For most of the Amiga’s life, a picture on an Amiga screen had probably passed through Deluxe Paint. Dan Silva wrote it for Electronic Arts, which released it in November 1985, when the machine was only a few months old. It went on to be the program Amiga owners drew with, a fixture of Amiga 500 bundles, and a working tool for the artists who painted the backgrounds and characters of games for the Amiga, the PC and other machines. In 1991 Computer Gaming World called it an industry standard “used by virtually every publisher”.
Fast facts
- Author: Dan Silva wrote versions I, II and III. Deluxe Paint IV was the first version he did not write.
- Publisher: Electronic Arts.
- First release: Amiga, November 1985.
- Versions on the Amiga: I (1985), II (1986), III (1989, animation), IV (1991, HAM), IV AGA (1993) and V (1995).
- Other machines: Deluxe Paint II for the Apple IIGS (1987) and the IBM PC (1988), and Deluxe Paint ST for the Atari ST (1990).
From Prism to the Amiga
Silva had written a black-and-white paint program called Doodle at Xerox. When he joined Electronic Arts in 1983, Doodle moved to the IBM PC and became Prism, a tool used inside the company. When the Amiga arrived in 1985, he rewrote Prism for the new machine’s graphics chips, and Deluxe Paint was the result. Info told its readers in December 1985 that EA expected it to be “on the shelves by the time you read this”.
What the first version did
Deluxe Paint painted in up to 32 colours at once in its low-resolution modes, chosen from the Amiga’s palette of 4,096. Abigail Reifsnyder, reviewing it for AmigaWorld in the spring of 1986, thought it looked at first like “a kind of MacPaint clone”, with a column of icons down the right-hand side of the screen, and then found that the likeness was “only ‘screen deep’”. Each icon did two jobs, one for each mouse button: the left button picked a brush, the right button let you drag it to a new size. Most menu commands had single-key shortcuts, so, she wrote, it was “one of the only graphics programs I have seen that recognizes that we have two hands”.
Much of its power was in the brush. Any part of a picture could be cut out and used as a brush, then stretched, halved, doubled, flipped, rotated, bent, sheared or recoloured, and saved to disk for later. A spare screen held a second picture or a store of parts, and a palette editor mixed each colour from red, green and blue sliders or from hue, saturation and value. The Spread control filled the palette between two colours with a smooth range of shades.
Colour cycling turned a still picture into a moving one. The program rotated a range of palette entries, so everything drawn in those colours seemed to move while the rest of the picture stayed still. The disk came with a waterfall painted this way, and, Reifsnyder noted, “the water appears to be flowing”. Because the Amiga changes a palette entry without redrawing the picture, the effect costs almost nothing to run.
Pictures were saved in IFF, the Interchange File Format that Electronic Arts devised in 1985 and Commodore adopted for the Amiga. Amazing Computing explained in its first issue, in early 1986, that pictures designed with Deluxe Paint would therefore be usable by other programs.
Versions
| Version | Year | Machine | What it added |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deluxe Paint | 1985 | Amiga | Brushes, colour cycling, spare page, 32 colours from 4,096 |
| Deluxe Paint II | 1986 | Amiga | Perspective, pattern fill, stencils and anti-aliasing |
| Deluxe Paint II | 1987 | Apple IIGS | A port, at $99.95 |
| Deluxe Paint II | 1988 | IBM PC | A port, at $99.95 |
| Deluxe Paint III | 1989 | Amiga | Animation, anim brushes, the Move requester and 64-colour Extra Halfbrite mode |
| Deluxe Paint ST | 1990 | Atari ST | A port, at £49.99 |
| Deluxe Paint IV | 1991 | Amiga | HAM painting and animation, a light table and Metamorphosis |
| Deluxe Paint IV AGA | 1993 | Amiga 1200 and 4000 | 256-colour and HAM8 modes of the AGA chipset |
| Deluxe Paint V | 1995 | Amiga | ARexx macros, a soft-edged airbrush and textures |
Deluxe Paint II followed in 1986, and Silva demonstrated it at SIGGRAPH that summer. EA’s advertisement put Silva’s photograph beside the line “A feast for the eyes. With perspective, pattern fill, stencil, anti-aliasing and much more.” By June 1988 Compute! listed it for the Amiga, the IBM PC and the Apple IIGS. On the PC it later became Deluxe Paint II Enhanced, and EA added a separate Deluxe Paint Animation; both were on sale in the United States by the summer of 1991.
Deluxe Paint III (1989) turned the paint program into an animation program. Silva told Amazing Computing that the Move requester began as soon as he got page flipping working: he wanted to move an object through perspective, and found that sliding it along the ground one frame at a time was slow work, so he built a requester to do it for him. Anim brushes followed, so that people who could not draw animation by hand could move ready-made animated pieces around in three dimensions. He added the 64-colour Extra Halfbrite mode but not HAM, the Amiga’s mode that shows all 4,096 colours at once with restrictions on how neighbouring pixels change: “Not that HAM isn’t useful; it’s just too hard!”
HAM arrived in Deluxe Paint IV in 1991, after Silva had left Electronic Arts. Amiga Format described it as “the only version not written by original author Dan Silva”, although much of his code was reused. Its reviewer, Maff Evans, pointed out that until then anyone who wanted a 4,096-colour picture had to leave Deluxe Paint for a HAM-only program such as Digi-Paint or Photon Paint. Version IV also added a light table, which shows the frames either side of the one being drawn, as a cartoon animator’s lightbox does, and Metamorphosis, which calculates the in-between frames that turn one brush into another. HAM had a cost: Evans found that a large gradient fill could take “anything up to a few minutes”, and he thought an accelerator card “almost a necessity” for professional work.
When the AGA chipset arrived with the Amiga 1200 and 4000, EA “rushed out an upgrade”, as Amiga Format put it in 1993, with 256-colour and HAM8 modes. Deluxe Paint V followed in 1995. By then Amiga Format’s reviewer thought newer programs such as Brilliance and Personal Paint had “punched the life out of” it, and welcomed its ARexx macros, which recorded a sequence of actions for replay from a single key.
In the studios
Artists used it even when the game was not for the Amiga. In December 1989 The One visited a team converting Sega’s coin-op Crack Down to home computers, and found that the graphics were “all done in DPaint” and then moved to the PCs used for development with the utility Dos2Dos. The first three levels alone needed about 600 frames of animation.
In the United States, Computer Gaming World described how Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts, made its adventures in 1991. For Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the artists used “the classic Deluxe Paint method of painting the backgrounds and characters on screen with DPaint”. For Monkey Island 2, they scanned pencil sketches into Photoshop, which the magazine compared to “Deluxe Paint, another industry standard used by virtually every publisher”, and made the basic characters with what the magazine called “Deluxe Paint Animator”.
On the Amiga itself it was everyone’s paint program. Amiga Format recalled in 1995 that Deluxe Paint III “appeared in just about every software bundle sold with an A500”. EA showed off each version with a picture of Tutankhamun, beginning with Avril Harrison’s 32-colour original; by 1993 the series had reached a HAM8 turning head by Don Woo. On the Atari ST, Deluxe Paint ST won ST Format’s first Format Gold award for a program that was not a game.
Sources
- Abigail Reifsnyder, review of Deluxe Paint, AmigaWorld vol. 2 no. 2, March/April 1986, pp. 72–77: the interface, the brush operations, the spare screen, the palette controls, Spread and the colour-cycled waterfall.
- Info issue 9, December 1985, p. 24: EA expects Deluxe Paint to be in the shops.
- Amazing Computing vol. 1 no. 1, 1986, p. 59: IFF and pictures designed with Deluxe Paint.
- ACE issue 22, July 1989, p. 84: first released in November 1985.
- The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review vol. 6 no. 4, April 1989, p. 42: first released in November 1985.
- “DeluxePaint III — The Inside Story”, interview with Dan Silva, Amazing Computing vol. 4 no. 9, September 1989, pp. 30–31: the Move requester, anim brushes, Extra Halfbrite and HAM.
- Amiga Interface no. 3, 1989 (Denmark), profile of Dan Silva by Peter Connor, pp. 15–16: Doodle and Prism.
- Electronic Arts advertisement for Deluxe Paint II, AmigaWorld vol. 2 no. 6, November 1986, p. 9.
- Amazing Computing vol. 2 no. 1, January 1987: Deluxe Paint II shown at SIGGRAPH in 1986.
- Compute! issue 87, August 1987, p. 38: Deluxe Paint II for the Apple IIGS at $99.95.
- Compute! issue 97, June 1988, p. 27: Deluxe Paint II for the Amiga, IBM PC and Apple IIGS; $99.95 (Apple, IBM) and $129.95 (Amiga).
- Info issue 21, July 1988, p. 29: the “new IBM version of Deluxe Paint II”.
- Atari ST User issue 58, December 1990, p. 75: review of Deluxe Paint ST, “ported to the PC two years ago”.
- ST Format issue 19, February 1991, p. 34: Deluxe Paint ST at £49.99 and the first Format Gold for non-game software.
- Computer Gaming World issues 84 and 85, July and August 1991: advertisements listing Deluxe Paint II Enhanced and Deluxe Paint Animation.
- Maff Evans, review of Deluxe Paint IV, Amiga Format issue 26, September 1991, pp. 22–25: HAM, the light table, Metamorphosis and the speed of HAM operations.
- Amiga Format special issue 1, 1992, p. 69: earlier versions limited to 32 colours plus Extra Halfbrite; Deluxe Paint IV at £89.99, “the only version not written by original author Dan Silva”.
- Brian Larkman, review of Deluxe Paint IV AGA, Amiga Format issue 44, March 1993, p. 132: the AGA upgrade and the Tutankhamun pictures.
- Stevie Kennedy, review of Deluxe Paint V, Amiga Format issue 71, May 1995, p. 97: its rivals, the A500 bundles and the ARexx macros.
- The One issue 15, December 1989, p. 52: the Crack Down conversion.
- Computer Gaming World issue 87, October 1991, p. 34: Lucasfilm Games and “the classic Deluxe Paint method”.