Antialiasing On

Antialiasing Off

The Area Menu

Antialias Area Selections

• Freehand
• Polygon
• I-Shape
• Rounded Rectangle
• Ellipse
• Polyarc
• Spline
• Bezier
• Font

Autofill

Autoclose

Pixel transfer Modes

• Color Fill
• Radial Fill
• Linear Fill
• Concentric Fill
• Outline Fill
• Texture
• Bang
• Flat Map
• Tiler
• Merge
• Place
• Stroke
• Plugin (plugins may, or may not, obey pixel transfer modes)

Please see This Page: "Color Transfer Modes" for more details on color transfer modes.

Undo Last Selection

Clear Area Selection

Show Area Tool Box

Load Area Select File

Save Area Select File

Load I-Shape...

Save I-Shape...

After you have completed the shape, select the Save IShape option from the Area menu. After this has been selected you can then specify a name for your IShape and where it is to be stored.

Font Style

Shape from Corner

Note: It is important to remember that WinImages F/x uses the center position of an area selection as the center of effect for many of the operations.

Rectangle from Corner

Rounded Rectangle from Corner

Ellipse from Corner

Roundness

Roundness Dialog

Color Wand Controls

Color Key Controls

1. Key on RGB (Red, Green and Blue)
2. Key on HSV (Hue, Saturation and Value)
3. Key on Colorspace (18-bit or 24-bit)
4. Key on Steepness (0=flat, 255=vertical)
5. Key On Height (0=low, 255=high)

As you select any of these options the controls will be altered to suit the key type selected. For example, if you select RGB as the key mode, the key color selection and RGB variance controls will be available.

Color Key Dialog (using HSV)

The remainder of the dialog is devoted to specifying options and setting for the three keying modes. All three modes allow you to select any of the predefined colors or specify your own color to be used for color keying. The specified color and variance are then used inside the area selection to select the desired colors. These colors are selected on the basis of the initial area selection (boundary), the key color, and any associated variance. After all of this has been determined, WinImages F/x will outline the area and perform the operation on only areas which contained the specified colors.

The Steepness and Height keying modes are designed to be used with heightfield textures and the landscape operators. They allow you to easily control what altitudes (or degrees of slope) an effect is applied to. Since a heightmap is interpreted with 0 as the lowest altitude and 255 as the highest altitude, this can be very useful.

For instance, if you watched to "roughen" a landscape, and you know you plan to flood it with water at an altitude of 32, then you might prefer not to roughen the landscape from 0 to 32 (because it would be underwater, and so not subject to the same environmental forces). To accomplish this, you could set the height key to lo=33 and high=255, then apply a dither operation to the resulting area from the key and the Entire Image area selection. Nothing below 33 would be affected, but the landscape above the planned water level would be roughened.

Similarly, Steepness keying can be used to apply effects to areas of low slope (for instance, a steepness key of lo=0 high=5 would apply an effect to gentle slopes) or to high slope regions (lo=5 hi=255 would do that). Steepness keying is also intended to be used with heightfields, though of course you can use it for anything you may think of!

Color Key Dialog (using Steepness)

Key on Color Space is handled differently from the other two keying modes. We'll explain the difference here.

RGB and HSV keying use a conventional, "central" color to key. You can then expand the key to also select colors that are near (in terms of a sphere in conventional RGB or HSV colorspaces) to the original key color. This means that colors in all directions are chosen, and if your key is not particularly uniform, as the keying range is expanded, colors can be included in the key that you don't want.

Color space keying builds an 18-bit or 24-bit colorspace that knows about every color in the area selected to set up the key. Not one central color, but hundreds, thousands - even millions of distinct colors. This means that the key precisely matches every color in the that region - not colors "near" them, or made of an average as must be done with RGB or HSV keying.

Once you have created a colorspace key, you can grow the colorspace key so that colors near all of the keying colors are also included. Because colors around all of the key colors are added, growing the key just slightly serves to increase the key application to the key colors in an extraordinarily accurate manner.

Color Key Dialog (using medium colorspace)

Each control in the dialog is described below in greater detail:

Key on: RGB, Hue, or Color Space

This control allows you to select the color key method that you will be using for the key selection. You may select an RGB based key, and Hue based key, or a color space key. By selecting any of these options the dialog will automatically change the controls to the proper settings for that key mode.

Medium/High Quality

This control alters the quality of the color key space. A medium quality space will produce fairly good results with low memory usage (about 1/4 megabyte), and a high quality space will produce excellent results with considerably higher memory requirements (about four megabytes). It is possible to change from one quality of key space to the other at any time, but their will be some minor reduction in quality when you switch from high to medium. These options are only available of the Key on Color Space option is selected.

New/Add/Subtract

These controls allow you to specify how the next sample area will be used by the key color space. You can select to Add the new colors to the current color space, subtract the new colors from the existing space, or create a new color space. These options are only available if the Key on Color Space option is selected.

RGB/HSV Range

These two sets of slider gadgets allow you to specify the specific RGB or HSV ranges for a RGB or Hue based color key. Please review the above documentation and the documentation in Color Key section for further details on how color ranges influence a color key area selection. These options are only available if the Key on RGB or Key on Hue selection has been made.

Grow

The Grow slider allows you to increase the range of a color within the key color space. For example, if you have a key space comprised entirely of pure blue (0,0,255) and you grow the color space by 10, your new space would include colors from (0,0,255) to (10,10,245). It is important to remember to reset this control to 0 if you are going to make further adjustments to the color space. If you do not, the program will continue to grow the color space by the specified value each time it is used. This option is only available if the Key on Color Space option is selected.

Load/Save Space

These controls allow you to load or save a color space to file. Once the color space has been saved, it can be recalled and used by selecting the load space button in this dialog.

Note: When you use a high quality colorspace, the file sizes for the color key can be as large as four megabytes. The colorspace files do use compression, and most files won't be anywhere near that size, but you should be aware that it is possible.

Feathering Controls

Feathering may also be adjusted within the details area dialog available from timeline area selection icon dialogs.

Finally, there are a number of useful scripting commands that control area selection feathering and other area selection features.

Tip: The feathering controls may also be accessed by right clicking on the AA button in the area toolbox.

Feathering Control Dialog

Transparency Controls

Transparency Control Dialog

Transparency level slider

This allows you to specify the transparency as a value that ranges between 0 and 255. A setting of 0 will result in the effect being completely transparent, and a setting of 255 will make the effect opaque. The specified transparency level will be applied to all of the effects in WinImages.

Edge Blending control

This allows you to specify the percentage value of the entire area select that is to be used for edge blending. The control can range from 0% to 100%, and effects the horizontal slope of the graph. A setting of 0% will result in there being no edge blending, and a setting of 100% will result in an edge blend that extends from the edge of the area select to the center. You can also perform an anti-aliasing operation by setting this control to 1%. This setting will not perform a true edge blend.

Preset Edge Blends

There are several preset edge blending levels. These presets are: Flat, Soft Edges, Broad Edge Fade, and Conical Fade. The Flat preset has an edge blending percentage of 0% which will simply place the effect in the selected area with no blending. Soft Edges will perform an anti-aliasing at the edge of the area select. The Broad Edge Fade has an edge blending level of 50% that produces a nice fading effect. Conical Fade has 100% edge blending.

This dialog also contains a control to alter the width of the area selection. This means that you can specify exactly where the edge blending is to begin. The control ranges from 0 to 100%, and effects the width of the transparency graph. For example, a setting of 50% would result in the edge blending beginning 50% into the area selection. It is important to remember that image information outside of this radius will be lost.

There are also trend graphs for each of these transparency modifiers. Setting the trends for an operations will allow you to create effects that fade in and then fade out or even transitions from one image to another. The trend button allows you to set that variable over a set of frames. Each frame of the animation can be thought of as a slice of time. The trends allow you to alter some, all, or none of the variables for a particular time slice. You will notice that the trend graphs have equidistantly spaced vertical lines. Each of these lines represents a frame in the animation. The number of frames can be altered using the Sequence controls... in the Timeline pull down menu. Animation lengths of 100 - 999 frames will be represented with a vertical bar being 10 frames, and animation length greater than 1000 frames will have a vertical bar for every 100 frames.

Mask with Target Alpha

Normally, this should not be selected unless you want the alpha channel to interact with the selection mask.

Opaque Fills

Normally, this should not be selected.

Splatter Controls

WinImages F/x Manual Version 7, Revision 5, Level B