Article 472 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: cg@winfcg.swb.de (Christoph Guelicher and Heiko Rath) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: PhotoworX version 1.71 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Date: 21 Feb 1994 15:55:27 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 444 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu Distribution: world Message-ID: <2kalhf$2tl@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: cg@winfcg.swb.de (Christoph Guelicher and Heiko Rath) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: graphics, CD-ROM, Photo CD, image processing, commercial PRODUCT NAME PhotoworX version 1.71 BRIEF DESCRIPTION Access software for Kodak Photo CDs, with image processing functions. The authors of this review were both involved in beta testing PhotoworX, but have no financial connection whatsoever with increased sales of the program. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Germany: Name: Corporate Media GbR ("COME") Address: Boedekerstrasse 92 D-30161 Hannover Germany Telephone: +49-511-661041/43 FAX: +49-511-668279 USA: Name: Interworks Address: 42191 Camino Casillas Temecula, CA 92592-3714 Phone/FAX: (909) 699-8120 Name: Spectronics International USA, Inc. Address: 34 East Main Street #23 Champaign, IL 61820 Telephone: (217) 352-0061 FAX: (217) 352-0063 Author: Olaf 'Olsen' Barthel E-mail: olsen@sourcery.han.de (programmer's address) LIST PRICE Germany: 198 DM suggested retail price. Bundle prices with CD-ROM drives and host adapters are available from COME. USA: approximately $199 (US) COMPONENTS SUPPLIED IN PACKAGE o AmiCDROM filesystem (Public Domain, written by Frank Munkert) o Sample Photo CD o Manual o Floppy disk with the program on it ;-) o Registration card SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE An 'XA' compliant CD-ROM-drive is required to read a Photo CD, although the software does not require one. If you move the Photo CD data files to a different medium (such as your hard disk) PhotoworX will treat it just as the original CD as long as the directory structure is left intact. 2 MB RAM required. The more, the better. A hard drive is recommended but not required. Approximately 350 KB disk space is needed for a complete installation. It is possible to run the software from floppy disk, but it makes more sense to have a hard drive to increase performance, to store exported pictures, etc. Two versions of the software are supplied: one for 68000 and 68010-based systems, and one for faster systems (68020, 68030, you name it). A faster CPU is not required, but you do yourself a favour if you have one. ;-) PhotoworX works with any graphics hardware setup, including the ECS and AGA chip sets and third party graphics cards that offer an Intuition emulation. SOFTWARE A CD-ROM filesystem. One is supplied with PhotoworX (AmiCDROM). AmigaDOS 2.04 or higher is required. If you have a graphics card, it may have its own software requirements. COPY PROTECTION None. The hard disk installation procedure requires you to personalize the program with your name, address and your serial number. MACHINES USED FOR TESTING Computers: A1200, 2 MB Chip, 0 MB Fast, IDE hard disk, no CD-ROM. A1200, 2 MB Chip, 8 MB Fast, 68030/68882 both at 50 MHz, GVP SCSI. A3000, 2 MB Chip, 14 MB Fast, Picasso II, internal SCSI. A3000T, 2 MB Chip, 14 MB Fast, Retina II, internal SCSI. A4000, 2 MB Chip, 8 MB Fast, Z3-Fastlane SCSI. CD-ROM-drives: Apple CD-300, XA multisession drive, double speed. Toshiba XM3401, XA multisession drive, double speed. NEC CDR83, nearly XA single-session drive, double speed. Operating systems: Kickstart 37.175, 39.106. Workbench 38.35 (2.1), 39.29 (3.0). CD-ROM filesystems: AmiCDROM 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8. AsimCDFS 2.0. CD-Xetec FS v1.94a. Babel-FS v1.1. Z3-Fastlane CD-ROM FS. Photo-CDs: Kodak Photo CD sampler (24 pictures). Philips CD-I Photo CD 'Akt Aesthetik' (67 pictures). HifiVision Test Photo CD (130 pictures). 'Photo CD and PC' sampler Photo CD (102 pictures). 3 'self made' Photo CDs with various pictures (42, 26, 45 pictures), one of them in multisession-format with three different sessions COME Photo CD (27 pictures). INSTALLATION The Commodore Installer program copies the PhotoworX software to your hard disk drive, and also installs the AmiCDROM filing system if requested. REVIEW When PhotoworX is started, it opens either a window on the Workbench, a public screen to support OS3.0 palette sharing, or its own screen, whichever you prefer. This choice is made via tooltypes or the program's saved settings. The settings can be adjusted, loaded and saved in PhotoworX. PhotoworX distinguishes the general settings for the programs's operation from the special settings for the 'currently loaded' or the 'to-be-loaded' Photo. The general settings let you define the following items: - Photo CD Volume to be used: You can enter or select (via standard ASL file requester) which device or volume is to be used by PhotoworX. So, PhotoworX does not necessarily need a Photo CD: it needs just the correct Photo CD directory structure as defined by Kodak: photo_cd (dir) images (dir) rights (dir) rights.use info.pcd overview.pcd Note: this directory structure is required only if you wish to load and display the Photo CD image directory (also called 'contact sheet' or 'index print'). You can still load single photos using the file requester. - Path to store pictures: You can enter or select via file requester the path to store exported pictures. - Define the program startup operation: Load the contact sheet, a photo, or just wait for user input. - Define the contact sheet settings: - Size, either 32x48, 64x96 or 128x192 pixels. - Colour or Grayscale display. - Layout (number of columns and colours). - Define the screen settings: - Select a non-HAM screenmode from the display database. - Select a font and size for PhotoworX's windows and requesters: very useful for higher resolution screens on graphic boards, etc. - Miscellaneous settings: - File format of photos to save (all IFF-ILBM): - 24 bit, true colour data. - 8 bit, grayscale data. - Processed screen data as shown, or - 2...256 colour data, both in available amiga screenmodes from LoRes - SuperHiRes-Interlaced, in HAM or HAM8 and with/without Floyd-Steinberg-dithering. - Viewers: Picasso II, Retina, EGS, DCTV or HAM. According to the capabilities of the viewer or the graphics extension, the number of colours may be chosen. For example, the Picasso II and Retina viewers support 32,768, 65,536 and 16,777,216 colour displays. PhotoworX makes use of the Amiga HAM mode also through a viewer module with 4,096 colours on an OCS/ECS-Amiga, or 262,144 colours on an AGA-equipped Amiga. Because viewers can be used only for display purposes, editing in HAM, HiColor or TrueColour modes is not supported. You can also select whether PhotoworX should operate with or without confirmatory requesters for potentially destructive operations. The Photo-specific settings let you define the following items: - Define the screen settings for the Photo display: - Select a non HAM screenmode and its colour depth from the display database for an editable view of the Photo. - Select the size to be loaded: 128x192, 256x384, 512x768, 1024x1536 or even 2048x3072 pixels. The possible size directly depends on the available RAM, because a picture in the highest possible resolution means 18 MB of raw 24-bit-data. To make this clear: Sorry folks, on an A500 with 1 MB RAM, there is NO WAY to load these beasties. Even sufficiently equipped Amigas are busy for a quite a while when 18 MB must be transported from a rather slow CD-ROM to memory, not even considering the required display memory.... - Select if the picture shall be displayed in Colour or Grayscale. - A toggle switch to display the photo using the selected viewer directly after loading. - A toggle switch to enable/disable dithering. - A toggle switch to enable/disable the progress indicator display. When all the settings are set, they can be saved as the default or under special names, so that they can loaded later or upon startup. For an overview of the Photo CD, the contact sheet may now be loaded. PhotoworX displays it nicely in numbered slide frames. From the contact sheet display, the user may - Single-click to select a single picture, or - Shift-click to select several pictures, or - Double-click to load a picture. Selected pictures are marked in the contact sheet. There are also menu functions available to 'Select all pictures' or 'Clear all selections'. All slides selected may then be loaded or exported, allowing the possibility of batch processing; for example, to read all pictures from the Photo CD, convert to 16-bit grayscales, and save as Amiga HighRes mode IFF files. When a picture is being loaded, PhotoworX displays a progress indicator which shows the different stages of loading. The author claims that the photo loading routines are about four times as fast as the code used by Macintosh programs such as 'Adobe Photoshop' or the MS Windows version of 'Kodak Photoedge'. Due to lack of hardware and software, we have not been able to verify these claims. However, if compared to the other Photo CD reader programs which are currently available for the Amiga, PhotoworX literally 'flies' when loading images in larger resolutions: say, 1536x1024 and up. When loading is finished, either the picture will be immediately displayed using the selected viewer module, or the dithering process will begin for a display in Amiga screenmodes. In 'viewer display' mode, the user can only look at the picture. One can return anytime with a click to the PhotoworX main screen. The other alternatives are to display a photo in a window on the same screen as the contact sheet, and to display it on a custom screen. The second case causes the program to choose a special colour palette which may take some time. If the photo is displayed in a window on the contact sheet screen, a default colour palette will be used, which greatly reduces calculation time. Now the selected picture may be exported, printed or edited. Picture export time is dependent on the export format selected and the CPU power of the computer used. The printing of the selected picture can be controlled in every single aspect the printer driver supports. Several editing functions can now be applied to the loaded picture. These include: - A rectangular area of the picture may be selected with the mouse and then cut, cropped, enlarged or shrunk. - The current picture data can be rotated in 90-degree steps in clockwise or anti-clockwise orientation. - The current picture data can be flipped horizontally or vertically. Different filter functions are available: - Colour Filters may be applied to adjust brightness, contrast and gamma value. One can even directly change the red, green and blue channels. - A 'sharpen' filter. - A 'smooth' filter. - A 'negative' filter. The picture currently being edited may be displayed at any time using the selected viewer module. DOCUMENTATION For reviewing purposes we had access only to the German version of the manual, a 56-page leaflet in German DIN-A5 standard size. The typesetting system TeX was obviously used for the production of the manual. On the floppy disk is a 'Hinweise' file with additions to the manual. The quality of the documentation is good. Every aspect of the program and Photo CD technology, production, and handling is covered to a sufficient degree and illustrated with screenshots when needed. LIKES AND DISLIKES The user interface complies fully with the Commodore Style Guide and is intuitive to use. Almost every function of the program is not only accessible via menu/mouse button, but also via keyboard shortcut, which also applies to every single requester in the program. It takes a while to understand the concept of the external viewers for displaying purposes only. The reason is that modification of Photo CD images can take place only in non-HAM, Workbench-compliant Amiga screenmodes. Because the Amiga Operating System does not yet support 24-bit screenmodes (only up to 8 bit), editing in 24-bit is not possible. A slideshow function and an ARexx interface would be nice to have. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS ('+' means advantage, '-' means disadvantage) Amiga: AsimPhoto v1.0 (from the AsimCDFS v2.0 package) + Contact sheet can be displayed in three sizes. - No dithering of contact sheet display. - Contact sheet cannot be displayed in colour. + Display database support for contact sheet display. - No viewing/displaying of the Photo CD pictures. - Conversion of the Photo CD pictures is only possible in base resolution (768x512) or below. - Not licensed by Kodak. + Has an ARexx interface. HPCDTOPPM (freely redistributable software) + Source code available (also freely redistributable). - Not licensed by Kodak. - Command-line-interface control only (CLI). - No display capabilities. -/+ Photo CD-picture-conversion to PPM, JPEG only. + Portable source (written in C). + All Photo CD resolutions supported. CDXetec PCDtoIFF v0.2 (from CDXetec package) - Not licensed by Kodak. - Command-line-interface control only (CLI). - No display capabilities. -/+ Photo CD picture conversion to IFF-ILBM. + All Photo CD resolutions supported. (All in all, it looks like a 'quick and dirty' port of the HPCDTOPPM-routines.) Macintosh: Quicktime v1.61 on Mac-IIci with 8-bit display - Feels very slow in total, no good dithering like FS. + Included in operating system. 'Recognizes' the Photo CD files and calls Quicktime modules for display, slideshow, etc. + Official Kodak license. - Almost free scaling/resizing possible, but quite bad results. ;-( BUGS None encountered. VENDOR SUPPORT COME, the German distributor, offers free BBS access to registered users for questions, updates, special drivers, etc. A phone hotline is also in service. WARRANTY The distributor warrants the product only against media failure or missing items in the PhotoworX package. CONCLUSIONS We rate the program 4.75 stars out of 5, because of the (yet) missing ARexx interface and the (maybe because of the lack of the ARexx interface) missing slideshow function. The program is very intuitive to use and is one of the most Commodore Style Guide-compliant programs we've ever encountered. The GUI is fully font-adaptive and supports localization. The author Olaf 'Olsen' Barthel of TERM-fame has shown in the past, that he is a very capable programmer and adheres closely to the C= software developers' guidelines. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1994 Christoph Guelicher (cg@winfcg.swb.de) and Heiko Rath (hr@brewhr.swb.de). All rights reserved. -- _ |_|_)
aka Heiko Rath, Raiffeisenstr.10a, D-64331 Weiterstadt, Germany | | \ The Software Brewery | PGP | Voice: +49 6150 2607 | HR@brewhr.swb.de and Christoph Guelicher Dohlenweg 4, D-57078 Siegen \|/ CG@winfcg.swb.de Universitaet-GH Siegen, FTS (ETG238) o^o CG@hrz.uni-siegen.d400.de ---------------------------------------oO-(_)-Oo---------------------------- MS-DOS is the worst text adventure game I have ever played: poor vocabulary, weak parser and a boring storyline. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews