Alchemy Mindworks

Graphic Workshop professional 4 is nearing its first public beta. Unofficially, it should see daylight in late July or early August. We hasten to note that anyone who has registered or upgraded their registration for Graphic Workshop Professional 3 within a year of its release will be able to apply for a no-cost Graphic Workshop Professional 4 registration, and never see the version 4 reminder screen.

We’ve reviewed a wealth of suggestions for features and improvements to Graphic Workshop, and many of them will appear in the new software. Some of the suggestions in question date back a while – the version 4 architecture has allowed us to implement things that were largely impossible in version 3.

Continue reading ‘Graphic Workshop Professional 4 Sneak Peak #4: It’s Also There’ »

In transitioning from Graphic Workshop Professional 3 to the new version 4 application, we’ve updated a lot of the functionality in the software. Some of the changes are subtle – you’ll notice them if they affect your use of Graphic Workshop.

Some of them are decidedly worth mentioning… very loudly. We’ve tried to avoid assigning the greatest volume to the ones that were the most difficult to implement.

Continue reading ‘Graphic Workshop Professional 4 Sneak Peak #3: Cool Toys’ »

The response to last week’s Graphic Workshop Professional 4 Sneak Peak posting would have been deafening if e-mail made noise. While we enjoyed hearing from a great many users who could still remember buying the software on floppy disks during the late middle ages, perhaps the most productive aspect of the mail and comments we received about the upcoming Graphic Workshop Professional 4 release were suggestions for functionality to be added to it.

In some cases, we were pleased to be able to reply that the suggested features were already in place in the new software.

Continue reading ‘Graphic Workshop Professional 4 Sneak Peak #2: It’s There’ »

The transition from 16-bit Windows software to 32-bit Windows software over a decade ago was an event that future archeologists will no doubt write papers about and bore people at parties with until they all make up excuses about having forgotten to hypnotize their ferrets and leave. Admittedly, archeologists get excited about the damnedest things.

It’s been our experience that neither archeologists nor most of the people who use Windows software actually know why 32-bit applications are preferable. This is arguably as it should be – well-written software should allow its users to do whatever they bought the beast for and never concern themselves with that’s going on under the hood.

Continue reading ‘Is There a 64-Bit Version?’ »

Graphic Workshop is a singular application. First released in 1986 – yes, they did really have computers back then – it has evolved to provide an expanding palette of graphic functionality to its users for almost a quarter of a century.

At times, it makes us feel really, really old.

One of the unseen components of Graphic Workshop has always been its internal architecture. The way Graphic Workshop manages its memory and resources to manipulate the oftentimes substantial data objects represented by digital images has allowed it to make the best use of the hardware it found itself running on. Its architecture has always been a bit of a juggling act in this regard – typically requiring that we keep a lighted torch, a chainsaw and a polecat in the air at all times.

Continue reading ‘Graphic Workshop Professional 4 Sneak Peak’ »

Many of the Alchemy Mindworks applications – including GIF Construction Set Professional, Graphic Workshop Professional, Animation Workshop, PNG/MNG Construction Set and Presentation Wizard – have internal Paint functions that call Windows Paint. At least, they do if it’s been installed.

Should you click on Paint in one of our applications and discover that nothing much happens – or if the application hangs – you’re probably looking at a total absence of the Windows Paint application.

Continue reading ‘Quest for the Missing Paint’ »

Web page frames having clean rounded corners are fashionable at the moment. While you can arrive at them with considerable work using conventional tools, you can create them effortlessly using Graphic Workshop Professional 3. Most of the tricky aspects of getting all the pixels in these complex web objects to line up correctly fade to inconsequence once you have the procedure by the throat.

Continue reading ‘The Art of the Round Corner Box’ »

Attaching images consecutively – with a second graphic stitched to the bottom or one side of a first – is easy in Graphic Workshop, even if Graphic Workshop doesn’t strictly speaking have a function to do it. This “by hand” approach to the problem will allow you to fine-tune the results, and manually adjust the relative dimensions of the pictures involved if you need to.

Continue reading ‘Easy Image Stitching in Graphic Workshop Professional’ »

One of the most mature applications on Earth, Graphic Workshop Professional can trace its ancestry back to 1986. It predates the Internet, iPods, digital cell phones and the births of a considerable portion of its current users.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it has acquired a considerable wealth of functionality in over two decades – so much so that almost nobody who uses it uses all of it.

Continue reading ‘Ten Features of Graphic Workshop Almost Nobody Knows About’ »

Digital cameras – real ones, not the cameras that also place phone calls – embody a level of sophistication that makes even the best old-style film cameras look like cave painting. This having been said, they’re nowhere near as smart as the people who buy them. Human beings have much more sophisticated image processing software in their brains than any digital camera can aspire to.

You can usually improve the appearance of your digital photographs by switching on your image processing software, and then booting up ours. Graphic Workshop Professional’s rich library of interactive image processing filters can give your pictures the subtlety and refinement of professional photography without requiring that you put up with a balding forty-something auteur who keeps saying “give it to me” and waving his hands incoherently.

Continue reading ‘Ten Graphic Workshop Filters to Improve Your Digital Photographs’ »