** 1 page PD/Shareware / 562 words **

VISION v3.5a

** On Reader Disk **

Joe Connor gives us a glipmse of this Anglo/French art package...

** VISABOUT.GIF (smallish) here **

There have been a steady stream of art packages over the years but ask yourself how many of these are relevant to your current image-editing requirements? My guess is not many and, in my experience, no single art package is a one-stop-solution so let's see how VISION measures up.

VISION is a shareware application, programmed by Jean Lusetti in France, which includes both French and English RSC files - English is selected from a popup in the Preferences dialog but you have to run VISION in French first in order to select a different language - a crafty bit of cultural imperialism!

Unlike Positive Image VISION cannot work on images which have a greater colour depth than the current screen depth so editing 24-bit colour images in mono mode isn't possible but, to be honest, it was never really a practical method of working anyway. Images with a greater number of colours than the current screen depth can be opened but they are either dithered or converted to greyscale. There's also an option to protect the GEM colours used to display the interface - no more black text on black menus and dialogs (been there, done that, got the T-Shirt!).

The Toolbox window is traditional and works well, left click on an icon to select each tool or right (or [Alternate]+left) click to display the relevant options for each tool. All the tools and options can also be selected from the Tools drop down menus or via F key combinations. The commonplace Replace, Transparent, XOR and Invert transparent drawing modes are supported along with a rectangular and free form block selection tools although the block functions seem limited - but there's a neat rotate dialog.

Most of the popular image formats are supported including TIFF, JPEG, GIF, Targa, BMP, X-IMG, Degas, NEO, Art Director (ART) and MacPaint (MAC) and there's also a batch conversion option.

VISION is intuitive, fun to use and on the Reader Disk. The unregistered version is fully functional with occasional 15 second shareware delays to encourage registration and you don't need me to tell you what to do if you like it.

** product boxout **
VISION v3.5a

Status: Shareware
Cost: 180 FFs (around œ18) or 230 FFs (around œ23) with printed (French) documentation

System: All Ataris, 640x400x2 (ST-high) resolution or higher

Contact:
Jean Lusetti
http://www.multimania.com/jlusetti
Email: vision@atari.org or j-lusetti@multimania.com

Pros: Intuitive, fast, works from mono all the way up to TrueColor resolutions, you can never have too many art packages

Cons: No documentation provided with unregistered version, my NVDI 5 printer drivers were not recognised

87%
** /product boxout **


** Images and captions **
** VISMENUS.GIF (must use) **
** VISTOOLD.GIF (must use) **

** VISZOOMD.GIF **
VISION's real-time zoom window makes pixel-perfect editing easy

** VISALBUM.GIF **
VISION includes its own built-in catalogue, slideshow, snapshot, font selector and bubble help variants which all work fine but I can't help feeling using external utilities would have saved considerable programming effort

** VISDIVID.GIF **
Here's an unusual feature. Images can be automatically divided into sub-blocks and saved as separate files which can be useful when generating arrays for HTML pages

** VISFILTD.GIF **
There are a range of nifty editable filters but unless your French is better than mine you'll have to try them to see what happens - the anti-alias filters seem particularly effective