Digital Artform

ColorTalk is a terse little language that allows the user to write functions that operate on the pixels in an image. To access it in Painter IX, hit the n key.

When I first heard about it, I was excited to jump in and start using it. I've had a lot of experience with similar kinds of applications, and expected to find it useful to me right away.

Maybe I'd write a Mandelbrot set generator in it for Painter -- that could be a fun test, and wouldn't take too long.

Then I saw that ColorTalk had no looping. Nor did it offer any "if-then" conditional statements. I lowered my ambitions.

Next I thought, "let me see if I can make a bunch of thin horizontal lines using a sine wave." Although a pattern like that can be useful for making tv screen effects, my main goal was to explore. "Let's see," I thought, "how many lines should I make? Hm, a few hundred, anyway."
That's when I saw that the only numbers even PERMISSIBLE are 1, 2, 3, and 4, and some decimals that have to be dragged and dropped into the window.

bottom line:

This is a cool beginning for something that appears to have never been followed through on. In its present state, ColorTalk appears to me to be an odd toy-like curiosity.

The fact that the software can produce continuous grads tells me it works okay internally, but I I notice banding problems, and I believe the software suffers from greatly limited bit depth. What's more, the user is severely constrained as to what numbers he or she can even EXPRESS as input to the program.

Considering it's a "secret" function, ColorTalk is better than nothing -- but only just barely. Anything useful you can do with it you can do more easily through Painter's GUI. Anything "slick" you'd like to try doing with ColorTalk you are likely to find impossible to do with it in its current state.

I want to stress that ColorTalk is an unofficial feature of Painter, and so the software does not merit criticism, per se. I offer these comments more as an evaluation of how the software strikes me in its present form.

I think ColorTalk holds great promise, and would be a welcome addition to Painter. I encourage Corel to flesh Color Talk out into a full-fledged feature. I think I would use it a lot. And if I'm wrong about my evaluation of it, if I'm "missing the boat" here, I'd like to hear more.

Additional links:

http://kaburaya.pobox.ne.jp/eng/colortalk_general.htm

ftp://ftp.corel.com/pub/Painter/Misc/ColorTalk_Tech_Note.pdf