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Impos/2 v2.0- by Chris Wenham

Impos/2 by Compart Systems is a general purpose 32-bit image processing package with a highly customizable but occasionally annoying interface. Its main strength is its built-in support for a wide range of popular scanners, both flatbed and handheld. It's also unhindered from many of the restrictions found in its major competitor -- ColorWorks 2.0.

Installation

Impos/2 comes on CD-ROM with both English and German language versions included. To install, one just needs to select the right directory for the language of choice (\CDINST\GR for German or \CDINST\US for English) and run the install program. You have the option of choosing which image file formats to install support for, as well as an option to copy a sampling of images to the hard disk. The program files take about 2MB of disk space, the sample images another 900k.

Manual

The paperback 130-page manual starts by giving you a short tutorial on the basics of image processing, explaining the difference between bitmap and vector based images, image file formats, color schemes and color conversion. The rest of the manual explains the features of the program, supplying B&W screenshots and illustrations.

User Interface

I have a love/hate relationship with Impos/2. The user interface is wonderfully configurable with the ability to re-size tool palettes, drag-n-drop, delete or add tool icons anywhere and create new user-defined floating tool palettes with custom tools. It has an extensive REXX interface, with which you can design custom tools and batch processes assignable to buttons that you can add to existing or custom tool palettes. These palettes are also free-floating, not confined to any parent window and therefore easily distributable across your desktop.

But it can also be a real pain to use. A glance at the painting tools palette will not tell you what tool is in use, because the buttons don't "stay down" after you select them. Each separate canvas window can have a different tool in effect, which may be convenient for some, but still leaves me clicking back and forth like mad whenever I'm working on more than one image. The screenshot feature is infuriating; click on the icon and the mouse cursor changes to a camera for a split second, then suddenly switches off while Impos/2 beeps at you with some unidentified error. You must click on the screenshot button and then flick your mouse away quickly before the program expresses complaint, and even that doesn't always work. (Despite this annoying idiosyncrasy, all of the screenshots I made for this review are "self portraits" so to speak.)

Painting Tools

Some of the painting tools are wonderful. Smooth and anti-aliased brushes (only one shape however -- round), an airbrush that builds up if you hold it in one spot, all fast and responsive too. One can set the size, the hardness of the brush, the covering (aka opacity -- how much of the original image it lets show through), or even the loss factor so that your brushes 'run out of paint.' By adjusting the step size you can either get a smooth flowing line or a 'string of pearls' effect from the brushes.

Impos/2 doesn't have any "natural media" style painting tools like charcoal sticks or textured canvases though, which I felt the program would benefit from enormously.

Impos/2 has two gradient tools which work more like the ones in PhotoShop than in ColorWorks. With the linear gradient you draw a line that defines the angle of the gradient as well as the thickness of the 'transition area' between the background and foreground colors. Radial gradients are drawn much the same way, but here you're drawing an ellipse. With Impos/2 you can draw elliptical gradients as well as circular ones, a plus over ColorWorks. And by holding down the Alt key as you draw you can invert the gradient.

In addition to the regular painting tools, Impos/2 features a collection of image filters, some of them quite fun. There are the usual 'standard' filters like blur, sharpen, emboss etc. (including a good Gaussian blur). But there are also a range of plug-in filters such as wave, whirlpool (GIF, 91k), oil-painting, ripples (GIF, 48k), radial blur (GIF, 46k) and motion blur.

These filters can be conveniently aborted before they finish by clicking on the black-square button that pops up in the progress bar.

Selection tools

Impos/2 has rectangular, circular (elliptical), freehand and Magic Wand tools for selecting an area. It also has a 'feather' feature for softening the edges of a selection. Impos/2 has no explicit tools for drawing ellipses or rectangles though, rather you have to use the selection tools and then fill them with whatever color you prefer. What I found annoying was that I couldn't draw ellipses by radius (pick center and drag out), only by diameter (pick top left, then bottom right). There also did not seem to be a constrain feature that would have made it easier to draw a perfect circle or square.

Masks

Impos/2 has limited but functional support for 8-bit protection masks. You can view the canvas in mask mode, which displays only the mask, or image-and-mask mode which displays the mask in red over a grayscale copy of the image. Impos/2 does not allow the use of the Text tool while in mask mode (the manual suggests an awkward work-around instead).

I was unable to test the masking feature properly however, as the program crashed whenever I tried to work with this feature.

Scanner Support

Built right into the base package, without the need to purchase third party add-ons, is a very wide support for both handheld and flatbed scanners. These include but are not limited to: The Mustek CG 6000, Epson GT 8000, HP ScanJet Plus, IIp, 3p, 3c and 4c, the IBM PageScanner 3119, Microtek ScanMaker II, Mustek MFS 6000 and others.

Scanners aren't installed at the same time the program is. Rather, the user must go the "Scanner" tab of the program's configuration notebook and add the drivers needed.

Summary

Impos/2 avoids many of the limits to ColorWorks V2 like the 100x100 pixel minimum image size. Plus it can edit images in several color-depth modes such as the 256-color palette of .GIF images which, although it loses color info when compared to a "truecolor" image, is still very handy for web page designers who know what they're doing. Impos/2 still falls short on raw image processing power though and its user interface has caused a few teeth-grinding sessions with me.

The Rexx integration sounds enormously powerful, but there's little mention of it in the manual and the online .INF documentation doesn't explain enough about how to use it. But if you can learn to work with it you can achieve powerful batch and macro processing.


 * Impos/2 v2.0
by Compart GmbH
MSRP: US$199
Chris Wenham is a Team OS/2er in Binghamton, NY with a catchy-titled company -- Wenham's Web Works. He has written comedy, sci-fi, HTML, Pascal, C++ and now writes software reviews.

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