If you are reading this in the I/O Port or on the TCS website and want to order these programs, call Don Singleton at 622-3417. I will be demonstrating this package at my December 9th meeting of the Graphic SIG at Martin East Regional Library at 7 PM. For information about this SIG, call me at 664-7707.

The bundle consists of a CD-Rom with Paint Alchemy 2, TypeCaster 1.15, Terrazo 2, Fresco, and for a limited time a Xaos T-shirt.he bundle can be used with any program that accepts Photoshop 3.0 or 4.0 compatible filters. However, XaosTools will only support Paint Alchemy when used with Adobe Photoshop 3.0 or 4.0, Adobe Painter 3.0 or 4.0 and Adobe Premier 4.0.

On the window's platform, the requirements for this program are: window 95 or NT 4.0; a 16 bit graphics card; 4 MB hard disk space; a 486 or faster processor; and a minimum of 16 MB Ram with 24 recommended.

I will describe each program separately: Fresco is a collection of many background textural images in three formats - 300 dpi, 72 dpi, and 640 x 480 pixels. There are a huge number of images on this CD even in the 300 dpi category.

Paint Alchemy 2 is a plugin filter that can be used to change the total appearance of an image. It consists of over a 100 presets with multiple tools to manipulate these presets. Thus, in reality, one can create an infinite number of styles. These "styles" can be applied to RGB images as a whole or to channels within the image. While the styles were interesting, on a 300 dpi image that was 20 megs in size, it took 5 minutes to display the image once it was applied. Preview was instantaneous. When I applied a filter to a file of only 2 megs, the effect was instantaneous. The computer used for this test was a Pentium 100 with 64 megs of ram. I tested it from Photoshop 4.01.

The manual gives a quick tour of Paint Alchemy and also contains a tutorial. Terrazo 2 gives one the ability to make kaleidoscopic tiles and backgrounds from one image. This program can be used extensively to create web backgrounds. The purpose of TypeCaster 1.15 is to create 3D type directly from a host program. To see examples of these images go to http://www.tcs.org/xaosto.htm. Figures 2-3 were created using Paint Alchemy. Figures 5-6 were created using Terrazo, and TCS was created using TypeCaster.

This package is definitely worth the money.