Deluxe Paint - Workflow

Workflow

The heavy reliance on an indexed colour model allowed for a rather different way of working, not generally found on many popular paint programs since. The intimate linking of palette and image data made DPaint an excellent tool for creating bitmapped icons, animation and game graphics in the days before true colour images became commonplace.

"" hotkeys could step through the indexed palette, turning indexed-pixel-painting into a fast 2-handed mouse+keys process, and right mouse button would paint with background colour (instead of bringing up a context sensitive menu as more common in modern packages)

For example, transparency was as simple as selecting a background colour index (a single right click on the palette GUI to change). Colours could be locked from editing by use of a stencil (a list of colour indexes whose pixels should not be altered in the image data). And simple colour-cycling animations could be created using contiguous entries in the palette. It was also easy to change the hue and tone of a section of the image by altering the corresponding colours in the palette. (The specific section would need to use a dedicated part of the palette for this technique to work.)

Brushes can be cut from the background by using the box, freehand, or polygon selection tools. They can then be used in the same manner as any other brush or pen. This functionality is simpler to use than the "stamp" tool of Photoshop or Alpha Channels as provided in later programs. Brushes can also be rotated and scaled, even in 3D. After a brush is selected, it appears attached to the mouse cursor, providing an exact preview of what will be drawn. This allows precise pixel positioning of brushes, unlike brushes in Photoshop CS3 and lower, which only show an outline.

Animations stored in IFF ANIM format were delta compressed (only differences between current and previous frames are stored), making animations even smaller and faster on playback.