Loading Images: Images can be loaded by clicking on the 'Load Image RGB' or 'Load Image BGR' buttons. Some images will appear to have their blue and green components reversed. The RGB and BGR buttons were supposed to allow you to get around this problem, but they currently both do the same thing. You can usually solve this problem by saving the file as a no-loss CMP file and then loading it again. You might find it useful to keep a scratch file for this purpose, perhaps called '\temp.cmp'. This way, you won't accumulate a lot of extra files, and it is always easy to find. We expect to fix this bug very soon.
Viewer: Moraff's WorldNet is based on a state-of-the-art imaging library that supports almost every image file format imaginable! You can view files with 256 or 16 million colors, and among others, they can be in BMP, GIF, PCX, TIFF, JPG, TGA, and even Mac Pict formats!
In addition to having great file format support, the user interface of the viewer is superior to any we've seen. In most Windows programs, there is a menu at the top of the screen that never goes away. We are so proud of the quality of the graphics in the WorldNet games, that we have designed most of our programs to have a special Maximized mode that has no menus or other stuff to clutter up your view of the image.
The Image Viewer and Editor automatically maximizes an image when you load it, and then when you close the menu, nothing will block your image. In some cases, this will stretch the image to weird proportions. If this happens, you may want to click the 'Actual Size' button to re-size the viewer window to the size of the image. This will automatically close the menu, which can be re-opened by clicking anywhere in the image window.
Editor: The image editor is a very special-purpose tool that we designed partly because we needed it to create images for WorldNet. If you ever do modifications to photographs where you might want to change the hue, intensity, contrast, sharpness, or other effects, you know that it can be a painful process. Using other programs, you have to do each of these steps one at a time, and then if you decide that you really wanted an earlier step done differently, you have to start all over again.
Run the Editor after loading an image by pressing the 'Modify Image' button.
WorldNet's Image Editor allows you to select all of the changes you want, and then press a 'Render' button, and have all the changes made at once. Then if you want to change something, you simply make the change and hit 'Render' again. This can make the process of image modification go 10 to 100 times faster, which really means a better quality final product.
Converting Images: To convert images to other file formats, click the 'Save Image' button. Then use the standard windows menu to choose a directory and filename. Click on the 'Save File as Type:' to choose a file format. If you choose a cmp, jpg, jtf, or similar format, then you may want to set the 'Compression Level' before clicking the 'Save Image' button. The minimum number is 2, and the maximum level is 255. If you want to have no image loss, go all the way to the bottom of the file type list, and you will find 'no-loss cmp'. We have been told that this proprietary format has no image quality loss.
The Image Viewer and Editor also allows you to convert from and to any file format and any number of colors. Simply click the 'Number of Colors' button to change to any of the following:
24 bit (true color, 16 million ): 16 million colors are achieved by mixing 256 shades of red, green, and blue. 256 times 256 times 256 is 16 million. Note that 256 is 2 to the 8'th power - that is what 8 bit means. So this is really 8 bits + 8 bits + 8 bits = 24 bits.
16 bit: There is very little reason to convert to this number of colors. It is achieved by mixing 32 shades of red, green, and blue, and 1 shade of brightness. 32 times 32 times 32 is 32768. 32768 dark colors plus 32768 light colors make 65536 colors. 32 is 2 to the 5'th power, or 5 bits. 5 bits + 5 bits + 5 bits = 15 bits. Add one bit for intensity, and you have 16 bits.
256 colors, optimized palette: 256 colors are achieved by using a color table with a list 256 colors that are made up of 64 shades of red, green, and blue. This means that each of the 256 colors are chosen from a choice of 262,144 colors (64 times 64 times 64). When you select this option, the Image Editor will choose the best possible selection of 256 colors to represent your image. This is usually very effective, and yields quality almost close to 16 million colors.
256 colors, fixed palette: This is the same as the optimized palette, except that the palette is a fixed set of 256 colors that are used for all images. When the image is converted to this mode, the image is 'Dithered', meaning that pixels are mixed together to give the appearance of more colors. This method yields quality much lower than the optimized palette. However, if you attempt to use these images simultaneously on a 256 color display, their palettes may conflict with each other, since you can only have one set of 256 colors at a time.
4 bit, 16 colors: These aren't very useful anymore.
Gray scale, (8 bit, 64 shades): This yields a very high quality no-color image with 64 shades of gray. 8 bits allow 256 different colors, but since the colors have to be made up of 64 shades of red, green, and blue, there can only be 64 shades of gray.
Half tone (black and white): This is useful for preparing photographic images for black and white printing. It dithers the image to give the impression of shades of gray.
32 bit (alpha channel, TGA format): This is really a 24 bit image with 256 shades (8 bits) of transparency.|
