Deluxe Paint - Functionality

Functionality

Unlike modern graphics editors, such as Adobe Photoshop, most Amiga graphics editors were heavily oriented towards the bitmapped and bitplaned display modes of the native Amiga chipset, and in Deluxe Paint this was most prominent.

The Amiga natively supports indexed colour, where a pixel's colour value does not carry any RGB hue information but instead is an index to a colour palette (a collection of unique colour values). By adjusting the colour value in the palette, all pixels with that palette value change simultaneously in the image or animation. Creative artists could use this in their animation by using "colour cycling".

Deluxe Paint III added support for Extra Halfbrite. It also added editing modes that allowed one to stencil certain colors, and perform blurs on the stencils in such a way as to produce an effect that with skill could be made to look similar to light-sourcing in a 3D program. Deluxe Paint III also added the ability to create cel-like animation, and animbrushes. These let the user create cel-like animations, as well as the ability to pick up a section of an animation as an "animbrush", which can then be placed onto the canvas while it animates. Deluxe Paint III was one of the first paint programs to support animbrushes. These allow you to copy a section of the animation and paste it into another area of the screen and animation. Similar to copy and paste, except you can pick up more than one image.

Deluxe Paint IV, which did not feature Silva as the Lead Programmer, was significantly less elegant and crashed more often than its predecessors, though it did offer significant new features like non-bitplane-indexed Hold-and-Modify support. Version 4.5 AGA, which appeared the following year, addressed the stability issues along with providing support for the new A1200/A4000 AGA machines and a revamped screen mode interface. It appeared in both standalone and Commodore-bundled versions.

The final release of Deluxe Paint, version 5, had support for true 24-bit RGB images. However, using only the normal AGA native chipset, the 24-bit RGB colour was only held in computer memory, the on-screen image still appeared in indexed colour.