| Mitch: Basically, the color processor has a 12 bit register made up
of 4 bits each of red, green and blue. When they were designing the
chip they put in a test mode that allowed them (C/A) to play with
the register directly...people liked it so much they decided to leave
it in and thus HAM was born.
You must use 6 bit planes,
You must NOT use high resolution,
You MAY use interlace (yielding a 320 x 400 picture).
The top two bit planes are are used for commands:
00xxxx = use color xxxx from the color map (absolute load of one
of 16 colors).
01xxxx = load xxxx into the red bits of the color register.
10xxxx = load xxxx into the green bits of the color register.
11xxxx = load xxxx into the blue bits of the color register.
What this means is that as the scanline is processed you have the
option during each pixel of either loading a new abolute color
(00) or changing ONE color gun (01,10,11). At most it would take you
3 pixels to get to any one of 4096 colors. By using the colormap
judiciously (sp?) you can usually average more like 1.2 pixels
to get to the desired color.
This is probably more info than you wanted... sorry.
dave
|
| I got it yesterday.
W O W !
This is one heck of a package! It runs in 4096+ HAM mode. It is
an enhanced version of HAM that NewTek uses that eliminates the
color fringing associated with HAM pics. It uses a sophisticated
dithering technique to clean things up.
This package blows Prism out of the water. If you are interested
in retouching HAM pics, recoloring them (for instance: adding color
to a B+W picture) this is for you. You can lasso brushes just like
on the Mac. However, the similarity ends there. The program will
automatically blend the brush with the background. The best demo
of this is to take a picture of someone's face. Cut out the eye,
or nose or lips (sounds pretty gross...) and drop it on another
part of the face. It will blend in perfectly, leaving no outline.
Hou can create shaded shapes with highlights in only one step.
They can be transparent or solid.
The program does not have perspective (although the pics on the
box would lead you to believe it.) It does not have any way to
use fonts. It does have a fantastic palette system, and a lot of
great options.
BEST OF ALL it creates a mini version of your picture for an icon!!!!!
Now you don't have to wonder what the picture is when you are cleaning
up your disks. I think I'm going to go back and create icons for
all my stored pics. This is fantastic, and long overdue. The
Lightspeed and Quantel Paintbox systems display files in a similar
fashion.
Ink jet prints made from this package are breathtaking. I haven't
tried any dumps to my Juki 5510 color printer yet.
More later...
Randy
|