Windows software to write (not just read) HAM6 pics?

[Amiga_Nut]

I've heard rumours that Photoshop does this, maybe an old version, but specifically it supports rendering and saving out of HAM6 images. I also heard it was pretty crap so I assume it didn't use the base palette properly and had excessive fringing?

So does anyone actually know of a program or utility that doesn't cost as much as a second hand Mercedes that does this on a Windows machine?

The requirement is to take a 24bit image and convert it to HAM6. I think Dpaint 4 will load 256 colour IFFs and convert those, but will Dpaint 4 load 24bit IFFs or just PC VGA style 8bit IFFs?

[bloodline]

DPaint IV will load 24bit IFF files and convert them to HAM8

[T3000]

PS 5.5 loads and saves amiga .iff
not sure about the other formats.

This might be what you are looking for. Iff Pro 0.08b  

INFO:
IFF PRO is a freeware image conversion tool for windows. It’s purpose is to convert various (previously unsupported) special Amiga Mode IFF images to Windows BITMAPS. While very simple in operation, What makes IFF PRO special is it’s support for these Amiga specific IFF files formats. Including Half Bright, Dynamic Hires, HAM6, HAM8 and even Sliced Ham. (SHAM).

[Amiga_Nut]

PS 5.5 loads and saves amiga .iff
not sure about the other formats.

This might be what you are looking for. Iff Pro 0.08b  

INFO:
IFF PRO is a freeware image conversion tool for windows. It’s purpose is to convert various (previously unsupported) special Amiga Mode IFF images to Windows BITMAPS. While very simple in operation, What makes IFF PRO special is it’s support for these Amiga specific IFF files formats. Including Half Bright, Dynamic Hires, HAM6, HAM8 and even Sliced Ham. (SHAM).

That's going the wrong way unfortunately, I wan't to write files back to HAM6 etc not convert them from HAM etc to regular standard picture files

I heard PS7 has optional HAM6 filter plug-ins, they didn't get rave reviews. And CS3 had dropped them altogether now, you need an older version of CS to get the filters.

I believe PaintShop Pro 8 onwards can use Photoshop plug-ins.

EHB in particular for game graphics ideas, as just reducing things to 64 colours in PSP 8 is not really useful as you can't see how EHB would handle things.

DPaint IV will load 24bit IFF files and convert them to HAM8

Don't suppose you know if the 21bit file format of Digi-View also allows Digiview 4 to load in 24bit IFF files?

I'd check myself now but there is no easy way for me to get files into WinUAE. Might have to have a long laborious session with DOS2DOS and a couple of drives on my A1000 this weekend to experiment further

[bloodline]

I'm not sure if this helps but "GFXCon" on Aminet has pretty much saved my ass every time with gfx

[Amiga_Nut]

Thanks I'll have a look. Really though I'd prefer a PC solution as potentially I have 1000s of subtly different images to convert and I don't own 060/PPC Amigas for all the processing and UAE is not exactly simple to drag and drop files between the real world.

Oh well Graphics Workshop Professional 3.0 looked promising, even specifically mentioned Amiga Hold and Modify mode as a format as well as IFF regular modes. Reality is that it's only for reading, and once again writing out is only for standard IFF indexed colour modes.

Shame because it has batch processing commands too just like the old DOS version in the 90s, ho hum they just lost a sale for the sake of 10 minutes worth of code to simulate 4bit RGB palette and the simple HAM mode rules. They already know the IFF structure for HAM clearly as they read it and they must simulate the restrictions whilst displaying it surely. It's not that hard is it!!

[Britelite]

They already know the IFF structure for HAM clearly as they read it and they must simulate the restrictions whilst displaying it surely. It's not that hard is it!!

Well, reading and displaying a picture in HAM-format is trivial, but doing a good conversion job from a truecolor-image to HAM isn't necessarily that easy. And I don't think there's such a high demand for that feature, otherwise someone would probably have implemented it

[Britelite]

EHB in particular for game graphics ideas, as just reducing things to 64 colours in PSP 8 is not really useful as you can't see how EHB would handle things.

You could prepare the EHB-palette in PSP and then map the image to use that exact palette.

[Amiga_Nut]

Well, reading and displaying a picture in HAM-format is trivial, but doing a good conversion job from a truecolor-image to HAM isn't necessarily that easy. And I don't think there's such a high demand for that feature, otherwise someone would probably have implemented it

Converting anything to anything is not trivial no, but for a company like JASC who do such things well it wouldn't have taken them that long to do. I'm not expecting NewTek levels of sophistication as the images will only be on screen for a fraction of a second -REMOVED by moderator-
 
The problem is getting the actual EHB palette without touching an Amiga in the first place. I want to take a full colour image, resample it to 320x512 keeping aspect ratio correct and then have the software make the best possible EHB palette for me in milliseconds on the PC and save it as EHB IFF picture file. If I have to create the palette on the Amiga first then it makes the hassle of passing files back and fourth with a PC and using different packages on each machine kind of redundant

[Ral-Clan]

Thanks I'll have a look. Really though I'd prefer a PC solution as potentially I have 1000s of subtly different images to convert and I don't own 060/PPC Amigas for all the processing and UAE is not exactly simple to drag and drop files between the real world.

I think a lot of people don't understand how to use WinUAE properly.  It *is* easy to drag and drop between Windows/AmigaOS when you have UAE setup correctly.  You just make a common folder shared by both OS's, then create a shortcut on your Windows desktop to that folder.  Anything you drop into that folder from either the Windows or AmigaOS side will be available to both OSes.

You do this by going into the hard drive settings of UAE, and creating a virtual hard drive for the Amiga that is actually a folder on your Windows hard drive.  This is NOT a hard file, nor an Amiga formatted partition on your Windows hard drive, nor a specific hard drive formatted as an Amiga.  The new versions of UAE actually let you specify that a standard Windows folder/directory on your PC be treated as a "real" hard drive by the emulated Amiga.  You can even boot AmigaOS from it, and it's fast.  From the Windows side you can access all the Amiga files instantly, add files, remove files, edit files, etc.  Just as if it were a Windows folder (because it is).

I use ImageFX a lot under UAE.  I have created a Windows folder just to be a shared folder with Amiga OS.  Whenever I need to work on graphics files between the two OSes, I put them in this folder, then I batch process them with ImageFX on the Amiga side, switch over instantly to the Windows side (middle mouse button or ALT-TAB) while AmigaOS is still running in the background and load them into PhotoShop, Irfanview, whatever.....if I need to do more processing on the Amiga side I just instantly switch back to AmigaOS and load them into the Amiga application.  It's as fast to switch back and forth between OSes as switching screens on the Amiga.  It's fantastic.

So, if I were you I'd create such a shared folder, drag all your PC graphics files into it from the Windows side, then flip over to the AmigaOS side and batch process them to HAM format with ImageFX's AutoFX Batch processor (specify output to the shared folder).  Under UAE ImageFX flies and it should only take seconds to process each image.  Then when the batch processing is done flip back over to the Windows side (ALT-TAB) and there you will have the processed files available to Windows.

[Amiga_Nut]

Ahh OK I'll try that out, sounds a lot like the way STeeM treats virtual hard drives, anything you copy onto your emulated ST's hard drive magically appears ready for writing to disks via windows explorer onto floppies in the assigned folder on your PC hard drive.

Tried to set up a hard drive a  few years ago, I hope it's a bit simpler these days as it never worked for me in the past.

Processing times could be interesting though at 3750 images per batch

[yakumo9275]

cosmigo promotion reads/writes iffs (But I think it is limited to ILBM and PBM types, probably still need ilbm/pbm conversion to ham afterwards).

[Amiga_Nut]

cosmigo promotion reads/writes iffs (But I think it is limited to ILBM and PBM types, probably still need ilbm/pbm conversion to ham afterwards).

Thanks but I've already got some software that can write IFFs, but these exclude things like EHB and HAM. So basically they are just saving simple indexed colour modes with fixed standard palettes as PC Delux Paint 2 would use, which is no good in this case.

I think I will have to repair a spare machine to run WinUAE and leave it doing the ImageFX thing as it will just make it impossible to watch HD content or Flash content on this machine. Got a spare shuttle PC with 2.2ghz so might get that going and use that when I get the parts