Art Department Professional

[Harrison]

Who remembers this software? At the time Art Department Professional was the best graphics program you could buy for the Amiga. It cost a lot of money, but could perform tasks on digital images that no other package could do at the time. It could also perform batch processing on a group of images, so could be left to get on with things once set up.

I gained a full copy of this package with my A4000. The box is huge and inside is filled up with one large ring bound folder containing the manual and disks in a plastic sleeve at the back.

Is this package now collectible? Does anyone even remember it? I will take some pictures for the software directory when I get time. However I don't think I could be patent enough to scan the whole of that huge manual in. I would take a long time!

[Sharingan]

So is it anything like Photoshop? Or more akin to Deluxe Paint?

[Harrison]

It's actually nothing like either. Sounds confusing to say that I know. The closest program I could compare it to is probably the Newtek Video Toaster video editing software. That might sound a bit strange. It isn't actually a drawing package like DPaint but an image processing package. The main screen is a mass of selection boxes and options. You don't even see the image while you are setting up the processing you wish to do to it.

At the time this was state of the art. It could open and convert between many different image formats, and also directly control a lot of different hardware. It could also integrate with the Morph Pro package. It actually is still quite a powerful package for conversion between file formats and reduction in colours etc... Shame the interface is quite clunky.

Take a look at the following video to see what it looked like, how it worked, and what it could do:

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=MAxCn-901jY

Be warned! This video contains possibly the most boring voice over I've ever heard. I had trouble just staying away until its end! :lol: