Comparing Alpha Paint and e-Paint



If you're familiar with our e-Paint image editing software — or even if you're just familiar with the web page thereof — you might have cause to wonder about what distinguishes it from Alpha Paint. Here's the whole tale in well under a thousand words.

Alpha Paint has borrowed a lot of its drawing tool logic and user interface from e-Paint. As such, both applications have pretty much the same controls. If you learn one, you're almost all the way to mastering the other.

e-Paint is what's often referred to as a "digital darkroom." While it's a powerful tool for creating graphics, it absolutely rocks when it's asked to refine, modify and enhance digital images. Among its capabilities are:

That which e-Paint can't do is manage transparency. While this may seem like it should have been a trivial bit of functionality to glue onto the side of e-Paint, doing so has been the reason for a number of otherwise functional paint and image editing applications finding themselves transmuted into incomprehensible turkeys.

You really need to build an alpha image editor from the ground up if you want to make it workable for users with fewer than sixteen fingers... and that's what we did.

Alpha Paint does manage transparency — superbly — and it has all of e-Paint's basic drawing tools, but it can't perform much of the high-end imaging that e-Paint can handle without breaking a sweat. It doesn't include access to the Graphic Workshop filter library, and it can't open JPEG graphics, as the JPEG format doesn't support transparency.

In additional, Alpha Paint has been created to work with images of modest resolution — pictures no larger than your monitor — and unless you have a computer that cost as much as a nice sports car, you'll probably find that it chokes on really big graphics, such as those that emerge from a digital camera or a smart phone.

We hasten to add that you can, of course, use both of them.