Color menu help

Color Resolution - using this dialog you can change the color "depth" of the active image. For some applications you may want to reduce the color depth or increase it to allow the inclusion of additional color information or make certain special effects operations look better. Possible values are from 1 (monochrome, a depth of either black or white) up to 32 bit, which contains every possible color plus a plane for transparency.

Choose how the colors are ordered in the data, selections being Blue-Green-Red or Red-Green-Blue. "Standard" windows bitmaps typically use RGB ordering, and changing this will have the effect of reversing the apparent color of the image.

You can effect how an image that is reduced to a level below "optimum" is dithered (which means colors "close to the original" are approximated by certain pixel changes). There are several possible dithering options from which you can choose here, and the final result will vary significantly based on the original image, its original color depth, and patterns within it.

For example, an image with a pattern of fine lines may not reduce well to a level where it must be heavily dithered, because the dithering will degrade the apparent resolution of the line content of the image. Your best approach is to move the dialog to the side so you can see your image, and click on the various dithering procedure radio buttons one-by-one until you see the one that handles your image's color reduction in the best fashion.

Choose the Bits Per Pixel you wish to use, and then select from the following options.

Palette options - choose from Optimized, Std Windows, Netscape (for web use), or Black and white.

Colorful destinations await you:

If you're creating a 16 color graphic for use in a Windows application, you should use the Windows standard. This means it uses the basic 16 colors that Windows "reserves" for use within its user interface are also reserved and used inside the graphic, if it needs a full 16 color set. This way loading of the graphic will not cause your system palette to shift, an undesirable characteristic that disturbs users running in low-color modes. This is less of a problem with newer computers, but previously was a big issue.

If the final destination of your graphic will be a web page, and you want it to look "accurate" for users of Netscape Navigator, you should select the Netscape web safe palette. Note that IE doesn't use the same palette.

Dithering Method - there are several patterns here, the default being None. If you do not dither an image and you reduce colors beyond the level required to correctly display the contents of your image, you may get "blocky" results.

Experiment with varying dithering methods (they all have pluses and minuses) and find the one that works best with the type of image you are creating. After trying a method, if you select Undo from the edit menu, you can try another, and continue testing until you find a pattern that best serves your needs.

Click on Revert to cancel changes to these settings and put the image's settings back how they were if you've decided to not perform the operation you were about to execute.

Pick a part:

You can perform functions from this point on within items on the Color menu by applying them either to the entire image orùif an area is selectedùwithin just the selected area. This way you can convert part of an image to Black and white, or grayscale, and so forth.

Items above this point in the menu are "global" and affect the entire image.

Black and White - converts the current image to a black and white image. You can enter a black level between 0 and 100. A value of 0 means a white image, a value of 100 means a black image. You can drag the slider back and forth instead of manually entering a value if you prefer. This way you also get a preview of your changes in real-time.

The change to your image is reflected in the preview window provided on the dialog.

Halftone - applies a halftone screen (similar to shooting a screen for monochromatic printing) to the active image. You can change the angle of the screen (how it is applied across the image) by moving the slider control or entering a value into the angle box.

You may have to experiment with the screen angle to get the desired results, and every image accepts half-toning differently based on its complexity and type of content. Images with very fine line content, light colored text, or plenty of diagonal lines often do not halftone well.

Gray Scale - converts the image to grayscale, which is akin to a "black and white" photograph. The image's chromatic data is converted to values of gray. You may want to do this, for example, to print a color image on a laser printer that supports grayscale printing.

HyperSnap-DX 5's conversion may provide better results than the printer driver's engine when sending color images to a grayscale laser. This varies by printer driver an other issues.

Color Correction - adjusts the colors of the whole image or selected, using the following 5 controls:

Brightness - move the slider back and forth or enter numbers from -100 (black) to +100 (white) to alter the luminance of the image. You can adjust the brightness of your image (just like how you adjust the brightness on a TV) by using the controls here. Select a percentage to increase from the original, from no change to a 100% increase, or from no change to a -100% decrease.

Adjust your picture:

Working with Gamma and Contrast, you can use this to get washed-out or overly-dense images back into usability. You might have to twiddle a bit, but these can fix many old photos, or (for example) blocked-up images made on older color photocopiers that you've scanned into your system. Also early digital cameras often produced wishy-washy images, too.

Contrast - scrub the slider back and forth or enter numbers from -100 (remove contrast, rendering the image very "flat") to +100 (maximum contrast, deeply blackening the shadows) to adjust the image's appearance.

This function works exactly like the same-named control on your color television set. You can adjust the "knee" of the image to that it represents a greater or lesser range of contrast values. The effect here will be to "block up" the image (more contrast between dark and light areas) or "flatten out" the image (less contrast between dark and light areas).

Prop up those flat pictures:

Combined with Gamma and Brightness, you can correct faded, flat, or blocked-up images with the color functions. Old photographs, for example, often need much help with these values.

Hue - similar in some ways to the hue control on a television, you can alter the balance of the image across the "color wheel" by moving the slider back and forth or entering numbers from -360 to +360. The color wheel represents all possible color values across the spectrum in a circle, and the value represented here is the location of a virtual "pointer" on the full circle. The color at that location will become the central "bias color" of the image.

Geometric issues:

Note that 1, 0, 360 and -360 represent the same position, just gotten to by different directions of rotation, so there is essentially no change in your image. If you have 360 degrees of rotation, and you rotate backwards 360 degrees from your original position (which is defined as 1 or 0) then you haven't really moved anywhere significant, you've just spun around in a circle and now you're facing the same way.

Saturation - this function is precisely like the color control on a television. You can choose values of -100 (no chromatic value, a grayscale image) to +100 (maximum color value, extremely over saturated) by scrubbing the slider or entering the desired value.

Wet paint:

New to computer graphics? Think of Saturation as you would how "wet" a brush is when it's dipped in paint. The wetter it is, the more intense is the color on the canvas (or your wall, when painting time comes around). The drier the brush is, the less intense is the color.

Gamma Correction - this can adjust the "knee" of the image by increasing the apparent "light" content of the image. Imagine looking through a slide at a light source that is adjusted so it's either brighter (positive gamma) or dimmer (negative gamma).

Lost in the shadows?

A slight positive increase can bring out shadow detail that's gotten lost in underexposed photographic prints, if there's at least some information in the scan or image. A slight negative adjustment can make washed-out scans of old photos appear slightly better, in some cases, by making the blacks more crisp and dense.

Invert Black and White - this function reverses the "polarity" of black and white content in the image. If your image doesn't contain black or white components (for example it's solid colors with neither black or white) this function will have no effect.

Invert Colors - you can turn positive images (such as scans of photographs) into reversal color, and you can turn negative images (such as scans of camera negatives) into positive images by toggling their state here.

Substitute Colors - This dialog lets you pick colors and then replacement values to use to overwrite the original values. The dialog is easy to use, and if you need to replace colors in an image, you can be up and running in just a few moments. You Add a color to replace, then using the Old color boxes on the bottom left, enter a valueùor use the color pickerùto choose the color you want changed. Then using the New Color boxes, enter manually (or use the picker) select a color to use to overwrite the old color.

Swapping can get colorful.

The power of this feature is easy to miss at first glance. But think about it for a moment and you'll see just how powerful it can be. It can turn a positive black and white image capture into a negative, can "remove" solid color areas from an image almost like a "matte" program, and do any number of things. The "programmatic" nature of the function (being able to set up multiple colors to swap or replace) makes it a very resourceful tool almost without bounds. Things that took you a half hour before (such as dropping out a background) can now happen automatically.

You can substitute one or many colors during this operation. For example, you could change all white pixels (values 255 255 255) to black pixels (000,000,000), and all pure red pixels (255,000,000) to pure blue pixels (000,000,255). "Program" in as many changes as you need by clicking the Add button every time you need a new function.

In addition to changing, you can swap colors by choosing Swap, below the color value boxes, instead of the default Replace. This is like "passing the butter" on the table and giving the "bread" in exchange.

If you're doing a group of captures and want, for example, to have the process you specify here applied to all images, check Automatically apply to all captured images. This is a slick way to have a purple background (for example) cleared away on a collection of desktop captures destined for publication (for example). You can have your purple desktop turned to white (or black) after capture and during the subsequent saving.

Click Delete to remove a substitution instruction from your list. Click Delete All to clear the list of all substitutions.

This dialog lets you save programmatic lists of color substitutions (just like you save image files or stamps). Click Save List to save your current list of color substitutions as an instructional file.

Open List will open a saved color sub. list you may have saved. Save List will save a new color sub. list as a new instructional file.

Apply uses the instructions on the current image and makes the colors swap or replace with the values you've specified. Revert cancels the last color sub. changes you've made.

This function can also be "automatic" if need be, being applied to every capture you do. Check Automatically apply to all captured images to enable that functionality.

When you're finished, click Done to close the Color Substitution dialog.

Unique Colors - although an image may be defined as a 256 (8 bit) or 16 million (24 bit) color, it may actually only have a limited number of the available colors in use. To view that value here, activate this function.

Guide to color dipping:

If you're about to change the color resolution (also called color "bit depth" of an image, sometimes previewing the unique colors in use may provide a key as to how far down in total color count you can go before the image degrades beyond use. For example: a 256 color image with only 30 colors in actual use can probably be dropped to 16 colors without terrible degradationùbut a drop below that would not be desirable and would produce a scratchy-looking dot-filled mess in most cases.