FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

(July 20, 1999)

Studio Artist the World's First Graphics Synthesizer With Intelligent-Assisted Painting and Drawing

Synthetik's Smart Software Redefines the Way Digital Art is Made

With a Symphony of Rich Natural to Out-of-This-World Paints

New York, NY, July 20, 1999-- Studio Artist, the world's first Graphics Synthesizer, is an intelligent painting, drawing, image and video processing program making its debut at MacWorld New York on July 21.

What is Studio Artist?

Developed by Synthetik Software Inc., Studio Artist is an innovative new full featured program for computer artists and creative professionals. The program combines dynamic user-configurable painting and drawing tools along with a complete image processing and video effects suite. A unique hybrid imaging model allows individual paint strokes to have the visual richness of raster paint with the editability of vector paths. Dynamic expressive paint tools or custom art processes can easily be constructed and applied to still images or motion sequences. Users can either paint and draw manually or direct Studio Artist's automatic Intelligent-Assisted painting actions.

Graphics Synthesizer Takes its Cue From World of Music Synthesis

Synthetik Software's president John Dalton, a two-time Mac-Eddy award winner for best music software with Deck, the first multi-channel hard disk audio recording software for the Macintosh, explains, "Musicians have used audio synthesizers for many years to generate complex sounds and arrangements. Studio Artist's environment mirrors that of a music synthesizer by allowing the user to have extensive control over many aspects of the paint's visual appearance and behavior. An individual can generate an unlimited number of paint and graphics presets. These presets can represent anything from an interactive painting tool to complex graphical processes that emulate traditional graphics arts techniques or produce totally new visual looks. Just like in music synthesis, paint parameters can modulate other parameters, which creates very dynamic and expressive paints. A user can literally jam with the paints in real-time."

The over 600 factory presets shipped with Studio Artist barely scratch the surface of the potential visual looks and tactile feels that can be created within the program. Each Preset consists of hundreds of fully editable parameters that can be individually adjusted to control the look and feel of the paint. These synthesizer parameters can also be interactively modulated while painting. This immense flexibility allows artists to create their own art tools or processes with unique visual appearance based on their own personal tastes.

Early Users Rave About Studio Artist

"Innovative products like Studio Artist show that the Macintosh continues to be the leading creative tool for computer artists and graphics professionals," said Clent Richardson, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "With Studio Artist, Synthetik has created a ground breaking product that is a natural fit with the Macintosh."

Early users of the program have included numerous computer artists and video professionals. Daniel Rosen of the Outpost Film Center had this to say. "I've never seen anything like it, and I use everything. It has a completely new look. The automatic rotoscoping opens up a whole new world for video effects. "

Steve Campbell, a San Francisco computer artist and Studio Artist beta tester, said "A major benefit of using Studio Artist is that it can generate color and look and feel that you would have never come up with yourself, no matter how good you are. The stuff Artist does, you can't get that look anyplace else. This thing can kick start your imagination in a lot of ways."

Studio Artist Knows How to Paint and Draw

Studio Artist is the first commercial program for computer artists that incorporates research results from cognitive neuroscience investigations into the nature of visual perception in the brain. The program uses human visual modeling to construct an internal representation from a source image that is used to direct smart assisted painting and drawing. The result is Studio Artist knows how to paint and draw. Whatever the user's skill, Intelligent-Assisted drawing can greatly expand creative expression. With Studio Artist, a user with little or no skills can now paint and draw easily. This opens up a whole new computer paint tools market to people with no formal artistic training.

Intelligent-Assisted drawing can also help professional artists by automating repetitive or complex drawing tasks. An artist can dynamically control a smart brush that assists in the generation of detailed individual paint strokes under their control. This hybrid drawing process can be used to create new visual looks and also to speed up complicated or tedious drawing tasks.

Interactive Modulation Brings New Power to Wacom Tools

"The approach to assisted drawing is quite unique," said Scott Rawlings, director of product management at Wacom. "Studio Artist opens up a whole new world of creative expression for the advanced features of Wacom's Intuos drawing tools and tablets. The program makes use of our tablets in ways we never could have imagined. An artist can selectively modulate over 200 interactive paint parameters in real time."

An artist can selectively modulate over 200 interactive paint parameters in real-time using dynamic pen pressure, tilt, orientation, velocity, and Airbrush or 4D Mouse wheels. Wacom's Tool ID allows different paint tools to be associated with individual Paint Patch Presets. Region selection, interactive image warping, and vector path drawing and editing also make extensive use of Intuos's advanced interactive features.

Auto-Rotoscoping with Hand-Painted Look

Studio Artist also includes extensive animation and video processing capabilities. A user can record a series of paint or image processing operations that can then be applied automatically to individual frames of a QuickTime movie. These Paint Action Sequences can be used to generate auto-rotoscoping with a hand painted look or to build custom video effects processes. Output movie resolution can be independent of input movie resolution, which allows low-res footage to be transformed into high quality professional output.

Pricing and Availability

Studio Artist's suggested retail price is $295, and is available starting July 21. Orders can be placed by calling 1-888-808-4188 or by visiting the Synthetik web site at www.synthetik.com.

About Synthetik

Synthetik's mission is to develop innovative, smart and creative software tools for computer artists and creative professionals.

Synthetik Software's president John Dalton is two-time Mac-Eddy award winner for best music software with Deck, the first multi-channel hard disk audio recording software for the Macintosh. John has spoken nationally and internationally on the subject of cognitive neuroscience and human visual perception. He is a well-respected researcher in the image processing engineering community and has presented numerous papers on the subject.

Additional information can be obtained from Synthetik Software Inc., 30 Sheridan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, 415-864-6582 (ext 72), 415-864-0433 (fax), or by emailing candice@synthetik.com.