CompuServe Messages

Brian, I thought my file was hotel1.gif? Oh well, whatever. <g>. You can do great painting and composition with Animator Pro but the limitation is 8-bit colour right now – this gives you a maximum pallette of 256 colours which doesn't work too well for photos and renderings with lots of colours. HiResQFX uses 32-bit colour which is 24-bit colour (16.77 million) plus 8-bits of alpha channel which gives 256 levels of transparency for each pixel also – this is very handy for compositing because you get smooth edges. The price is in the $1200 range so not really for the casual user. Give them a call and get some info. An alternative is Aldus' Photostyler which is pretty good and supports 24-bit colour in Windows and is only about $500 discounted and is widely available in retail outlets. Disadvantages are that it doesn't support compressed .tga files or alpha channel and it can be slow running under Windows although a fast 24-bit vga card with a co-processor can help that a bit. Hope that helped. Martin