Picture Options

The rest of the buttons and checkboxes in the DeskPicture control window offer options that let you control the size and look of the selected picture.

Scale: Clicking this button automatically scales the picture so that it fills the entire screen. Keep in mind that this may cause the picture to appear distorted, depending on the proportions of the picture compared to those of the screen. You can avoid this effect by holding down the Option key, which causes this button to read “Propor. Scale”; clicking it causes the picture to be scaled proportionally to fill your screen. Clicking it while also holding down the Shift key causes the picture to be scaled so that its top border is directly below the menu bar.

Delete: To delete a picture, simply select it (click on it– the handles will appear around its borders indicating that it is selected) and click “Delete” in the control window or press the Delete key. It is particularly important to select the picture first if you are displaying multiple pictures, so that you do not delete the wrong one.

Default size: Clicking this button restores the selected picture to its original dimensions. This option lets you revert to your starting point whenever you decide that you do not like the scaling you have done. 

Holding down the Option key causes this button to read “Full Crop”, so that clicking it restores the picture to its original size but crops and centers it within the frame of your screen. “Full Crop is used when the picture is larger than your screen size or when you are setting DeskPicture to switch automatically between pictures of several different sizes (see the “Changing pictures automatically” section later in this manual).

Send back: This button is used to control the layering of the pictures on a screen. Let’s say you placed one picture on the desktop, then opened another one and moved it so it overlaps the first one. When you are working with DeskPicture, the last picture you opened or adjusted is always the active one (the one on which the handles appear), so in this situation the second picture is active. If you want to select the picture behind it, you can easily do so just by clicking it– the handles will appear around its border. However, the second picture will still overlap the first, so you will be looking at the handles through the second picture. This is fine if all you want to do is drag the picture to a different location or delete it. If you want to make more major changes to the picture like scaling or cropping it, of if you decide that you actually want it to be the frontmost picture, all you need to do is select the current topmost picture by clicking it, and then click the “Send back” button. This causes the two pictures to swap their stacking order. You can then make your changes and send it back again, if you want.

Holding down the Option key changes this button to read “Send forward,” so you can reverse the procedure using this option.

Crop picture: This checkbox activates the cropping function for pictures. When this checkbox is off the handles surrounding the picture are used to scale the size of the picture. When you turn it on, dragging the handles of a selected picture inward will hide portions of the picture rather than scaling the entire image to fit the new size. You can also crop outward to increase the boundaries of a picture’s border for special effects.

Tile picture: This checkbox enables DeskPicture to “tile,” or repeat pictures. Any single picture you open on the desktop can be tiled so that multiple copies of the original picture fill the screen. Note that the picture you tiled still appears in its original locations with handles around its borders. Because the handles are still active, you can scale, crop, or move the original picture in order to adjust the way the repeating pattern appears on your desktop.

Use the color table: Selecting this checkbox allows you to enhance the appearance of a picture by using its unique color table (only necessary on monitors that support 256 or fewer colors). To explain a little further, the system software uses a color table that determines the appearance of icons, folders, and any other items that use colors in the Finder or other applications. Some pictures (most often photographs) contain colors that are not found in the standard system color table; as a result, they contain their own tables which provide these special colors. When you display such a picture using a standard system color table, its colors may look washed-out or just “off.” If you select the “Use color table” checkbox on the DeskPicture control window, DeskPicture will use the picture’s unique color table instead of the system’s, making the picture appear as it was intended to. Be aware, however, that the color table you select by doing this becomes the active color table for the system– this can cause your icons and other color objects to appear differently that they normally do.

On a monitor that supports 16-, 24-, or 32-bit color, this option isn’t necessary because these resolutions provide a selection of thousands of millions of colors. This means that multiple color tables are easily supported.