Your preferred version of Deluxe Paint

[Amiga Lifestyle]

The one that came with my A1200 back in the day.
5 seems fine but it feels like it crashes a lot, it may just be the copy I have.

[fxgogo]

I have been exploring the various point upgrades or versions that are floating out there and there is a lot more than I thought. It also doesn’t help that some versions are needlessly cracked and those can’t be relied on to not have unofficial modifications or instability problems.

[rare_j]

I found the version of DPaint 3 that was packed in with the A500+ to be the most stable and least janky.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by rare_j

I found the version of DPaint 3 that was packed in with the A500+ to be the most stable and least janky.

I cant remember seeing 4.6 crash

[fxgogo]

Thanks everyone for your votes and thoughts in the comments. Looks like the results were more or less in line with my thoughts. But why no love for DPaint 1?

[Paul_s]

It would have to be II as that's what I got with my A500 back in 1990.

[Megalomaniac]

I've said 3, partly because its the one I had, but I'd say the addition of animation to 3 was probably a bigger leap than anything added by 2 or 4, and the AGA version was soon outdone by Brilliance. The first one was probably the most impressive for its time, but then it required a £1300 computer at that time.

[Lord Aga]

I remember using DPaint IV AGA the most on my A1200.
I did try the V version, but on my level I did not see any differences.

[Avanze]

Deluxe Paint III, yea

[CCCP alert]

I see elements of Dpaint III's 2.5D manipulation in my advanced video editor, it was a game changer for animation beyond simple key frame/tweening/uncompressed frame tools at the time.

Dpaint II for regular static pixel art is pretty much all there though, I actually preferred using Dpaint II for doing album cover art on my A1000 because there were some neat tricks/hacks using palette range and style functions to do things like smudge in modern paint programs you get today. It's how I did a copy of the cover of Enigma's first album.

Dpaint IV AGA on the 1200 was too slow for me, but regular Dpaint IV on my A1200 was not too bad IIRC.

[Marle]

There are 4 released versions of DPaint IV.

4.0 - Original release, somewhat buggy, Kickstart 1.2 compatible.
4.1 - Fixes many bugs and adds some features (improved morphing, double click in file requesters to OK), Last Kickstart 1.2 compatible version. Some retail boxed copies are 4.1.
4.5 - DPaint "AGA" except it works on all Amigas with Kickstart 2.04 or later. Saved files are OCS/ECS compatible but be aware that colors will be mapped to RGB-4 on such machines and may need tweaking as a result. Adds some features, such as key shortcuts to requesters.
4.6/4.61 - Very minor update to 4.5.

The biggest flaw is in 4.x is the palette mixer, it's slow because it's a HAM screen to allow live color mixing, and you have to always switch it from RGB to HSV on opening, both mixing options are not available from the get go unlike all other versions of DPaint including 5 which improved the palette requester.

I tend to use DPaint 4.1 or 4.5 these days. It's more solid than 5.

Vix

[KONEY]

Personal Paint ^_^

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by KONEY

Personal Paint ^_^

I always thought of PP as a shameless DPaint rip-off but I also never gave it a fair chance. I think the only version I tried was the 6.x something that came on an Amiga Format CD.
Can you make a quick pitch for PP? Whats good, whats bad etc? Did the later 7.x updates add anything useful?

[Retro1234]

I agree PP was very very similar -was it licenced?

Got it on a CoverDisk and was good for loading and converting to PC formats,iirc GIF

[Marle]

I'm not the OP but there is nothing that wrong with Personal Paint but it's biggest weakness is in animation, it's not as good as DPaint. It also doesn't support HAM.

But it has some nice dithering for reduced color counts, some effects of maybe a bit of a dubious value these days, and it doesn't have the dreaded "no painting behind the toolbar/menu" when active that DPaint has always struggled with. The magnifier is also a bit more flexible.

[Daedalus]

There are a few key areas where PPaint beats DPaint for me, to the point that I've barely used DPaint at all since I started using PPaint in the late '90s:

- RTG support. Being able to edit images on a nice, big, hardware-accelerated screen is wonderful, and makes editing an image on an AGA screen (as DPaint requires) feel very slow and unresponsive. It also means chip RAM isn't a limiting factor.
- Support for all mainstream formats as well as datatypes. JPEG, PNG, GIF etc. are all very well supported, both for loading and saving. Custom options for format-specific things like transparency and compression are included too.
- Solid ARexx support and excellent selection of included macros. The ARexx support in the application is very comprehensive and powerful, and a vast array of filters and effects can.
- Tied to the above two points, the ability to easily import and export AnimGIFs has long been a regular use case for PPaint for me, even preferring to use it over Fireworks in some cases back when I was doing web development.
- Support for loading in 24-bit image data, despite only being an 8-bit paint program.
- Excellent palette statistical and colour reduction algorithms are included, allowing various options to optimise colour reductions. This really helped getting the best out of PNG and JPEG imports, for example.

And probably more that would come to mind as I use it.

There are a couple of features that DPaint has that PPaint lacks however, but they're not things I would normally use, so they don't impact me. I'm sure other people would though, and in those cases the choice would be a little less clear cut. To my mind:
- HAM support. PPaint doesn't allow the use of HAM modes.
- Anti-aliasing. This is a nice feature added in DPaint IV I think, and it's one thing I occasionally miss in PPaint.


The similarities with DPaint are clear, but really only go as deep as the general GUI layout. There are lots of other packages on various platforms which followed a similar layout, not least MacPaint and MS Paint in their early days, and many more besides. So I don't consider it a rip off, more like a more modern alternative with a similar interface to many packages that came before.

[eXeler0]

Looks like no one touched the code for 5 years..
http://www.ppaint.com/

but it's still being sold..
https://amigakit.amiga.store/persona...nt-p-1292.html

Sounds like it would be a decent option for RTG Amigas these days then..

10 min Amiga podcast review of v7.3c
[ Show youtube player ]

[lmimmfn]

As PP is mentioned here, for me while DP4.5 i thought was the best version of DPaint, i moved on to Brilliance 2 afterwards and found it the best by far, performance, tools(especially blending to remove aliasing with a stencil). DPaint was still better for creating animations though.

Each had its own strengths and weaknesses, for me:
Best all rounder: Brilliance 2
Best for animation: DPaint 4.5
Best for file formats: PPaint

I never really had much use for PPaint though if you had ImageFx or Art Department Pro.

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Looks like no one touched the code for 5 years..
http://www.ppaint.com/

but it's still being sold..
https://amigakit.amiga.store/persona...nt-p-1292.html

Sounds like it would be a decent option for RTG Amigas these days then..

10 min Amiga podcast review of v7.3c
[ Show youtube player ]

I found PP extremely limited with RTG because of the 256 colour limit, it could have been the best package if it supported full 24bit view and processing and expanded image processing. I was disappointed with TrueBrilliance that it was still using HAM for the view rather than native 24bit RTG.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

As PP is mentioned here, for me while DP4.5 i thought was the best version of DPaint, i moved on to Brilliance 2 afterwards and found it the best by far, performance, tools(especially blending to remove aliasing with a stencil). DPaint was still better for creating animations though.

Each had its own strengths and weaknesses, for me:
Best all rounder: Brilliance 2
Best for animation: DPaint 4.5
Best for file formats: PPaint

I never really had much use for PPaint though if you had ImageFx or Art Department Pro.


I found PP extremely limited with RTG because of the 256 colour limit, it could have been the best package if it supported full 24bit view and processing and expanded image processing. I was disappointed with TrueBrilliance that it was still using HAM for the view rather than native 24bit RTG.

Right, that was my combo too. DPaint 4.5 + ADPro for conversion / processing. Probably why I never missed those features from PPaint.
Also, I didn't own an RTG Amiga back in the day. I also had (actually Legal / purchased versions ) of Imagine for 3d rendering and Image FX because it felt it would be useful, but I probably did most processing with ADPro instead.

Later in the 90s I also tried to use Photogenics but at that point I had access to Photoshop on PC and while Photogenics was somewhat impressive, everything was just much slower on an AGA Amiga even with 060 so it became more and more obvious the writing was on the wall...
After that I mostly reverted to DPaint IV / V only for pixel-art and used Photoshop for anything "image process or conversion releated)

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Looks like no one touched the code for 5 years..
http://www.ppaint.com/

but it's still being sold..
https://amigakit.amiga.store/persona...nt-p-1292.html

Sounds like it would be a decent option for RTG Amigas these days then..

Yup, it's also worth noting that version 7.1c is a free download if you scroll down fully on ppaint.com. There are some improvements in 7.3, but all the major features are there in 7.1c.