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Rainbow Painter 3 is an advanced image editor aimed at both professionals and amateurs who want to retouch photos, paint and draw. It's currently in open beta and will be free throughout the beta period. After that, it will be sold at a reasonable price as shareware.
The previous version, enjoyed its share of accolades, including being named as one of "Ten Tools You Shouldn't Be Without" in the book "Internet For iMacs For Dummies".
Features
• Everything in this program supports 32-bit float/channel in HDR, which lets you make adjustments back and forth without losing quality.
• Support for layers. Lots of blend modes, tools, effects etc.
• View and edit seamless tiles in true WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) style. All you have to do is switch on the repeat function (horizontally, vertically or both) and start working.
All effects and tools support this mode and the brush strokes will continue over the edges.
Rainbow Painter 3 is currently in open beta and can be downloaded by anyone with a Mac or a PC.
Layers
• Although Rainbow Painter has supported layers since 1999, we have continued to develop this useful feature into something considerably more advanced. Today, the graphics layers have different blend modes and other settings.
HDR & Floating Point Precision
• Conventional programs use 8 bits per channel (red, green, blue, alpha), an integer value of 0-255, which is only 256 possible levels.
Rainbow Painter uses 128 bits per pixel and each color component is a 32-bit floating point value with literally billions of possible levels!
Even if you didn't grasp everything about the bits, components and floating points above, you only need to know one thing:
Having billions of levels gives you much more precision than just having 256!
• In addition to this higher precision, all of Rainbow Painter's tools, effects and operations support HDR (High Dynamic Range). This gives you even more precision, since they actually work beyond what is visible to the human eye.
What's the point of this, you ask. Well, here's a concrete example:
Suppose you use a tool or an effect to, for instance, drastically increase the brightness in an image.
You continue working on your picture, only to later decide that you want to lower the brightness in some areas.
In a conventional program, these areas will now look posterized and ugly.
In Rainbow Painter, on the other hand, all that super precision has worked its magic and the picture is as crisp and vibrant as ever!
• Also, photographers can import their HDR images and retouch them in Rainbow Painter without losing their high dynamic range.
Tools
• Rainbow Painter offers lots of different tools, ranging from basic tools like pen and eraser to oil, water-color, airbrush and more.
• When you draw or paint in this program you will always get the best result, thanks to extra precise anti-aliasing (where both the brush and the actual brush strokes are anti-aliased)
Effects
• You have a wide selection of effects to choose from, whether you want to do something spectacular or just remove red eyes from a photo.
Revolutionary Pattern Editing
• View and edit seamless textures and patterns in true WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) style.
Just switch on the repeat function (horizontally, vertically or both) and start working!
• It's like having your artwork on a wallpaper, in a repeating pattern.
You can apply effects or paint/draw anywhere on this wallpaper and see the true results immediately
Windows & Dialogs
• Virtually all windows and dialogs in Rainbow Painter can be transformed into re-usable permanent windows, by clicking in the lower left-hand corner of the window, marking it with a capital 'P'.
A permanent window can be moved around and will, as the name implies, stay open until manually closed instead of automatically closing after one use.
• Also in the lower-left hand corner, you will find a button with a '-' sign on it. Clicking on this button will make the window significantly smaller, but still fully functional! Clicking again on the button (which now has a '+' sign on it instead) returns the window to normal size.
New in version 3.1.2
• [Bugfix] The Mac version had a serious bug that could cause crashes during import/export.
• [Improvement] You can now toggle sub-pixel precision on/off in the Coordinates panel.
• [Improvement] The Zoomer panel now remembers the magnification level.
• [Bugfix] The Rectangle tools were not working correctly with Softness set to zero.
New in version 3.1.1:
• The application can now be used in a window, as well as fullscreen.
• The application is now based on Cocoa instead of Carbon.
• Improved stability.
• Improved memory management.
• Starting a brush stroke (or shape) inside the editing area and ending it outside did not work properly.
• The tools Smear, Smudge, Oil Paint, Fingerpaint and Pastel could cause unwanted 'scratches'.
• Lots of minor bugfixes and improvements.
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
System Support:
PPC/Intel
Shareware
For more information, visit:
http://www.rainbowpainter.com/
Tags: Software Updates ď Graphics & Design ď Software News ď
