Compose


Photogenics has a powerful image composition system - Compose. Compose allows you to take one image and place it anywhere on top of another image and combine the images together using powerful operations.

You need at least two images loaded to use Compose. The background image should be your currently selected image, and the foreground image should be placed in the secondary buffer (select the buffer and press the '2' key to do this quickly)

Select the 'Image/Compose' menu item (or press Amiga-K on your keyboard) to start compose. A new window, the Compose window should open:

Your secondary image will appear in a window on top of the primary image. You can use the mouse to resize the box (drag the corners or the edges to change the size, drag the box around the screen from the middle) or you can type in values directly into the 'X Offset', 'Y Offset', 'Width' and 'Height' boxes to specify an exact position and size.

Once your image is positioned correctly, press the OK button in the compose window to combine the images together.

There is, of course, far more to Compose than this. With the next figure we have taken the background image (an image from the Graphics/ExampleScenes directory called Scene2.JPG) and we want to add a creature comfort.

We used an image of a Polarbear (PolarBear.JPG in Graphics/ExampleImages) on a black background.

Now, this isn't ideal, we don't want all the black background around the image. Using the compose system, solving this is simple. Just click on the cycle gadget in the middle of the compose window until it says 'Transparent Black'. ...

and the black background disappears! Now we can position the image with the black background transparent. We can choose the position for the fuzzy bear and click on OK to fix it.

Now we want to add some text to the image, we want to use an anti-aliased colour font (These fonts are white fonts with smooth grey edges fading into the black background. There is a cluster of these high quality fonts available for installing via an option in the installer on disk 1). If we use an anti-aliased font like this (or if we use any image which has been blurred into the black background) then the Transparent Black option will have some problems. This is what you get:

As only the black is replaced and not the grey border around the text it is not combined smoothly. You may want to use this type of effect to give your text a border, but in general the text looks better if it is smoothed into the background (or anti-aliased). Turn off the Transparent Black option and select the Brightness Key option instead.

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