Deluxe Paint
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Deluxe Paint (DPaint) is a bitmap graphics editor originally created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts (EA). The original version was created for the Commodore Amiga and was released in November 1985. It was eventually ported to other platforms, but only had killer app status on the Amiga.
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History
DPaint was the product of an in-house art development tool called Prism. As Silva added additional features to Prism, it was turned into a showcase product to coincide with the Amiga's debut in 1985. After release, it was quickly embraced by the Amiga community and became the defacto graphics (and later animation) editor for the platform. Amiga manufacturer Commodore International later commissioned EA to create version 4.5 AGA for bundling with the new AGA-chipset (A1200, A4000) capable Amigas. Version 5 was the final release after Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994.
With the development of Deluxe Paint, EA introduced the ILBM and ANIM file format standards for graphics. Although widely used on the Amiga, they never gained widespread acceptance on other platforms. The PC conversion was used by Lucasarts to make graphics for their adventure games such as Monkey Island.
A minor bit of legal controversy surrounded images created with Deluxe Paint in its early releases. EA argued that they held the copyright on any image created with DPaint since they held the copyright to the tool itself. The courts determined, however, that they did not own the copyrights of works created with the program. If so, makers of compilers or other software tools could claim ownership of properties created with their products (and by extension, makers of pens and paper could claim copyrights on any books written with their tools). EA's case, while not groundbreaking by legal standards, was interesting nonetheless.
Interestingly, early versions of Deluxe Paint were available in both protected and non copy-protected versions, the latter retailing for a slightly higher price. This copy-protection was later dropped. Deluxe Paint was part of a series of products from the Electronic Arts Tools group, which included such Amiga programs as Deluxe Music, Deluxe Video, and the Studio series of paint programs for the Macintosh.
Functionality
Unlike other products, for example Adobe Photoshop, DPaint was heavily orientated towards the bitmapped and bitplaned display modes of the Amiga. In other paint applications palette and image data are somewhat divorced. In DPaint they were firmly linked, to the extent that changing the hue of a palette entry automatically changed all pixels of that index in the image.
Versions prior to 4 did not support the extended set of display modes, such as HAM (Hold And Modify) and Extra Halfbrite, which did not directly translate bitplane data into a colour index.
The heavily reliance on an indexed colour model allowed for a rather different way of working, not generally found on many popular paint programs since. The intimate linking of palette and image data made DPaint an excellent tool for creating bitmapped icons, animation and game graphics in the days before true colour images became commonplace.
For example, transparency was as simple as selecting a background colour index (a single right click on the palette GUI to change). Colours could be locked from editing by use of a stencil (a list of colour indexes whose pixels should not be altered in the image data.) And simple colour-cycling animations could be created using contiguous entries in the palette. It was also easy to change the hue and tone of a section of the image by altering the corresponding colours in the palette.
Trivia
- The webcomic Unicorn Jelly was drawn entirely in version 2 of Deluxe Paint.