Standing as it does, not only head and shoulders, but knees and ankles above its competitors in terms of name recognition, Adobe Photoshop is in danger of becoming a generic term for image editing software. An overwhelming majority of graphics professionals use it, and a great many amateurs as well, despite the fact that it is one of the most expensive software applications on the market.

There are several pretenders to the Photoshop throne, but none with serious prospects of threatening Photoshop’s hegemony over the bitmap graphics field. Deneba Canvas and Corel Photo-Paint are both powerful image editing programs, in some areas offering features Photoshop can’t match at prices hundreds of dollars lower. Fractal Design Painter is also a powerful specialty bitmap graphics program developed with creative artists especially in mind.

However, the fact is that the four programs cited above are all overkill for the sort of graphics work most non-professional computer users are ever likely to do. They are all big, ponderous, difficult to learn, and RAM hungry. The bitmap graphics program “for the rest of us,” arguably, is MicroFrontier’s 32-bit image editing program Color It! 4.0, which is a very cool program that deserves more recognition than it gets.

Bitmap graphics or “paint” software programs are all essentially descended from the MacPaint application that shipped with the original Macs back in 1984. There used to be a passel of paint programs for the Mac, including Photoshop, Canvas, Painter, SuperPaint, UltraPaint, Expert Color Paint, the painting module in HyperCard, PixelPaint Pro, Color It!, MacPaint itself, and more.

Of all of these, Color It! came closest to being an all-around substitute for Photoshop at a fraction of the price, which is probably why it is still around while most of the others are pushing up daisies in the software boneyard.

My first acquaintance with Color It! was Version 3.0, which came bundled with a scanner I bought about four years ago. I was impressed that the bundled image editing software was such a complete and comprehensive program and not a “crippleware” come-on to buy something more expensive. Color It! has been my main image editing and scanning program ever since.

I found that Color It! even offered some features that the formidable Photoshop didn’t, notably including multiple undos and a convolution editor that applies convolutions (numerical pixel-by-pixel operations) on the fly as you paint. Color It! also happily supports Photoshop plug-ins, vastly expanding its built-in versatility, and has a customizable toolbox, user-friendly color controls with an intuitive slider-bar motif, anti-aliasing and feathering options, an Unsharp Mask function, and selection and masking tools. Color It! gives you pressure-sensitive control over input (if you have a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet like Wacom’s), does color corrections with its Levels and Curves commands, allows you to edit color channels separately using paint tools and special-effects filters, including CMYK separation channels.

While Color It!’s execution of certain functions is less precise and powerful than Photoshop’s, it is more than adequate for the needs of novices, advanced amateurs, and light professional use. It is also enough like Photoshop that those familiar with that program will not have a steep learning curve to climb.

For the sort of graphics work I typically do, such as converting screenshots to GIFs or JPEGs for the Web, or doing simple image editing, creating line art drawings for article illustrations, cleaning up product photos, and the like, using Photoshop seems like the proverbial swatting flies with a sledgehammer. Color It! starts up quickly and is admirably fast at doing what it does.

While Photoshop 3.0 (two versions out of date) requires 10 MB of hard disk real estate for the program alone (31.6 MB for the full install less the help files which are another 20 MB or so) and wants a minimum of 16,384 KB of memory to run in, Color It! 4.0 is only 2.9 MB for the application (3.4 MB for the entire installation) and will run in 2,048 KB of memory (both cited memory partitions are with Virtual Memory on).

The current Color It! Version 4.x is an evolutionary upgrade from Versions 2 and 3. Those familiar with the earlier versions of Color It! will have no problem feeling right at home.

With Color It! 4.0 you can:

• Create, view, edit, and save animated GIF files without leaving the program
• Catalog your image files for quicker browsing and retrieval.
• Export documents with clipping paths.
• Remove scratches, dust, red-eye effects & more from scanned or digital photographs with the program’s built-in filters.
• Use Photoshop 3.0-compatible plug-ins
• Open and save PNG and progressive JPEG files.
• Quickly create client- and server-side image maps for the Web by simply defining shapes around parts of an image.
• Apply linear or radial effects to gradient fills.
• Minimize color tables to create smaller GIF files for your Web pages.
• Mix paint and pasted images together with different effects using Color It! 4.0’s new paint transfer modes.

System Requirements are happily modest, making Color It! 4.0 an excellent choice for older 680×0 Macs as well as the latest G3s:

• 68020 processor or greater, or a PowerPC chip
• Mac System 7.0 or later
• At least 2 MB of RAM (3 MB of RAM for the PowerPC version)
• A hard drive with at least 5 MB of available space.

Color It! runs fine on my old 25 MHz 68030 LC 520.

If you have a registered previous version of Color It!, you can upgrade to Color It! 4.0 for just $29.95

The full price for new users of Color It! 4.0 is just $49.95 – an amazing value for the money. This is a powerful, capable software program, folks, for little more than a shareware fee. I love bargains, and this is an extraordinarily attractive one.

If you don’t want to commit even that much cash before trying out Color It!, you can download a demo version for free. Color It! has also released the older 24-bit Color It! 2.3 as freeware in CD-ROM bundles like the one included with David Pogue and Joseph Schorr’s popular Macworld Mac Secrets books.

Manuals for Color It! are downloadable from the MicroFrontier website in either PDF or text only versions.

Education users can obtain Color It! 4.0 from Genesis Technologies for $33 for a single copy, or even less in multiple packs. Go here for details. In my estimation Color It 4.0 is a much more sensible choice of image editing software for schools than Photoshop on the basis of user-friendliness alone, notwithstanding that it sells for a tiny fraction of Photoshop’s price.

There is also a Color It! 4.0.1 update with minor bug fixes available as a free download to Version 4.0 registered users.

Changes in Version 4.0.1 from Version 4.0:

• Information is now displayed correctly when the “Get Info” command in the “Image” menu is used to report on image files created with Color It! 3.2.
• Printing – Fixed page orientation problems and a major Color PostScript bug in which all Color PostScript printing would not work.
• Animated GIFs will now loop only once in Web browsers when the loop count is set to one. Previously, animations would run twice if you set the loop count in Color It! to one.
• Tool Palette Color Pick area – Hold down the OPTION key while clicking the mouse in the Color Pick area to bring up the System’s Color Picker dialog. (The “sticky mouse” feature prevents Mac OS 8.x users from accessing the Color Picker by double-clicking in the Color Pick area.)

MacCave Rating: Color It! 4.x

Price Dependent: *****

Price Independent: ****

Hooray: Incredible Value; Multiple Undos; Small, economical of memory, fast; many high-end features that put more expensive programs to shame; user-friendly; stable, highly polished program

Boo: Some functions not as powerful or precise as they would be in Photoshop, but given the vast price difference between the two programs, this is hardly a serious complaint. Color It!’s eraser tool is a bit poky.

keywords: #colorit

© 1999 Charles W. Moore. Originally published at http://geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/9318/colorit.html