Bazbo Soft's Photon Paint - distributed through Micro Illusions/Activision - takes full advantage of the Amiga's HAM (Hold and Modify) mode, allowing up to 4,096 colours on-screen at the same time, whilst also providing an array of real-time drawing functions.

This package has received quite a good press of late, but after struggling with the latest addition to the rapidly growing circle of Amiga art utilities. I can only suggest that other reviews were seduced by the impressive HAM pictures included with the program, or simply stunned by the huge array of colours to play with and the clever brush manipulation features.

These 3D surface mapping routines (see pic) allow a section of artwork - or 'brush' - to be wrapped around a tube, ball, cone, ellipse, cube or freehand object, and to be shaded accordingly by a ray-traced 'luminescence' command. Some clever effects can be obtained, but serious applications are really quite limited. The package also allows the flat 2D brush to be re-sized, bent, twisted and tilted in three dimensions.

Alongside these amazing devices though, the package has some real failings: the ever-important magnify mode is clumsy to use, and you have no way of finding the RGB value of pixels already coloured. When having so many different shades to manage, this proves extremely annoying; tidying up a shaded, surface-mapped brush is made incredibly difficult by having to match the computer-defined colours by eye.

Photon Paint's HAM calculations are centred around sixteen base colours which are then modified to produce the remaining colours in the picture. Occasionally, these calculations give rise to 'colour fringes', where a separate edge of a different colour appears next to the original. There are only avoidable by careful planning of the base palette and can be extremely annyoing when encountered, spoiling an otherwise clean piece of artwork.

Indeed, the co-ordination and use of over 4,000 colours proves to be a low and often laborious process. There are plenty of lengthy calculations to sit through, loads of disk accessing and even more disk swapping to be endured. This is most apparent when attempting to save or load your artwork: on occasions, up to six disk changes were needed in order to bring up a picture. Needless to say, an extra external disk drive is recommended.

In the final analysis, Photon Paint is an impressive utility, but one which is far from perfect. Creating an entirely original picture is a time consuming and occasionally frustrating process. This removes much of the spontaneity which makes art so enjoyable; I'd much rather work quickly in 32 colours than slowly in 4,096.