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Digital Frontiers ]
HVS ColorGIF operates on RGB images which may contain transparent areas and/or an alpha channel. The package includes both Filter and File Export versions of the plug-in, because each of these formats excels at particular tasks.
The filter plug-in runs on a variety of hosts in addition to Adobe Photoshop, and as a filter is able to operate on selections rather than the entire image. For example, You might choose to dither only the foreground of an image, leaving the background flat color. Also, the filter operates only on the currently selected layers, whereas the export plug-in operates on a flattened copy of all visible layers. The export plug-in is more useful for batch processing, because Photoshop provides the file name of the image when the export is called and the filter will not run automatically without its dialog box. The Export plug-in can be invoked without a UI via Photoshop 4.0 Actions.
Selections are particularly useful in protecting colors from processing, restricting dithering to certain regions, reducing various regions to different color depths, and creating a MultiPalette from a single image, varying the weight for the foreground and background.