping this book on the shelf brings back images of Fred Flintstone's infamous bowling-ball-in-the-closet. ("Creeeeeek... BAM!")

This book also adds about $100 to the purchase price, so ColorWorks V2 is available on CD-ROM only. In such a case you'd use the on-line "MegaManual", a VIEWable .inf file of more than 20 megabytes that contains just about everything that's in the printed version. The install program simply makes a pointer to the file on the CD so you're not using up valuable hard-disk space.

Should you buy it?

If you're looking for a product with a lot of support backing it up you've come to the right place too. SPG's website has a download area offering free demo versions of their products plus the tutorial section of the on-line MegaManual and Technique lessons for you to read (in .INF format). To encourage developers, SPG is also sponsoring a "Code Warrior" contest to find the best new plug-ins and they're offering to negotiate the rights to buy the best entries and make them available free for download.

And, of course, even more tips and tricks can be found in our new monthly column, "Chris' ColorWorks Power Tips", written by yours truly.

So, ColorWorks or PhotoShop? The first has a lot more raw power and artistic flexibility, the second is considered the "universal standard" and already has a lot of plug-ins available. But if you want to look good "out there" you'll want what we chose; ColorWorks.

ColorWorks V2

letter to the editor.

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