ADPro vs. ImageFX

[Ral-Clan]

Hi, I have been a serious ImageFX user for the past decade or so.  I just cannot do without this software.  

But I've heard various people say that ADPro (Art Department Professional) was a "must have" app for the Amiga at one time.

I remember playing with ADPro but I eventually uninstalled it.

Can't ImageFX do anything AdPro could do (and better)?  Or is there still some reason to use ADPro and have both pieces of software installed on one's Amiga?

[Ral-Clan]

AdPro is great for "batch processing" Where you take entire imgages, resize them, recolor them, run a filter on them and resave them either as an image sequence.

But ImageFX has its own batch processor, AutoFX, which is highly customizable and can even use user defined macros....so how is ADPro's batch processor better?

These days Photoshop or After Effects replace BOTH ImageFX and ADPRO
Imagemaster for the Amiga was quite good as well.

I don't know about this.  There have been a few times that I've started using Photoshop to work on an image, but then switched back to ImageFX just because I can do it easier/quicker, etc.  I'm sure Photoshop has now grown so it has more features than ImageFX, but for the core features that people use 99% of the time (and some more exotic features) it seems to me that ImageFX can still do the job well.

[Ral-Clan]

I could'nt live without ImageFX. This program pretty much makes AdPro useless.
Maybe it's because I've used ImageFX so long, but I find it much easier to use than Photoshop, or any Windows program. This is why an Amiga usually sits next to my Windows machine.

My thoughts exactly - although in my case it runs under UAE and shares a common folder with the Windows side so I can easily pop images back and forth across operating systems.  ImageFX runs like the blazes under UAE on a modern PC CPU.

[Ral-Clan]

I'm still using it with a real Amiga A2000. But with a 28MHz 040 it is pretty quick with most operations. I will, no doubt, add WINAUE again - soon to my windows machine.

I ran it on a 33MHz 68020 A2000 up until the summer of 2008.  When the A2000 broke down I reluctantly switched to a PC with WinUAE.  Although I was very skeptical at first it was actually one of the best Amiga decisions I ever made.  All my productivity apps now run about four times faster or more without problems.  I recently edited a large 40,000 x 40,000 pixel image under ImageFX in UAE.  It worked great and was reasonably quick for an image this large (which would cause sluggishness on any modern system).  On my original A2000 I don't even think I could have loaded it into ImageFX with only 32MB RAM.  It would have switched to virtual memory and probably taken a half an hour to load.  I love the original machines, but UAE has really kept ImageFX a practical reality for me for serious work (although I did do a lot of "serious" work on the A2000 as well, just in lower resolutions and I needed a little more patience for complicated operations).

[Ral-Clan]

At this point? I'm sorry but I had to laugh till I fell out of my chair. I was so amused by these words that I had to join the forum so I could reply.
 
You do realize that ADPro has not been modified or maintained for more than 15 years? What are you still doing playing with it? Or ImageFX?
 
I'm still laughing.

I had to bite my tongue here to prevent me from not using forum-banning language, but you could try a little more tact.  I'm sure you didn't mean to come across in an abrasive way, though, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

I've used ImageFX in the past few years to produce graphics for commercially sold products (CD covers, videogame covers) and graphics for professional archaeological reports.  I actually took the graphics home and did them with ImageFX because the photo editing software they had at work was too cumbersome.

It has never hindered me, and it has been just as flexible and faster (in my case) than doing the equivalent in Adobe Photoshop.

Maybe I wouldn't win an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement, but the people I produced these graphics for (whether they be customers, clients or projects partners) have never even suspected I was using 15 year old software.  That's because the end result looks good, and that's all that matters.  Instead they've said "Wow!  Great job!" and sometimes asked if they could get that software for their Windows/Mac computer.

Some of the most beautiful furniture ever produced, far surpassing what is commonly done today (in the Palace at Versailles, etc.) was produced only using hand tools.  Just because they didn't use power tools doesn't make the end product any less impressive.  So you see, it's not the tool, it's what you can do with the tool.  Some people produce amazing art with old software they are familiar with and know how to use intimately, while others have the latest and the greatest software, but produce shitty animated gifs for websites.

You know, there are some artists out there that even use (gasp!) --- paint and canvas!  Wasn't that developed in, like, the 15th century!

[Ral-Clan]

This is where UAE on a really powerful windows machine would come in handy. I am about to do just that, just for the bigger files that my digital camera produces....
IFX would truly fly in this environment.

I use ImageFX under WinUAE and have successfully loaded a much larger image into it (about 60 megabytes and approximately 60,000 x 60,000 pixels I believe).

It was relatively speedy too!  Bearable at least.  Not much slower than IrfanView on the PC side with an image of this size.

I am sure that ImageFX when running on my real 68040 A2000 with 32MB RAM would have had a lot of trouble handling an image of this size.  It *might* have been able to handle your 25MB RAW images.  

I think ImageFX does have a loader for RAW images.  Oh, and it also does have it's own virtual memory built in (you need to turn it on in the preferences).

[Ral-Clan]

No RAW loader AFAIK, but there's a CLI RAW converter on Aminet:

http://aminet.net/package/gfx/conv/ami-dcraw_V8_70

Varthall

Didn't someone just mention that there is a RAW datatype in the thread where someone was asking what digital camera or camcorder to buy?