************************************************************************** - THE LEGENDARY >> SUBSOFTWARE << IN 90 !!! =========================================== - CONTACT US - BP: 36 - - 1380 REBECK - - BELGIUM - - DON'T SEND ANY DISKS - ************************************************************************** THE BUTCHER II -------------- Project Menu ------------ Ask Mode: 320 x 200 1 - 5 bit-planes 320 x 400 1 - 5 bit-planes interlaced 640 x 200 1 - 4 bit-planes 640 x 400 1 - 4 bit-planes 320 x 200 Hold and Modify (6 bit-planes) Tools Menu ---------- Undo: You can reverse many of the commands in this program by selecting UNDO Draw: A few primitive drawing tools are included in a small window which you can move around the screen. Upon selection of one of the five commands, (Filled Box, Hollow Box, Lines, Draw, Fill) the window will disappear and you can draw with the selected tool using the current color. To recall the draw window, press the right mouse button. The last thing which you did can be cancelled by pressing the UNDO button. On choosing "Pick" the window will also disappear and all pixels of the current color will flash in red. To stop the flashing, press the left mouse button. You can flash any of the colors by positioning the crosshairs over a pixel of the desired color and again pressing the left mouse button. You can continue to do this until you press the right button. The window will return and the current color will be the last flashing color. This command is used in several places in the program. Reverse and Flip: "Reverse" will reverse the screen horizontally. "Flip" turns the screen upside down. Palettes: You can maintain three different palettes at all times. These palettes are switchable from the menu. When you load a picture, the picture's colormap is always loaded into Palette One. Should you wish to apply another palette to a picture, you should first copy that palette into Palettes Two or Three before loading the picture. Sorting by intensity is particularly effective if used with the "Spread" command. By spreading a range of colors between two shades of the same hue you can produce a shaded picture. Also, by exchanging the colors at the light and dark ends and spreading between the ends, you can create a negative. The "Copy" and "Ex" (Exchange) commands work as they do in most palettes. With "Copy" you can not only copy colors to other positions, but you can also copy the current palette to another palette by pressing one of the Palette Selection Buttons after invoking the copy. The "Pick" command that is also found in other parts of the program flashes the current color in red. You can stop the flashing by pressing the left mouse button. You can select a new current color by positioning the crosshairs over a pixel and again pressing the left mouse button. This process can be repeated until the right mouse button is pressed. The last flashing color is then the current color. The "Map" command will map one palette to another palette. Butcher will rearrange the colors of the second palette to match more colsely the colors of the first palette. Sometimes this match will be very good depending on the closeness of colors in the two palettes. The mapping is less effective if the palettes are not very close. Process Menu ------------ Edge: The edging process of Butcher if based on a nonlinear function which decides whethter any particular pixel is part of an edge by examining its neighboring pixels. If the computed variance between the tested pixel and its neighbors is greater than an adjustable threshold, Butcher writes that position as part of an edge. You set the threshold with the proportional gadget at the top of the window. A threshold of zero will result in edges at all points where a pixel differs with one of its neighbors. If this gadget is tuned to its maximum value, edges will be found only where pure black (R = G = B = 0) is found next to pure white (R = G = B = 15) Note that Butcher only notices differences in intensity, not in color. If two very different colors have R + G + B values which are similar, then it less likely that an edge will be found. Finding edges by intensity is satisfactory in most cases. The pen gadgets determine the color of the contour lines. "Light" will map the brightest color from the palette on a background of the darkest color. "Dark" will reverse the foreground and background colors. If "Color" is selected, the pen color will relate to the actual pen color of a tested pixel. If the proportional gadget at the bottom of the window is tuned to zero (completely to the left), the pen color is the actual color of the pixel. Increasing the value of "Darkness" will cause the program to choose darker and darker colors from the existing palette. If possible, it will choose colors with related hues. "Enhance" applies the edges to the pcture itself. If the pen color is light, white lines will be traced around the contours of the picture. If the pen color is dark, black lines will be written on the edges. If "Color" is selected, different colors from the palette will be used on the picture. "Map" draws the edges on a blank background. If "Color" is active, colors are drawn on a blank background. The background will be as dark as possible. Mapping on a dark background with different colors often produces eerie effects. You can stop mapping a picture at any time by pressing "Stop". "View" closes the Edge Window until you press the right mouse button. "Restore" returns the original picture to the screen. "Keep" closes the Edge Window and keeps whatever picture is currently displayed. "Cancel" closes the window and returns the original picture to the screen. Filter: The filter removes isolated pixels or isolated groups of pixels from the picture. Level 1 will remove pixels which do not have neighboring pixels of the same color. Levels 2 through 4 will attempt to remove larger groups of pixels of the selected color. Isolated pixels chosen for removal will be replaced with a neighboring color. Butcher filters pictures by testing each set of pixels with templates of all other colors. You can stop this process at any time by pressing "Stop". You can clip the part of the screen you wish to filter with the "Clip" command. You can pull a rectangle on the screen which will define the section which will be filtered. If you frame a section which is not exactly right, you can continue to pull rectangles until you press the right mouse button. You can remove the clip by pressing the "Clip" button a second time. You can select the filtered color by pressing one of the color squares at the bottom of the window. Also, you can choose a color by selecting "Pick" and pressing the left mouse button when the crosshairs are over a pixel of the desired color. The last color which flashes red is the current color. "Filter" works particularly well on contour maps or on pictures with only a few colors. Filter is less effective on areas with finely grained mixes of numerous colors. Mosaic: Mosaic creates new pictures with blocks of colors. The color for each block is a sample from the original picture. You can adjust the pixel height of the blocks. Butcher adjusts the width depending on the pixel aspect ratio for the current display mode. Slice Plane: You can selectively remove any bit-plane or combination of bit-planes from a picture. Each bit in a plane corresponds to one pixel postion. A one bit-plane picture can have only two colors because each bit in the plane is either on or off. A picture on the Amiga consists of one or more layers of these bit-planes. The binary number which is extracted from combining bits from each plane determines the color used to draw a specific pixel. With the slicer you can examine each plane or combination of bit-planes. With only one plane displayed you are essentially seeing the individual bits of memory in a single bit-plane. If the bits happen to map to dark colors you can brighten the palette by toggling the "False" button. This changes the palette to a series of gray levels. Press the "View" button if you wish to see the entire picture. You can return to the window by pressing the right mouse button. Sometimes you can manufacture interesting effects by removing planes from a picture. You can often find smooth silhouettes of the features in your pictures. Density Slice: You can think of every palette as a series of intensities progressing from no intensity, or black, to maximum intensity, or pure white. Whith density slicing, you pick a point on this scale of intensities and assign one color to one side of the point and another color to the other side of the point. You can adjust this point with the sliding gadget. The colors will update as you move the gadget. If "Mono" (for monochrome) is selected, the point is adjusted with black to the left side and red to the right side of the scale all of the colors will shift to black. At either end of the scale the screen will turn all one color. If you lose the gadget, hitting the space bar will return the slicing point to the center. Pressing the 'R' key will restore the original palette. Also, you can move the slicing point left by pressing the '<' key and right by pressing the'>' key. You can slice the scale of intensities at more than one point with the two markers. By pressing a marker button you will place a numbered marker at the current position of the sliding gadget. Butcher will use green to the right side of this marker. With one marker and the point above the sliding gadget you can slice the palette into three levels. With two markers you can slice the palette into four levels. Yellow is the fourth color. If you cansider the areas between markers, and between markers and end points, as regions, you can adjust a slicing point within any one of these regions with the sliding gadget. The purpose of this scheme is to allow simple adjustment along the entire scale even while using multiple levels. This becomes important if you choose "View" and close the window Butcher will continue to adjust the slicing point by responding to the keyboard commands. If you choose "Color", the darker colors to the left side of the slicing point are replaced with black as you slide right. The original colors return as you slide the gadget to the left. In Color mode, the markers are ignored. By pressing the "Reverse" button, you can invert and redisplay the colors. If the mode is "Color" and you have the dark colors of the palette on the right side of the scale, white will fill on the left side of the slicing point instead of black. If you choose "View" the utility window will disappear You can still use the keyboard commands. Pressing the right mouse button returns the window. Density slicing is useful for pictures with very low contrasts. By dividing regions of intensity into starkly different colors, you can highlight various features which are not very prominent in the original picture. Density slicing only operates on the palette. The program does not rewrite any pixels. It is helpful if you copy the original palette into one of the other palettes before you use density slicing. You can manipulate one of the palettes and then alternate the original palette with the transformed palette from the menu. Convert Menu ------------ Histogram and Quick Merge: In "Histogram" the program counts the number of pixels drawn in each color of the palette. After it finishes the count, Butcher displays a bar chart describing the relative totals. You can sort the colors by number of pixels, exchange sets of pixels (not colors as in the palette), and merge all or portions of these sets into other colors. Butcher immediately rewrites the pixels and updates the graph. "Quick Merge" is a modified version of "Histogram". When "Histogram" first opens, it counts all of the pixels in the picture. This takes about ten seconds in low resolution. The counting can take much longer in higher resolutions. With "Quick Merge", the program samples the picture. You do not get the precise counts for each color, but you can get to the tools of "Histogram" a lot faster. The current color is selected at the bottom of the window by pressing one of the color gadgets. The RGB values are updated in the box to the right. These numbers are in hexadecimal so that '0' is the minimum value and 'f' is the maximum value. For example, white is described as 'fff', bright red as 'f00', a medium gray might be '777', and black is '000'. You can also select a color by choosing "Pick". The window will disappear with the current color flashing in varying intensities of red. You can stop the flashing by pressing the left mouse button. By pressing the left mouse button over a pixel of another color you can select that color as the current color. You can return to "Histogram" by pressing the right mouse button. The last flashing color is now the current color. If you press the "Use" button, the pixel count for the current color is displayed in the window title bar. Its percentage of the total number of counted pixels is also displayed. With "Merge" you can merge all or a clipped section of the pixels of a single color into another color. In other words, the pixels of the current color are redrawn using the selected color. You can effectively reduce the number of colors in a picture by merging some colors into other closely related colors. This can free room for defining new colors in the palette or you can reduce the memory requirements and the file size of the picture by removing enough colors to eliminate a bit-plane. Sometimes, you can improve the appearance of the picture by merging some of the pixels. For example, a digitizer may have generated a blue sky with a mix of various shades of blue. The picture might look better if you merge most of the shades of blue into a single shade. The fine shadings of buildings or other features remain in the picture. By breaking the uniform texture of the picture, you can often improve its perceptual depth. You can do this with drawing programs but it can become tedious if you must draw around or through complicated features. You can clip a rectangle in which all merging operations will occur. When you choose "Clip" the window disappears, and you can pull rectangles on the screen by pushing and releasing the left mouse button. If you don't quite like the rectangle you have drawn, you can start over and Butcher will remove the preceding rectangle. The final rectangle is selected when you push the right mouse button. A clip can be removed by pushing the "Clip" button again. Clips only apply to the command of merging pixels. Butcher updates the pixel count after every merging or sorting operation. The update is almost instantaneous after merging the entire screen. Because the program has to count the pixels within a clip, clipped operations take more time to finish. "Blend" performs a full screen merge of pixels. In this case, the color into which you are merging may change. This change is determined by a proportional change. This change is determined by a proportional mix of the two colors based on their relative pixel counts. If the second color has many more pixels than the first color, no change will occur in the second color. "Exchange" rewrites the pixels of one color into the position of a second color. The pixels of the second color are placed in the original position of the first color. Since both of the colors are also exchanged, there is no change in the picture. "Sort" rewrites pixels until their counts are in descending order. The sort starts with the third color and proceeds to the last color in the palette. Color Numbers One and Two are unaffected. By sorting the colors you can place the least significant colors, in terms of their pixel counts, at the end of the palette. Sorting is the only operation which cannot be reversed with the "UNDO" command. Auto Merge: You can define the maximum number of colors used in the palette. "Auto Merge" will merge, blend, and sort the colors until all of the palette positions beyond the maximum count are without pixels. You can redefine the empty color registers without changing the picture. Auto Chop: "Auto Chop" uses "Auto Merge" to remove enough colors from the picture in order to reduce the number of bit- planes in the picture. After it completes merging, Butcher converts the pcture to a screen with the specified number of bit-planes. Suppose you currently have a five bit-plane picture. If you specify a depth of four planes, Butcher clears the pixels of 16 colors from the picture. The picture is changed into a four plane picture with a maximum of 16 colors. Change Depth: You can change the number of bit-planes in the picture without regard for the information in the dis- carded bit-planes. This will usually result in severe and not entirely pleasant changes in your picture. If you increase the depth of a picture, clear bit-planes are added to the picture and the picture appears unchanged. Adding one plane will double the number of colors which you can use. Lo-Res to HAM This command will convert a low resolution picture (320 x 200) of any depth to a Hold and Modify picture. HAM to Lo-Res This converts a Hold and Modify picture to a low resolution picture. It can hen be used in most paint programs. Since Hold and Modify pictures can use all of the Amiga's 4,096 colors, the reduction to 32 colors in low resolution will almost always result in a picture of less quality than the original. Slice Menu ---------- The items in the slice menu represent similar operations. You can change pictures to different resolutions by expanding or reducing their width or height. The depth does not change unless you are converting a picture with a width of 320 pixels and a depth of five planes into a picture with a width of 640 pixels. The fifth plane is discarded in the conversion. Before perfomring this command it is important that you clear out the last bit-plane with either "Auto Chop" or "Auto Merge". If you are converting a picture to a higher resolution it will not look any different after the conversion. Single pixels are split into two pixels, but the picture appears no different. This is not the case when you change a picture to a lower resolution. Every other pixel is lost in the conversion.