Photon Paint

~ the goodbye ~

This one predates me completely. Photon Paint shipped in 1987, when I was three, and by the time I had a modem and any opinion about software the Amiga was already the machine older engineers went misty about. I have never run it. What follows is reconstruction from magazine reviews and a disk image on the Internet Archive.

The Amiga could do something no other home computer could, and it was a hack. Hold-And-Modify mode put all 4,096 colors of the palette on screen at once by cheating: each pixel either picked from a small palette or took the previous pixel's color and modified one component of it. That produced photographic images on a machine from 1985, and it produced ugly smeared fringes anywhere the color changed too fast.

Most paint programs would not touch HAM because it was miserable to paint in. Photon Paint was built for it. It was also, and this is the real claim to history, the first bitmap paint program to put 3D solid modeling and texture mapping inside itself. You could wrap a piece of your own image around a cylinder or a sphere and light it, in 1987, on a home computer, in a program that otherwise just wanted to be a paintbrush.

It sold around 250,000 copies and Amiga World gave it a best of breed award. Deluxe Paint was the one everybody had and stayed the one everybody had, but Photon Paint is the one attempting a trick nobody else was attempting.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who wrote it ~

The credits are the strangest thing about this program. It came out of BazboSoft, a small Israeli software house, written by Oren Peli with Eyal Ofek and Amir Zbeda. Peli was seventeen. Two decades later he shot a haunted-house film inside his own house in San Diego for about fifteen thousand dollars, called it Paranormal Activity, and it took roughly a hundred and ninety three million.

That is not a normal thing to find at the bottom of an Amiga paint program. It is the kind of footnote you go back and reread to make sure it is the same person, and it is.

~ the postmortem ~

MicroIllusions killed it by dying. The publisher was a Granada Hills operation that had a genuine hit with The Faery Tale Adventure in 1987 and spent the proceeds on an ambitious catalog of creative software, Music-X for sequencing and Photon Paint for images. Activision signed it as an affiliated publisher and dropped it after a year. The company went out of business in or about 1990 and its assets scattered.

Version 2.0 was the last one. There had been a Macintosh port in 1988 published by Mediagenic, which was Activision wearing a name it abandoned during its own bankruptcy, so both ends of the distribution chain were gone within a couple of years of each other. Nobody picked the program back up. HAM was an Amiga trick, and when the Amiga went the reason for the program went with it.

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