[343] in comp.os.os2.announce archive
OS/2 USERS GROUP MEETING: November 9, Phoenix, AZ
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (esther@primenet.com)
Wed Nov 8 10:27:38 1995
To: os2ann.DISCUSS@bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 11:30:42 GMT
From: esther@primenet.com
Reply-To: esther@primenet.com
Submitted by: Esther Schindler (esther@primenet.com)
Source: Esther Schindler (esther@primenet.com)
Date received: 1995 November 5
Date posted: 1995 November 6
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Graphic expressions
This month, SPG's Joel Krautheim will demonstrate Colorworks
for OS/2 at the Phoenix OS/2 Society general meeting. Note that for this
month only, the general meeting is on a different date and day of the week --
Thursday, November 9th -- to accommodate Comdex schedules. (In December we'll
return to our regular schedule.) Here's the meeting details:
Day: Thursday, November 9
Time: 7 pm (6:30 for Q&A Session)
Location: Mountain Preserve Reception Center, 1431 East Dunlap.
(From 7th Street, head east on Dunlap until you can't
go any farther and would run into the mountain.)
Guests are welcome!
Yearly membership dues for the Phoenix OS/2 Society are $30 a year. That gets
you an award-winning monthly newsletter, discounts on products, the chance to
win door prizes, and the opportunity to contribute to the Valley's fastest
growing user group. We believe in having FUN while we learn from one
another -- otherwise, why would we all give up our free time for this stuff?
Now, why should you show up at THIS meeting?
Whether or not you care about programs that manipulate graphics, this meeting
is sure to, er, draw a crowd. That's because ColorWorks takes superb
advantage of OS/2.
ColorWorks' multiple modes of operation, configurable tools, painting
abilities, photo retouching, "Filter Labs," special effects, and warping and
distortion effects, yields a power-packed program for computer artists and
designers.
ColorWorks is a 32-bit dynamically multi-threaded, re-entrant engine
application. Wow: what a collection of buzzwords! When you get down to real
benefits, the bottom line is that Colorworks' use of multitasking technology
lets you continue using the program while complex drawing operations are
still executing.
ColorWorks can be operated like a traditional paint program where all editing
to a canvas image is performed with drawing tools, or like a photo retouching
program where effects are applied to a canvas selection area (a floated
image). In Draw Mode, any drawing tool can be configured to draw with a
color, an effect, or a combination of multiple effects. Mask Mode lets any
drawing tool be used as a selection tool to define a mask for application of
effects and transformations. ColorWorks has a full suite of professional photo
retouching effects including color map adjustments, dodge and burn,
posterize, and invert. The program includes over 60 filter effects and
special effects, from smoothing to noise reduction and edge detection to
texturize and pixel displacement. Effects can be used alone or in combination
-- literally millions of different combinations. All this combines to produce
a splendid professional graphics program.
You can create graphics states and plug-in effects. Individual canvases have
up to 255 levels of Undo. You can use interactive zooming and panning for
precise image editing.
But high level graphics applications have been around for years. Colorworks
is a great program, but what makes it superb is the degree to which it takes
advantage of OS/2.
OS/2 specific features
ColorWorks is SMP Ready. If you have the SMP version of OS/2, you can set the
program to dynamically divide drawing tasks to up to 64 processors, for huge
linear increases in performance.
ColorWorks' DIMIC technology can reduce the RAM requirements of editing
images by up to 90%, letting you edit large workstation size images on a PC.
This technology of editing compressed data minimizes or eliminates swapping
image data to virtual memory, allowing you to edit larger canvas images at
nearer to full speed.
Naturally, that's not all. Joel Krautheim will show us more including:
* Redo ("magic eraser"), Clone, Dodge, Burn, etc. are effects rather
than dedicated pen tools. You can use any tool to apply these effects and
interactively zoom and pan while drawing with them.
* Drag-and-drop features are used instead of a private clipboard to
move floated images between canvases.
* A Canvas Status dialog displays a Drawing Queue of all drawing
operations (threads) occurring on a canvas, with the ability to delete,
pause, resume and change the OS/2 execution priority of the thread queue.
Despite its power, ColorWorks is a small, 1MB application. This tight
programming conserves up to 3Mb of RAM in loading the application compared to
other programs, RAM that can be used for images or other programs under OS/2.
It's sure to be a lively evening. Won't you join us?
