I used deluxe paint 4 and loved it, I still have some of the amiga disks that I recorded the pictures I did with it. The Amiga was and still is my all time favorite computer.
I remember my first exposure to DPaint was over at my friend's house, in a tiny almost secret room at the back of their attic - the ultimate Amiga cave. He loaded it up and used the spray tool with some neon colors, which just blew my mind. Of course, it was his big brother's computer, so we had to sneak in there to use it, which I guess just added to the excitement. Those were the days!
Thanks for the Shout Out of my Amiga Art Contest, Dan! We have some just incredible submissions this year, too. The Livestream of Amiga Art Contest 2021 will be November 13th this year, hosted by myself and Pixel Vixen.
Excellent video! Thank you so much for bringing back those memories! I don't expect anyone to read any of this but here we go! I owe so much to my parents spending so much money back in the day on buying an Amiga 500 and Deluxe Paint. I used this so much and eventually I landed my first job at RARE Ltd in 1991. Mostly thanks to my work in DPaint. I was very young at the time and had just left 'Secondary School' as it was called back then, thinking I was going on to College but landing this amazing fulltime job instead. I kinda fit right in to be honest, RARE's custom in-house software and hardware at the time, was very much like DPaint, showing you just how good and influential DPaint was at the time! The custom hardware comprised of a fairly plain looking grey box with a 3.5 inch floppy drive with a detachable circuit board on top (this was a custom board to which new software was uploaded to and new ram etc was added). And finally there was a very early type of Wacom (I don't think it was manufactured by Wacom though) drawing tablet attached. The pen, in hindsight, was pretty awful to use, it was attached by a stiff cable to the tablet that always got in the way and restricted your movement a fair bit and the pen tip was a metal ball that you had to physically press down to start drawing. Because of this the tablet surface would have to be replaced all the time, hah! I say 'in hindsight' because at the time I had never used such a device for art before, I was so used to mouse and keyboard on the Amiga. Back to Dpaint though! I continued to use Dpaint at home on the Amiga through to Deluxe Paint IV AGA on my A1200 with 030 accelerator, I never used Dpaint 5, by then I had moved onto PC with various art software on there. (funny enough one of those was Dpaint 2 Enhanced). These days, both at home and 'professionally' I use Cosmigo's Pro Motion NG for most of my 2D art, for both games and just for fun! This software is very obviously inspired by Dpaint, having many of the same sort of functions. I do however still dip into DPaint through emulation now and again on the Amiga Forever platform. Very nostalgic indeed! Anyway I have waffled on so much and I doubt anyone will read this far! If you have, thank you so much for putting up with it! Again, thank you Dan for making this video, all the best to you and happy Halloween!!! 🎃
@@GG-fz7st I used to just draw cocks. Lol. Seriously though, I never really could use it to it's full potential, I was only about 6 when I got my Amiga 600. I got it with DPaint and a game called Putty packed in.
Without a doubt, this is my most cherished piece of software. I spent thousands of hours on this growing up, DP 3 in particular on the A500. Great video
I spent so much time in DPaint. Apart from just messing around I used to make graphics for my AMOS games. That Personal Paint clown picture really takes me back! Brilliance was good too.
Man I spent so much time on D-paint (IV) back in the day. I still have a lot of the artwork I created with it. I even got some of that artwork into the pages of Amiga Format (issue 115, october 1998) and also on the cover CD. I still have some old D-paint artwork on Devientart. 😀
So many years in advance upon everything with this on Amiga, even today I am really surprised about how cool and performant this was back in the days. Loading the 2 digitalized models images that was included was just crazy in DPIV.
The Amiga hardware included the ability to display 4096 colors on the screen simultaneously, and DigiPaint allowed graphic artists to draw with a variety of tools in that full-color space at a time when IBM PCs were typically limited to between 4 and 16 colors. This was the MAGIC of the Amiga , Light years ahead of anything in its class at such a great price point , its very rare to have such planets align to create a machine and software to match that is stuff of legends
Really nice review of DPaint Dan! You covered a lot very succinctly. Needless to say it’s a very special package to me and many others of course too. Thanks for giving the Amiga Art Contest 2021 a shout too, most appreciated and didn’t expect that very kind plug at the end, very kind indeed. I’ll admit that I’ve been slower on pixel art in general since I came to Japan but quietly working away on something using DPaint as well as other things which I’m covering gradually at the moment. 気をつけてね！
The pharaohs likeness was absolutely astounding at the time. I remember it stopping in my tracks while walking through a Sears at the local mall. It may have been low resolution, but the first time I saw something realistic and metallic on a PC screen.
It helps that CRTs provide some softness and shading with those limited colors that just doesn't show up on our modern LCD/LED screens. The box really contextualizes it!
Excellent video Dan, I watching my otherwise non artistic dad design a animation with Deluxe paint of a playing card that span back and forth about 60° on its axis it looked really cool and took him months. I was all of about 9 at the time. Magical memories.
Like you I got D-Paint 3 with my Cartoon Classics Plus. Loads of memories including ripping screen shots with the AR MKIII and loading them into D-Paint. I still have some floppy disks with stuff I made and saved in D-Paint back in those days.
@Greg’s Game Room - THANKS! We (ArtisTech Development) had a blast creating the ST version. There’s a lot of fun backstory to DPaint ST. We were just a bunch of kids straight out of high school. We were both Amiga and Atari fans. Wanting to make games. But the tools for ST were horrible compared to Amiga. We went to EA, and asked if they would pay for us to make ST version. They said “only if WE PAY THEM”. haha. we’ll .. we didn’t have that kind of money, so we decided to make our own program. We called it “Da Vinci”. We got it to beta quality, and showed it at a ‘world of Atari’ show/convention. Then EA saw it and THEY asked US if they could buy it and make it “Deluxe Paint ST”.
DPaint is what I used to impress my (then future) wife with my cool computer skills, the first night I met her back in 1991 when that seemed like magic. I was obviously a true nerd if I took her home from a cool drunken party to show her an Amiga instead of making out. But hey, we're still together today :)
Dan, thank you for producing and posting this. It's completely taken me back to my childhood happy place! I also spent hours and hours playing with D-Paint (v3 & v4) and also had no artistic talent, but I really enjoyed the animation side. Prior to this, I'd been introduced to Degas Elite on the ST (at school) which coming from the Beeb, was a miracle in my eyes but D-Paint was so much better.
I just loved DP3. All through high school, I would make cheesy animations for school projects. History, English, etc. I have zero artistic ability, but it was trivial to use. and back then, most people thought it was like magic
I remember seeing this Tut picture at Computerware at the mall in the 80s. I swear it was a photo. My mind was blown at that time. We ended up getting an Amiga in Video Production class at my high school and used some version of Paint. It was a trip being able to record video of a computer image…. The 80s were awesome.
Dan, its so pleasing to watch a video where you actually are interested in the software instead of some guy who has such a large retro collection then just boots up doom on each of them. Thank you so much!
I had no art skills either when we got our Cartoon Classics pack in Xmas '91 (It's strange to think there was another little Dan somewhere in England on Christmas Day being wowed by this new computer Dad had bought at the same time I was :)), but I too enjoyed playing around with it. I never had any great artistic flair or even much interest in creating art, but I nevertheless was impressed by the potential of it and once I had tired of doing what my feeble ability would allow, the programme nevertheless gave me huge enjoyment when I created new maps for Civilization and Worms (On Civ, I had a memorable game as the Chinese in which I simply painted a narrow sea channel through the centre of Asia, isolating me from the rest of Eurasia and Africa. When I eventually made contact with the rest of the world I found that I was hopelessly far behind in technology, so set about vigorously building forts in the mountains and stocking them with musketeers and cannon for a feared invasion which never came. I had similar fun when making a map of Britain, being the only civ there- Romans- and creating a wall of forts across the country to guard against imaginary barbarian tribes). In Worms the Director's Cut they included an in-game simple paint version for making maps, but I didn't enjoy that as much as actually going into DPaint myself and choosing all the colours, brushes etc. and not being restricted to painting shapes that would be filled with the chosen map texture from the game, so in that aspect I preferred Worms to Worms DC.
Fond memories, my parents bought me an Amiga 1200 that same Christmas, in the Desktop Dynamite package. Fantastic technology for its age but I remember Deluxe Paint well along with Oscar, Home Alone and Wing Commander.
I think the AGA release of DPaint is Deluxe Paint 4.5. My friend and I spent hours and hours designing animations on his A500 and then his A2000 back in the day. 87-92 were our golden years. He had the Amiga and I had a lowly IBM AT 486 with EGA graphics and Adlib sound. Needless to say we were always at his house and not mine.
An 486 with EGA? It might have been an 386? Was there no game? At that time is had an Amiga 500 and the only PCs I did see were XT8088 or 8086 CGA or so.
@@ironmaiden5658 that a pc with a 486 and an EGA probably didn't exist from a computer store but it might have been a 286 or 386 cpu only. An 486 was absurdly expensive and at such price it would have been at least VGA. Although it's technically possible to make that combination. I wish I would never had a PC with Microsoft e.g. unfortunately commodore needed a businessman like jack tramiel to survive and that didn't happen so tramiel went to Atari and commodore went bankrupt. And Microsoft rules the world since 3 days as most expensive Fortuna company ever in existence richer than the Roman empire and successful invasion od more countries than the Germans ever did.
@@mrkitty777 I don't know what you're talking about. Of course it existed. I owned it. First I had a 286. Then a 386. Then a 486. It was monochrome first. Then CGA and then I upgraded to EGA. It's only a graphics card and monitor. . You can put anything in it you like. They weren't expensive. Not in the US anyway.. It had 1 meg of RAM and a 30 Mb HDD.
Wrote my own paint program because there wasn’t anything that supported the Tandy 1000 and I didn’t have the cash. Taught me a lot about programming when I was 14. I was inspired by Mac Paint and DPaint.
I think I had the same journey with it. No art skills but a fascination with art and animation. I never did really pull off any colour cycling pictures of moving water and the like but I did render tonnes of fractals and colour cycled the heck out of those. It was the most spectacular thing to my eyes. I can absolutely say this sparked a life long passion for creating stuff for the fun of it on computers.
Nice video Dan! I actually still hope someone makes a tutorial on how to use DPaint as a pro, as there are so many hidden tricks and features that all the elite pixelartists were using back then. It's still very usefull as a pixel tool I think.
Great video, had lots of fun with DeluxePaint 3 in the 90's :) Actually my computer came with Dpaint IV demo, but bought the full program DPaint 3 as it happened to be available while I was looking to buy game in one shop, bought the DPaint 3 instead :D Used to draw cars with it. I first traced the basic shape to transparent sheet, placed it to the screen, which stayed nicely in place, thanks to the CRT static electricity and drew the basic shape with DPaint from the sheet. Then added details and coloured it, pretty fun results even if I say it myself :D Some time ago I drew Knight Rider KITT's dashboard instrument panels with the Amiga DPaint, after long time not using it for anything other than watching my old drawings with it. I think I too played with DPaint more than actual games with my Amiga 500 in the 90's.
Deluxe Paint 3 takes me back to spending my lunchtimes at high school in the art department's computer lab. They had 3 Amigas and an early scanner (a digital camera on an arm, pointing at the desk). That was the start of a long career in graphic design for me!
Technically, you can somewhat add BRILLIANCE to the legacy, as the developers of Deluxe Paint ST (Atari ST version) went on to work for Digital Creations and creat BRILLIANCE. And then Digital Creations merged into “Play Inc.” whose president was the producer of NewTek’s Digi-Paint. Anyway, THANKS for the great video!
Eric is still making art on the Amiga to this day! You saw a few of his images when Dan was talking about the Amiga Art Contest. He is a nice guy and quite talented.
There hasn't been any graphics software that's inspired me as much as Dpaint did back in the day. I don't know why but something about it just made me keep creating stuff nonstop.
Great vid thanks! Loved playing with DPaint back in the day. Made my fair share of Stick man animations...usually involving his meeting a grisly end :D
I came to this video to find out more about the software behind the junior senior video -- i was absolutely flabberghasted when it got namedroped, as if you predicted why i was here.
Psychedelic mess using colour cylcling was my speciality. And I made some very good radioactive warning signs with the symmetry tool, only problem was I had no way of ever printing them out.
Hello, i m 45. I was a bit nostalgic and came upon your video. If people want to understand what DPIV was to computer graphics, let them know that all the 2d era incredible arcade artworks from Japan were made using this software. On a personal side, the combination of DPaint and Amos made me do my first video games, and set the path for my future in the industry. I ve been doing games, code and graphics since then (more than 30 years now), and without an amiga, without DPaint, Lightwave, Amos and ASM1, I would probably have had a total different life. Among devs and artits, there s a global respect for any original amiga users, because they are at the source of this industry. We all moved to PC when pentium 2 became so powerfull that it took over everything, shifting to 3d, and c++. But the origin of everything are Amiga and Atari creators.
I remember when Deluxe Paint was released, it was a hot item at the computer store. Could not keep it in stock. I have a copy on my Commodore software shelf.
Cant say how many hours I spent on deluxe paint. I had the A500+ Cartoon Classic pack on release and still have it today. I'm like you Dan I have no artistic skill what so ever, but D Paint was still so much fun to play around on.
My brother and i worked on a original music video back in the early 80's (I was into synths), we created the music and then, working on an Amiga 1200 we sat up all through the night, which we still occasionally talk about, now I might be getting caught up in nostalgia but it was DPaint that tied it all together, so i don't care what we or anyone else calls it, it was special. ps...we had no artistic skill whatsoever, but with DPAINT it rocked. :-)
My high school back in 1990 had a school TV station. We used an Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster and Deluxe Paint III for the titles and graphics. I was the guy for that my senior year. It was an amazing platform, especially for the price.
DPaint (version two, I think) got me started with making graphics on the Amiga in 1987. Still got a boxed version III signed by Dan Silva. :) Moved on to Lightwave and the Video Toaster during art school, spent the 90s and early 2000s working as VFX artist and VFX supervisor.
After watching your videos and taking that fond walk down memory road, I FINALLY dug out my Amiga 500. I've been carting that with me for the last 30 years and just now dug it out of storage and hooked it up! Miraculously it still worked! I fondly remember some of the images I drew for my aviation tech and flight courses in college, but even I didn't remember how amazing they truly were until I fired it up again. I can't believe I qas able to do all that as I am not an artist and they were done on a computer from back in 1988! Anyway is there anyway to transfer these images to a PC and print them out and share them with others on a PC platform?
Yup, same as you. A500, Dpaint 3 and hours and hours making little animations. Used to make a death kill animation, put it on a floppy and post it to my cousin and he would make one in response and post it back. We did that for a while.
I actually used this program in art class in the early 90s in Hauppauge New York. I'm not sure of the Amiga model number, but it was probably a 500. It was the only Amiga in the school that I was aware of, the rest of the computers were all Apple IIs.
When I Purchased my A1000 in 1986 it was quite expensive. I at least got them to throw in a copy of Dpaint. Still using for retro art fun and with PPaint have created a few images for Amiga contests.
I used DPaint on my brother's Amiga and got a copy for my first PC (an AT clone). I fondly remember reverse engineering the DPaint bitmap file format so I could rerender DPaint images in my own programs (I still mostly remember the relatively simple compression algorithm it used). I wouldn't be surprised to learn this was documented somewhere -- but in an age before the internet I would have no idea where to look. So I figured it out myself.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge, Dan! I know the famous Deluxe Paint cover but as someone who never had an Amiga, neither was I aware that famous artists actually drew pictures with it or that the mentioned music video was produced on an Amiga. My thoughts have always been, this looks like C64 stuff so someone surely coded an amazing running demo on one.
I hear DeluxePaint was the program used to draw the graphics for multiformat 90s hit Another World! I live in the UK and I played the Atari ST version of Another World at Paris Game Week 2015!
Lots of impressive DPaint animations submitted to PD libraries. With the help of programs like Moviesetter to add sounds to their animations too. Great video by the way.
Great video Dan, I'll forgive you for not mentioning Brilliance II ;) (exclusive Amiga only). Agreed DPaint is awesome and remember using it on mac and pc.
This video takes me back to the day I used most of the Amiga Art programs I even created my own with Amos Pro programing software and today I use advanced photoshop. 😁👍
DPaint was a great program and use to love playing about with it back in the day. I must have all the Amiga versions of it as I would upgrade as soon as a new release came out.
I will always have a soft spot for Electronic Arts under Trip Hawkins: The "We see farther" ad was truly visionary, DPaint was more important back then than Photoshop is today, they literally invented the IFF format that became the standard, and they did other software like Instant Music (though of course with less success, but if you were a game developer back then, EA was a pretty solid supplier). Electronic Arts was one of the most important companies for 8/16-Bit machines.
That last bit you mention, about them being one of the most important companies for 8 and 16-bit machines, is very true. They had a much better reputation back then; the name Electronic Arts was simply a byword for quality and there were no negative connotations attached to the brand. When you saw the EA logo coming up during the initial loading phase of a game, it was a reassuring, pleasing sight.
This took me back decades. Used to use dpaint 3 on my A500+ for his at a time. Even managed to use it to make graphics for an AMOS game which I got published as a user game on an Amiga format cover CD.
I still have a boxed copy of DP3 with animation at my parents place. I used to make sprite sheets with a purple or cyan background and convinced myself an editor would contact me to give me a job in the videogame industry. I was 11 years old.
I used to love playing with the animation features on this! Although you could only get a few frames out of it at any time, I used to string them together to form longer sequences then record it to vhs tape. Heady days indeed.
Dpaint was awesome, and very user friendly. Amiga was an exciting time, that took multimedia computing to the next level and accessible to the everyday user.
I'm not very artistic, but I loved fooling around with the various versions of Deluxe Paint. I found it very easy to use. When I made the move to Windows, I was really disappointed at how primitive and clunky the UIs of various paint programs were. Many of them used the menu Copy/Paste to do what DPaint did effortlessly with the brush feature. And out of the free programs I've tried, I haven't seen one that included anything like DPaint's perspective function that allowed you to tilt a brush in three dimensions. For those who are interested, Ultimate Paint is about the closest program I've found for Windows. Saint Paint is also good, although I find UP easier to work with.
I had the same impression of Windows and the various Windows drawing programs available back then, including CorelPAINT and Photoshop. And, even to this day, no major painting software has duplicated the usability of DPaint with it ease of copy-and-paste, live brush manipulation, and various features unique to DPaint.
@@AndreasToth I originally typed this the other day, but then the browser crashed when I went to check something and I lost it. Both Ultimate Paint and Saint Paint are very similar to DPaint. They don't have all of its features, namely perspective and the fill options that would add a highlight to simulate 3D, but they're the easiest to use that I've found. Both let you easily cut brushes and then paint with them. Both let you draw with the left button and erase with the right button. You can deform brushes in both to sort of simulate perspective, but it's hard to be precise. Both have a symmetry option and all the standard drawing tools. Both are also freeware. Ultimate Paint Advantages: Has a variety of brush cutting options, such as box, circle, freehand, irregular shape, user-defined box, etc. You can also cut multiple sections at once and have then all follow the pointer. Drawing boxes and circles, or selecting brushes and areas shows a large set of cross lines for precise positioning. Unlimited undo as well as a specific brush undo. There's also a handy snap to grid function. Ultimate Paint Disadvantages: Transparent brushes are useless for freehand drawing as the color instantly reacts with itself the moment you press the button. It's only practical to select an area, then draw a transparent, filled box over it, so only the selected area is affected. Holding the Shift key to constrain the mouse movement to horizontal or vertical is kind of broken as it doesn't take effect immediately. It's also crashed on me on a few occasions and I've also had rare instances where the selection lines would become part of the image. Saint Paint Advantages: Layers, transparent drawing mode that doesn't react with itself until you release the button and start a new drawing operation, smoothing/blur mode, animation features. Can save in more formats, such as icons. Saint Paint Disadvantages: Only box and freehand selection, can't cut a brush using the right mouse button, drawing boxes and circles, or making a selection only changes the pointer to a hand with a small crosshair for marking the corner or the center of the operation. Zoom isn't as smooth and seems to go from small steps to large jumps in the blink of an eye. Both programs have their good and bad points. I use whichever program suits my needs at the moment, although I tend to rely on Ultimate Paint more. If you try them out, I'd be curious to hear what you think of them.
What I see from the images is that there was no gradual transparency for brushes? Which I think would be possible with some clever dynamic pallets? I think people didn’t realized how powerful this would be.
