IMAGEFX RELEASE 2.0 PART THREE --=======-- Mode This pop-up menu allows you to select a Draw Mode for use with the Airbrush tool. Style This pop-up menu allows you to select a Draw Style for use with the Airbrush tool. Blend This slider controls the maximum amount of paint applied when painting with the Airbrush tool. Alpha This pop-up menu allows you to enable ImageFX's Alpha Channel for use as a frisket or as a texture. Radius The slider controls the size of the basic Airbrush shape. It is measured in pixels from the center to the outermost edge of the spot. Nozzle This slider controls the distribution of paint within the basic Airbrush spot. Rough This slider controls the smoothness or amount of spatter present in the airbrush effect. Realtime When selected (checked), this toggle switch turns on real time painting update. When this toggle is not selected, the Airbrush tool reverts to its default paint/redraw mode. Okay Accept these airbrush settings. Cancel Return to toolbox, aborting any changes made. The Create Buffer requester has the following features & functions: Size Controls: Typ directly into the text gadgets or use the "auto-sizing" buttons below. Each buffer is defined in terms of width, height, horizontal and vertical dots per inch and horizontal and vertical pixel aspect ratio. Width Width of new image buffer. Height Height of new image buffer. X DPI Horizontal dots per inch. Y DPI Vertical dots per inch. X Aspect Horizontal pixel aspect ratio. Y Aspect Vertical pixel aspect ratio. Color This cycle gadget specifies whether the buffer is to be created in 8-bit grey or 24-bit color Pixels This cycle gadget specifies whether the width and height size readouts are exprssed in pixels or in ruler units (inches/metric). Size Presets... Allows you to choose one of the size presets from a scrolling list requester. The presets are found in a text file called "Default.presets"; it may be edited with any standard text editor. Size to Swap Sets the size of the new buffer to be the same as the size of the swap buffer. Okay accept any changes made in the Create Buffer requester and return to the Preview Screen Cancel cancel any changes made in the Create Buffer requester and return to the Preview Screen This requester allows you choose a screen to be loaded as a buffer or brush. When you click the Grab Screen... button, a small list requester will appear. All screens currently logged into the Amiga's display system will be listed in this requester. By selecting one of them, you can load a copy of its screen data into the main image buffer. Choose the name of a screen from the scrolling list requester, and press Okay when you are done or Cancel to abort the operation. Color limiting allows you to clip the color values in the main buffer to certain minimum and/or maximum values. Red Select the lower and upper limit of the red channel. Green Select the lower and upper limit of the green channel. Blue Select the lower and upper limit of the blue channel. NTSC Limit Set preset values to clip the colors to those that are legal NTSC values. Okay Perform the color limiting. Cancel Abort back to the toolbox. Matte is used to composite the main and swap buffers together using a single transparent color. R, G, B RGB value of color to be considered transparent in the main buffer. Black Preset the transparent color to black (0,0,0). Draw Color Preset the transparent color to whatever the current drawing color is. Okay Perform the matte composite. Cancel Abort back to the toolbox. Motion blur simulates the blur produced by moving objects. Angle Selects the direction of the blur, in degrees. Length Length of the blur, in pixels. Okay Perform the motion blur. Cancel Abort back to toolbox. Scaling is used to transform an image from one resolution into another; for example, to turn a 640x400 image into a 320x200 image. Size New image size, in pixels. Percent New image size, expressed as a percentage of the old image size. Width Width adjustment. Height Height adjustment. Units Select display units in either pixels or ruled. Mode Select one of three scaling modes; "Smooth" is the standard anti-aliased scaling, "Fast" is a faster non-anti-aliased scaling, and "Border" adds a black border around the image to build it up to the new size. Size of Swap Sets the new image size to the same size as the image in the swap buffer. Size Presets Allows you to choose one of the preset sizes from a requester. Load This is the path that will be searched first when you attempt to load an image. Save This is the path to which 24-bit image files will be saved. Render Allows you to specify an alternate path for saving Rendered files. Brush Load This is the path that will be searched when you attempt to load a brush. Texture This is the path to 8-bit grey texture maps. Hooks The default directory where ImageFX program Hooks are found. Convolve The default directory where custom Convolve matrices are found. Transform The default directory where custom Transform operators are found. REXX The default directory where ImageFX ARexx programs are found. Clicking the Choose button to the right of each Path default produces a file requester to simplify the path selection process. Adjust the R, G, and B sliders to change the screen colors to your liking. Select OKAY to use the new colors or CANCEL to abort. Type Type of color separation, CMYK, CMY, or RGB. Planes Which planes to separate. Depth Selects either 24-bit or 12-bit output. Colormap Selects either greyscale (the standard) or color output. UCR Under color removal. Percentage of CMY to replace with black ink. GCR Grey component removal. Intensity of black ink used to replace CMY. Mag Magenta ink correction. Yel Yellow ink correction. Separate Perform the color separation, saving the results to the file format selected in the Save Format requester. Load Load separation settings from disk. Save Save separation settings to disk. Cancel Abort color separation. Path Directory to store virtual memory files. Choose Allows you to choose the virtual memory path using a file requester. Disk Buffer Size Size of buffers read from and written to disk, in kilobytes. Max RAM To Use Sets the maximum amount of RAM that will be used by the virtual memory system, in kilobytes. Defaults Chooses suitable defaults based on your current system configuration. The cycle gadget allows you to control when ImageFX uses virtual memory. A note about calculating the values for your Virtual Memory preferences: Working with 24-bit data files can consume a vast amount of memory resources. Generally, it is best to have as much RAM as you can afford, but ImageFX provides a disk-based virtual memory management system for those with limited resources; or for those who must work with truly frightening amounts of data. By copying portions of the image in and out of actual RAM, ImageFX lets you treat a portion of your hard disk as virtual RAM space. Be sure to specify a hard disk with sufficient free storage space. Scanned images at 200 or 300 dots per inch resolution can require tens of megabytes of VMEM swap space. Disk Buffer Size sets the maximum size of any one chunk written to the virtual memory disk buffer. It is measured in kiloBytes. Each chunk written to disk represents some number of rows of pixels from the image. Since each 24-bit pixel requires 3 Bytes of storage, a single line of 2,500 pixels would represent a chunk 7.5 kiloBytes in size. A default buffer size of 250 kiloBytes, then, would mean that ImageFX could page portions of the active image to disk in 33-line chunks. Depending on the operation, you would want to increase the buffer size significantly. Max RAM to Use limits the amount of system RAM that ImageFX will use for managing the virtual memory disk buffers. The program must always know how many buffers have been written and in what order to retrieve them. The mechanisms by which this is achieved are kept in RAM and added to or deleted as necessary. Dedicating too much system RAM to virtual memory management decreases the amount of RAM available for processing the image. CAUTION: Be sure that the Maximum RAM setting is never set to more than one half the total amount of available FAST RAM. ImageFX also supports other, third party and public domain, virtual memory implementations. If you wish to use a virtual memory system from another manufacturer, make sure that the ImageFX VMEM authorization selector is set to Never Use VMEM and that your third party virtual memory system is properly configured (according to that product's documentation). The Distort menu provides a number of interesting image decomposition methods. Some of these involve the use of an Alpha Channel buffer as a displacement mask. Others are self-contained special effects programs. Most can be automated and, when applied to sequences of frames, produce breathtaking animated effects. Clicking the Distort button in the ImageFX Toolbox produces the Distortion pop-up menu. Manual Distort... provides the simplest image warping technique. It requires you to prepare a greyscale Alpha Channel image beforehand. If you attempt to use the Distort... operator with no Alpha Channel present, an error requester will appear. Wave Distort... In addition to the wave generator in the Alpha Channel creation menu, the Distort menu also contains a full featured wave distortion engine. This tool is extremely flexible and the effect is stunningly beautiful when applied to animation sequences. Swirl... The Swirl distortion is useful mainly as a special effect and, when animated, has been used in movies and on television, to suggest a dreamlike transition. Pinch/Punch... The Distort menu also contains a general warping function called Pinch/Punch. Pinch has the effect of squeezing together pixels toward some user-defined point. Punch has the opposite effect of pushing out pixels away from a point. Punch can be useful for simulating blister effects, the magnifying qualities of water droplets or a fisheye lens. Polar Blur... The Polar Blur distortion is similar to the Swirl distortion in that if allows for the angular displacement of pixels around a center point. Where Swirl moves pixels from their point of origin and relocates them at their point of displacement, Polar Blur repeats each pixel at every point along the angle. The result is an image with a circular blur. In this respect, it is also similar to the Motion Blur convolution. Mosaic... One of the most popular, and characteristically computer-like distortion effects actually recalls the days of low-resolution computer graphics. The Mosaic distortion effect allows you to pixelize your image, effectively reducing its resolution. This effect is often used in television "cop" shows, for example, to make the face of a person unrecognizable. Polar Mosaic... The Polar Mosaic distortion produces one of the most spectacular effects available with ImageFX. A mosaic is an image composed of geometric tiles; and a polar mosaic is one that is constructed, in radial fashion, around a center point. The Polar Mosaic effect often creates images that look like stained-glass windows. Spherize... The Spherize distortion operator allows you to map any image onto a sphere. This tool performs a ray-traced surface mapping effect that can be applied across moving sequences for highly entertaining animation effects. Dream... The Distort menu contains yet another image warping system for producing dreamlike special effects. Anyone who knows old black and white Science Fiction movies will instantly recognize the Dream distortion effect. The wave generator will create an alpha channel filled with a wave pattern which can then be used in another operation, such as a distort or merge function. Wavelength Distance between wave "crests", in pixels. Center X X coordinate of wave origin, in pixels (need not be on screen). Center Y Y coordinate of wave origin, in pixels (need not be on screen). Angle Wave movement angle, vary this value from 0 - 359 to achieve an animated wave pattern. Dampening Amount of dampening in the waves. Dampening makes the wave intensity smaller the farther away from the center you go. These keys may be modified by editing the "Default.keys" file, or you may program them by pressing SHIFT-HELP and then entering the key sequence you want to modify. Press SHIFT-HELP again to leave the key programming mode. Universal Keys: Escape Open command shell. Up Arrow Scroll up. Down Arrow Scroll down. Left Arrow Scroll left. Right Arrow Scroll right. Shift-Up Arrow Scroll up a little. Shift-Down Arrow Scroll down a little. Shift-Left Arrow Scroll left a little. Shift-Right Arrow Scroll right a little. F1 Jump to scanner menu. F2 Jump to palette menu. F3 Jump to toolbox menu. F4 Jump to render menu. F5 Jump to print menu. F9 Push ImageFX screen to the back. Shift-F9 Bring ImageFX screen to the front. A Swap main buffer with alpha channel. C Toggle preview aspect lock. G Convert buffer to NTSC greyscale. J Toggle between the main and swap buffers. M Zoom into the current mouse location. R Redraw buffer. S Open scaling window. U Undo last change (forward). Shift-U Un-Undo last change (backward). X Flip image horizontally. Y Flip image vertically. Z Rotate image 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Shift-1 Begin macro recording. Shift-2 Stop macro recording. Shift-3 Run Arexx macro. ? Open preferences window. | Toggle coordinates display. . Delete the current brush. + Zoom into the center of the image. - Zoom out of the image. _ Zoom all the way back out of the image. Toolbox Keys: F6 Open drawing modes window. F7 Open fill options window. F8 Open airbrush options window. DEL Restore all modes, blends, etc. to normal. B Pickup brush. F Toggle "Use As Frisket" alpha channel mode. H Set brush handle. I Set coordinates display units. K Clear buffer to black. L Toggle the light table on or off. N Create a new buffer. O Outline brush with current drawing color. P Toggle pressure sensitivity. T Enter the text window. V Toggle light table view between swap/alpha. Shift-M Zoom out. Shift-O Trim edges off of brush. Shift-R Redo last operation. 9 Turn on the "ghost brush". 0 Turn off the "ghost brush". Control-I Invert current region. Control-R Swap regions between main and swap buffers. , Pick color. [ Activate previous color palette entry. ] Activate next color palette entry. ( Cycle down through region selections. ) Cycle up through region selections. Gadgets with a single underlined letter in the label may be activated by pressing the Right Amiga key along with the underlined key. You can select among loaded alternate buffers by clicking the Alternate Buffer Selector button, found in the title bar of the ImageFX main panel to the right of the About button and left of the filename or coordinates display. If no alternate buffers are loaded, the selector button remains ghosted and unavailable. Click the Alternate Buffer Selector button. A list requester will open, containing the filenames of all the images currently loaded into memory. To move one of the loaded images into the main image buffer, select its name from the list and click Okay. The image presently occupying the main buffer will be swapped out and its name will appear in the alternate buffer list, replacing the other file. In order to move one of the alternate images into either the Swap or Alpha Channel buffers, it is necessary to swap them into the main buffer first. Then, it can be copied or exchanged into the Swap or Alpha buffer. Text ImageFX 2.0 offers significantly enhanced Text formatting and handling capabilities. Its new interactive Text composition panel offers onscreen preview of the selected font, as well as style, justification and rendering control. Clicking the Text tool in the ImageFX 2.0 Toolbox produces the Text Composition panel. Entering Text When you access the Text Composition panel, a single line of text is already defined and ready for you to modify. Click the line in the Text Composition Field that reads "Test Text." This line is then selected and it appears in the Text Editing Field below. The Text Editing Field is like any normal Amiga string gadget. You can click the mouse cursor into the field to activate it for entering text. When you are finished, press Return and the new text will appear in the Composition Field, replacing the previous text. To add a second line, click the Add button. A new line will appear in the Composition Field. This line, reading "new," also appears in the Text Editing Field where it can be modified as before. To remove a line from the Composition Field, select it by clicking on it with the left mouse button. Then click the Del button. Choosing a Font Clicking the Choose Font... button produces a standard Amiga font requester (unless you have selected a replacement font requester in your Preferences/File Requester settings). Use the font requester controls to select a suitable font and size. ImageFX supports all Amiga supported font types, including CG Compugraphic and Color Fonts. Font Style Controls The Font Style controls provide familiar stylistic options: Boldface, Italic and Underline. These may be applied singly or in combination. Font Preview You can preview the selected combination of font, size and style by typing a word or two into the Font Preview text entry field. If your text contains a critical logotype or other special characters, you can use the preview to determine that ImageFX will render the text correctly. Justification Controls Use the Justification Controls to specify how the rendered text will be aligned: Left, Centered, or Right justified. When rendered, all the lines in the Composition Field will be aligned according to this setting. Rendering Controls The Rendering Controls affect how ImageFX will render the text to suit the current image buffer's color depth and pixel resolution. Remap colors produces the best rendition of Color Fonts into a limited palette buffer. Extra Border adds a pixel around the edges of the letterforms. This is useful for creating drop-shadows and other text effects. Anti-Alias applies the Anti-Aliasing edge smoothing algorithm to help the text blend into existing background colors. Load and Save Controls You can Load Text documents created in other word processing programs. You can also Save Text you create in the Composition Field for later use. If you wish to save your font, rendering and justification settings as well, choose Save All. These settings can be reused at any time thereafter by selecting Load All. Default Settings Clicking the Default button clears all existing text and settings, restoring the Text Composition panel to its default condition. Rendering Text When the panel is configured satisfactorily, click Okay. The text will be rendered according to the settings in the panel and attached to the mouse as a custom brush. You can then position the text brush anywhere you like in the image buffer and click the left mouse button to place it. The text is rendered into the image according to the currently selected Drawing Mode and style and using the currently selected palette color. If you wish to exit the Text Composition panel without rendering any text, click Cancel. Cropping Controls The middle set of controls in the Size menu are for reducing the image dimensions by discarding pixels. Cropping is a familiar graphic arts term for cutting away unwanted picture information and, thereby, drawing attention to the most important elements of the image. Auto Crop ImageFX 2.0 has an automatic cropping capability that can intelligently detect blank background information and simply delete it. Auto Crop is especially effective with scanned images. Cropping Control Panel When a more interactive method of cropping is desired, click the Crop... button in the Size menu. This produces the Cropping control panel. Double-clicking on any color well produces an Edit Color Register requester. This requester contains string gadgets with values describing the currently defined color in terms of the currently selected color space components, either RGB, CMY, CMYK, HSV, YIQ or YUV. By typing in new values for each component you can alter the hue of the color well. These requesters all have three string gadgets except for CMYK which has four. The fourth button in the middle column of Preferences panel controls allows you to pick your favorite file requester. File requesters are a matter of taste among Amiga users and some prefer to use one that is different from the Amiga's own ASL.library requester. In addition, ImageFX 2.0 now offers its own thumbnail-based file requester for selecting images. If you indicated in the Preferences/File Requester... options panel that you wished to use the ImageFX Thumbnail File Requester when loading pictures, this is the requester that will open. Otherwise a standard Amiga file requester will be used. Image selection using the Thumbnail File Requester is accomplished the same as any standard file requester. Locate the image you wish to load and double-click using the left mouse button. If necessary, use the scroll bar to move unseen thumbnails into view. The Thumbnail requester also has two pull-down menus, described in the ImageFX Program Reference. Images that have not had a thumbnail previously created, and all directories, will display in a blank square with a ? character. ImageFX 2.0 includes a Hook program to search your image directories and create thumbnails automatically. The complement to Grey to Color, this operator reduces a 24-bit image to 8-bit greyscale. This process requires a method for scaling Red, Green and Blue color data to an appropriate greyscale brightness level. Since the ideal scaling method may vary from one picture to another, ImageFX provides several choices. Clicking the Color to Grey... button produces the following requester. It provides two standard scaling methods and the means to create your own. Grey This method assigns equal weight to Red, Green and Blue image data. Luma This method weights the interpretation of Red, Green and Blue data according to the sensitivity of the human eye. In this case, green is counted almost twice as bright as red which, itself, is more than twice as bright as blue. This is the default setting. Custom If you wish, you can edit the individual weighting values to any number you like. When you click the Custom... button in the Convolve pop-up menu, the Custom Convolution control panel appears. You can create your own custom convolution matrices, either by typing values into the Matrix Definition Field and clicking Save, or by typing a set of values into a file using your favorite text editor. The following, taken from the Matrix subdirectory of ImageFX:, is an example of such a text file. Custom Matrix Specification Diagonal 3 3 3 -1 -1 2 -1 3 -1 2 -1 -1 -1 -1 2 -1 3 -1 2 -1 -1 -1 -1 2 -1 3 -1 2 -1 -1 Different display and publication uses for digital images impose different characteristics on the pixels that comprise the image. For instance, most Amigas support a number of different display modes, each of which uses pixels of a different rectangular shape. All Macintoshes, by contrast, use perfectly square pixels, no matter what display dimensions they use. If you were to load a Macintosh image on your Amiga, you might wonder why it looks vertically or horizontally squashed. In fact, the image is not squashed, it just uses a different Pixel Aspect Ratio. Pixel aspect ratio is the relationship of pixel width to pixel height. ImageFX provides the necessary tools to correct for any type of pixel aspect ratio mismatch. Clicking the Set Aspect... button in the Size menu produces the Aspect Ratio control panel. Dots Per Inch/Dots Per Centimeter The Aspect Ratio control panel also has entries for setting the image's default Dots Per Inch (dpi) resolution. Normally, ImageFX defaults to 300 dpi laser printer resolution, but images destined for monitor display only are commonly used with either a 72 or 75 dpi setting. Many image file formats include aspect ratio and dpi information along with the file. Dimensions Finally, the image's Width and Height, either in terms of inches or in terms of inches or centimeters may also be set. These values change as you adjust the DPI/DPM setting. The first Filter adjustment method allows you to adjust the Dynamic Range for the image in the Main buffer. Dynamic range is an expression of the image's informational bandwidth; the volume of its graphical content. Normally, when scanning or frame grabbing, you want to acquire and maintain the broadest dynamic range possible. Video signal transmission and low-resolution printing technology are media with limited dynamic range capabilities, however. If the images are to be distributed using either of these methods, they should be filtered first. Picture information that exceeds the dynamic range limits of a given medium turns into noise. Clicking the Dynamic Range... button in the Filter pop-up menu produces the Dynamic Range adjustment subpanel. The normal dynamic range for computer graphics is 0 255: The maximum range of brightness values carried by 8 bits of data. Video signals degrade if they are asked to carry picture information that is too dark or too bright. Generally, a suitable dynamic range for video is 12 210. Thus, to adjust an image for video, using the Dynamic Range filter, you would raise the Lower Limit slider to 12 and lower the Upper Limit slider to 210. The top portion of the Size menu contains two Quick-Scaling buttons and a Scale subpanel selector. Quick Halve and Double The buttons marked Halve and Double, when clicked, immediately and automatically either halve or double the pixel dimensions of the image in the main buffer. The method of scaling used is set in the Scale control panel described below. Normally, the Fast scaling method is used. Scale subpanel When you need to scale an image by some factor other than 2, click the Scale... button to produce the Scale control panel. Scale Mode Scaling can be performed according to several user preferences. The Smooth method interpolates the picture data and produces the highest quality image at the expense of speed. The Fast method scales the image much faster, but simply discards or repeats pixels, rather than interpreting new color information. The Border method provides a way to increase the image's pixel dimensions without changing the actual size of the picture data. When Border is selected, the original image, at its original size, is placed against a black background of your specified dimensions. Thus, when scaling a 640 x 480 image to 800 x 600, 80 pixels of black are added to either side and 60 pixels of black are added top and bottom. The Simple 2D Rotation controls provide the easiest and most direct method to accomplish rotations around a point fixed in the center of the image. Clicking the Simple 2D Rotate... button produces the Simple Rotation control panel. Clicking the Custom... button produces the Custom Color Curve Editor. Color Curve Edit Field The large field at the top, left of the Curve Editor represents, in cartesian coordinate space, the brightness curve of the current image. By default, this curve is a straight line. The Curve Editor field is actually a small image buffer. You can edit the Color Curve to alter the image by brightness levels. You can also use the Curve Editor in combination with the R, G and B Color Channel selectors to adjust the individual color components by brightness levels. Curve Types and Editing Methods Controls are provided to adjust the color curve using a line composed of individual pixel-sized points, point-delimited Line segments or Spline-curve segments. Point-based This method allows you to create a color curve composed of discontinuous segments. Line-based This method is the easiest and quickest method, but can produce unwanted brightness cusps if the points that separate line segments produce sharp angles. Spline-based Using Splines to shape the color curve takes a little more work to master, but produces the smoothest and most satisfying results. When the Line-based or Spline-based method is selected, the Add Point and Remove Point buttons become available. Adding points increases the number of segments and permits greater flexibility in adjusting the overall curve. Preview Thumbnails When you first open the Custom Curve Editor, the current image is rendered in reduced, thumbnail form in the upper of the Preview windows. Any time you make an adjustment to the color curve, you can check its effect by clicking the Preview button. The new curve will be applied to the thumbnail image and the new thumbnail will be displayed in the lower window. Loading and Saving custom curves ImageFX ships with a number of pre-defined custom curves. These are stored in the Transform directory within your ImageFX main directory and may be recalled simply by clicking the Load button at the bottom of the Editor window. Any curve you create using the Custom Curve Editor can be saved for later use by clicking the Save button and supplying a suitable name in the file requester that appears. When you have selected a suitable Custom color curveor created one of your own and have previewed it to your satisfaction, click Okay to apply the curve to the data in ImageFX's main buffer. To exit without affecting your image data, click Cancel. Disperse mode produces a very interesting special effect. As you paint usually with a fairly large brush or pen the pixels in the image are scattered slightly. You can adjust the amount of dispersion by clicking the Options button to the right of the Mode selector. Doing so produces a Disperse Density slider. END OF PART THREE ---===========---