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| Impos/2 v2.0 | - by Chris Wenham |
Impos/2 by Compart Systems is a general purpose 32-bit image processing package with a highly customizable but occasionally annoying interface. Its main strength is its built-in support for a wide range of popular scanners, both flatbed and handheld. It's also unhindered from many of the restrictions found in its major competitor -- ColorWorks 2.0.
I have a love/hate relationship with Impos/2. The user interface is wonderfully configurable with the ability to re-size tool palettes, drag-n-drop, delete or add tool icons anywhere and create new user-defined floating tool palettes with custom tools. It has an extensive REXX interface, with which you can design custom tools and batch processes assignable to buttons that you can add to existing or custom tool palettes. These palettes are also free-floating, not confined to any parent window and therefore easily distributable across your desktop.
But it can also be a real pain to use. A glance at the painting tools palette will not tell you what tool is in use, because the buttons don't "stay down" after you select them. Each separate canvas window can have a different tool in effect, which may be convenient for some, but still leaves me clicking back and forth like mad whenever I'm working on more than one image. The screenshot feature is infuriating; click on the icon and the mouse cursor changes to a camera for a split second, then suddenly switches off while Impos/2 beeps at you with some unidentified error. You must click on the screenshot button and then flick your mouse away quickly before the program expresses complaint, and even that doesn't always work. (Despite this annoying idiosyncrasy, all of the screenshots I made for this review are "self portraits" so to speak.)
Impos/2 doesn't have any "natural media" style painting tools like charcoal sticks or textured canvases though, which I felt the program would benefit from enormously.
Impos/2 has two gradient tools which work more like the ones in PhotoShop than in ColorWorks. With the linear gradient you draw a line that defines the angle of the gradient as well as the thickness of the 'transition area' between the background and foreground colors. Radial gradients are drawn much the same way, but here you're drawing an ellipse. With Impos/2 you can draw elliptical gradients as well as circular ones, a plus over ColorWorks. And by holding down the Alt key as you draw you can invert the gradient.
In addition to the regular painting tools, Impos/2 features a collection of image filters, some of them quite fun. There are the usual 'standard' filters like blur, sharpen, emboss etc. (including a good Gaussian blur). But there are also a range of plug-in filters such as wave, whirlpool (GIF, 91k), oil-painting, ripples (GIF, 48k), radial blur (GIF, 46k) and motion blur.
These filters can be conveniently aborted before they finish by clicking on the black-square button that pops up in the progress bar.
I was unable to test the masking feature properly however, as the program crashed whenever I tried to work with this feature.
Scanners aren't installed at the same time the program is. Rather, the user must go the "Scanner" tab of the program's configuration notebook and add the drivers needed.
The Rexx integration sounds enormously powerful, but there's little mention of it in the manual and the online .INF documentation doesn't explain enough about how to use it. But if you can learn to work with it you can achieve powerful batch and macro processing.
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