CD Actual 8

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ CD Actual 8 / CDACTUAL8.iso / share / os2 / mmedia / truespec / readme < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1996-08-13 | 22.6 KB | 489 lines

TrueSpectra (R) Photo>Graphics Sampler (TM) README ============================================ Contents ------- 1.0 About TrueSpectra Photo>Graphics Sampler Version 1.02 1.1 INSTALLATION 1.2 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS 1.3 RECOMMENDED OPTIONAL HARDWARE 1.4 TUTORIAL GUIDE 1.5 BUGS & SUGGESTIONS 1.6 Q & A 2.0 Reporting Bugs 3.0 Product & Company Overview 1.0 About TrueSpectra Photo>Graphics Sampler Version 1.02 August 1996 =========================================================== We thank you for viewing our Photo>Graphics Sampler! For the latest information on TrueSpectra products and services as well as news about our library of ColorWave Clipart and images, please check out http://www.truespectra.com. 1.1 INSTALLATION ---------------- 1. Optionally uninstall any previous betas of TrueSpectra Light or TrueSpectra Photo>Graphics. 2. Read and agree to the Software License Agreement, then put the CD-ROM in your CD-ROM drive. 3. Double click on OS/2 System, then on Drives, and then on the CD-ROM drive icon. To start installation, double click on the PHOTOGFX folder and then on the INSTALL icon. Follow the prompts. NOTE THAT PHOTO>GRAPHICS CAN BE RUN FROM THE CD-ROM AND DOES NOT HAVE TO BE INSTALLED FIRST. SIMPLY DOUBLE CLICK ON THE PROGRAM ICON FROM THE PHOTOGFX DIRECTORY ON YOUR CD-ROM. 1.2 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS ------------------------ - OS/2 Warp - 8 MB RAM - 4-8 MB Hard Disk free space for application, if not run directly from CD - Sufficient free Hard Disk space for swapping with many images - Mouse or other pointing Device - CD-ROM drive - 486DX or better PC 1.3 RECOMMENDED OPTIONAL HARDWARE ----------------------------------- - SVGA Color Display Adapter supporting 800x600 or better resolution with 64K or 24-bit color capability - 40 MB of free hard disk space after installation for swap space when working with large images - Pentium processor with minimum 256K L2 Cache - 16MB or more RAM, depending on total size of images concurrently manipulated and other OS/2 overheads (installed network support, in particular) as well as hard disk performance (slower drives make swapping tiresome) 1.4 TUTORIAL GUIDE ------------------ TrueSpectra hopes to be able to offer an online version of the Tutorial Guide on its web site during 4Q 96. Check www.truespectra.com for details. Printed full color versions of the Tutorial Guide are included in all retail packages of Photo>Graphics. 1.5 BUGS & SUGGESTIONS ---------------------- Do not edit a path created with freehand or line draw with the paint roller. You may get unpredictable results. Also, editing with the roller may appear strange if you are in stroke mode. The title-bar of dialogs that usually appears when they have been pulled from the Access bar may be obscured. This will not cause other problems. Press F1 for help at any time, it is context sensitive! Note that if you tear-off a dialog from the Access Bar, it may be minimized by double clicking on its title bar and will automatically restore when the object that it refers to is reselected. This is handy when you have many dialogs active. Note that you may also restore any minimized dialog by double clicking the title bar. When you have deselected all objects in the Workspace, the Access Bar color will change and the name 'Default Object' will appear in the Object Name field. You can change certain defaults here, such as the Tool or Region types and these defaults will be used if you select 'Create Object' from the Context Menu after dragging a rectangle in Edit action mode. The object created will be based on the default setting. Note that it is often very convenient to create objects this way while in Edit action mode, even if you then have to immediately change the tool or region. To effectively use the Paint Roller to crop an image you should first load the bitmap into a Rectangle Region and size and position the bitmap in your WorkSpace. Then convert the Region to User Draw by using the Power Panel/Access Bar. Otherwise, the bitmap may tile since it does not know the scale of your work. When in doubt, read the User Draw section in the on-line help or User Guide and if you can get access to the web-based Tutorial Guide mentioned above, follow the steps in Tutorial #16. Remember to hold down the Shift key when adding or subtracting from an existing Draw Region with the Roller. You cannot delete the Power Panel by pressing the Del key. Use the Context Menu options instead. 1.6 Q & A --------- Q - My system is running slowly, how do I speed things up? A - Regardless of your chosen display resolution, ensure that you are running with 65,000 displayable colors. The automatic dithering for low color displays (ie: 256 or 16 color) consumes many, many processor cycles and 16 million color modes are very demanding on the memory bus. Also, run the Workspace at less than full screen size so that ColorWave does not have to render as many pixels each time you move or change an object, or set your display resolution to 800x600 pixels. Do not use high amplitude Wave tools as the "look-around" is extremely compute intensive. Likewise, avoid Blur and Sharpen until necessary. If you are still experiencing unsatisfactory performance, check that your machine really does have its numeric co-processor enabled and do not turn on bitmap smoothing in the Bitmap Tool until necessary. Q - I want to look at the sample graphics projects but don't have enough disk space to load all the sample images onto my hard disk - can I load them directly into Photo>Graphics from the CD? A - Yes! Just include a path to your CD-ROM drive with the images directory in the User Preferences Bitmap Path entry field. Then, open the projects in the samples directory on the CD ROM from Photo>Graphics. For even faster viewing, drag the sample .GDO files from your CD-ROM samples directory and drop them on the open Photo>Graphics Workspace. You can use this fast drag/drop technique to directly view images from the CD-ROM as well. Q - I saved a rendered high-resolution .TIF file but cannot load it back into Photo>Graphics - is this normal? A - Yes, because ColorWave renders very efficiently, it is easy to render an image far larger than available RAM or swap space. This creates difficulties if you want to load the rendered result to check your work. Currently, you cannot view extremely large images with Photo>Graphics even though you can create them. The maximum loadable image size is approximately 80MB. The maximum renderable image size is approximately 300-600MB. Q - It seems that bitmaps sometimes vanish from the bitmap list. Is this so? A - Yes, to dynamically reduce memory requirements, Photo>Graphics drops unused bitmaps from the list of active bitmaps. So, if you change an object with a Bitmap Tool to some other Tool, and no other Bitmap Tools refer to the bitmap you were previously using, the bitmap will have to be reloaded from disk if you want to restore the object to its original configuration. Q - I can't see the help bubbles (context sensitive hints). A - We are looking into a situation where help bubbles do not appear that seems related to another third-party bubble help system. Check our Web site for future developments. Q - My system seems to hang when I load any of the images whose names begin with the letters HRES. Why? A - HRES images are compressed JPG files which expand at about a twenty to one ratio. Since they are all about one meg on disk, they will expand to about twenty megs in RAM. Unless you have a 24MB machine, there will be a very significant amount of swapping as OS/2 attempts to create virtual storage on your hard disk. Be patient, or do not work with these images in this version of Photo>Graphics with a small machine. Q - When drawing, by default Photo>Graphics creates many small, independent objects. Why? A - It is far quicker for ColorWave to deal with a multitude of smaller draw objects than with one large, complex object. However, if you are running a Pentium Pro, or running at only 640x480 screen resolution with an earlier processor, you can confidently build large draw objects. Of course, after creating your drawing, grouping objects ensures that the individual pieces stay together and regardless of your screen resolution, all draw objects are resolution independent. Please note that after a very long or very intricate Freehand draw there will be a significant pause as Photo>Graphics converts your draw shape to ColorWave format. This conversion only happens once, so later editing will not be delayed with such a pause unless you are holding down Shift or Ctrl to add to the line path. Q - Rendering never finishes on my machine and all I see is a white or black screen. What's wrong? A - Typically, the user interface may be successfully prioritized from the Preferences Dialog giving Photo>Graphics a smooth feel. However, some DOS applications and certain print spooling and communication programs may prevent processor cycles from reaching the ColorWave thread. In this case, you must deselect the User Interface Priority check box in the Preferences Dialog. Then restart the program. Occasionally, if the ColorWave engine seems to pause for a long time or the User Interface appears to freeze, pressing Ctrl+Esc or Alt+Esc will free a resource contention situation and normal operation will resume. Q - I can open the controls, even load a bitmap, but all I see in the main window is a black hole! A - Photo>Graphics requires complete video drivers as it makes calls designed to optimize screen updates. Contact your video card supplier for the latest drivers or check the Team OS/2 web site for links to Warp drivers. (www.teamos2.org) Note that the recently revised IBM PC700 desktops models require new video drivers that should be available Fall 1996 from IBM. The original 700 series with S3 Vision 864/868 video perform flawlessly with or without the optional 1 MB upgrade provided you download the current drivers from IBM. Q - I am not getting correct colors on screen. Why? A - We have seen certain drivers indicate to the user through the System settings that they are displaying 65,000 colors yet are only indicating to Warp that they are displaying 256 colors. Photo>Graphics then enters a dithering mode, tries to set a palette, and often displays incorrect colors. Check our Web site for future developments. Q - Pasting from the clipboard doesn't seem to work. Why not? A - This one's tricked us a few times too! After you cut an object or grouped set of objects to the clipboard, drag a rectangle in the target Workspace, Custom Tool or Custom Region. From the Automatic Menu that appears, choose Paste from Clipboard. The object will appear in the new location, scaled to fit into your rectangle but rotated, skewed, flipped etc. to match the original. What happens if you want an exact duplicate? You could just use the object duplicate option from the Context Menu - but if you wanted a copy in another Custom Tool or Region EXACTLY aligned with the original copy, you must use the Clipboard without dragging a rectangle. Make the target window active, then bring up the Context Menu and choose Paste. This can be confusing because the object may appear far from the center of your attention, depending upon its co-ordinates when it was put on the clipboard. Possibly more confusing, the Window may automatically zoom, or if you are pasting into the window you copied from, the pasted copy will be exactly on top of the original - often making it impossible to see. Even though this all seems very complex at first, this is a very powerful feature, especially when used with Custom Regions. For example, copy an object containing text to the clipboard, create an object with a Custom Region (and Solid Color or even Contrast Tool) and place it behind the original text. Then, in the Custom Region, paste the copy of the text using the Context menu (ie. do not drag a rectangle first), make the text black and put a blur object over it. Now, in your main Workspace, you will have a blurred shadow and everything will be precisely aligned! Q - Sometimes text disappears from the Workspace. What can I do? A - ColorWave currently uses the extensive array of Warp font calls to get the initial mask for text fonts. Should the call fail, an invalid mask will be returned by your video driver. See if there is a more recent video driver available from your video card supplier or try rotating or skewing the text a bit. We have found that most cards made after the release of Warp with the latest chipsets have acceptable drivers, but many of the earlier video chipsets do not fully support Warp's font calls. Q - I saved a GDO file and gave it to a business associate. When he loaded it, all the bitmaps were missing. What should I do? A - You must include bitmaps with any GDO files saved in Photo>Graphics since bitmaps are not replicated in GDO's to save you hard disk space. Check our Web site for the release of a "packager" which can scan a GDO file and package it with related bitmaps. Q - Blur and Sharpen don't seem to be very adjustable for subtle effects and seem to vanish in Custom Regions and Tools. Why? A - To maintain reasonable performance on lower-end machines, we decided to target the Photo>Graphics Blur and Sharpen primarily at the cool text effects and shadows end of the scale rather than providing our more compute intensive, yet far more adjustable Blur and Sharpen code library. This library is required for extremely precise high-end image clean-up, as are a number of other ColorWave compatible libraries which we have developed. Check our Web site for news of future product announcements targeted at Pentium Pro class processors. Note that even though you may not notice a blur in a Custom Region or Tool whose window is scaled down relative to the main Workspace, all objects will render at their required output resolution so that such blurs will show their result in the final output of the Custom Region or Tool in the main Workspace as expected. Q - With the multitude of possible object combinations in Photo>Graphics, I refuse to accept the answer to the question above. There must be another way to subtly sharpen an image! A - OK, but this is an advanced technique, not for the faint of heart. First, load a bitmap into the Workspace. Copy it to the Clipboard. Then duplicate the original bitmap object and change the duplicate's Region to a Custom Region and its Tool to a Contrast Tool. Open the Custom Region and, without dragging a rectangle, choose Paste from Clipboard to paste a copy of the image exactly aligned with the original in the main WorkSpace. Put a Sharpen object over it and set the sharpness fairly high. Now, in the main Workspace, adjust the Contrast Tool's brightness control to reduce the brightness. The image will appear to sharpen in a unique, and very powerful fashion. What's happening? Well, the dark areas of the sharpened copy of the image in the Custom Region will apply the full effect of your Contrast Tool, while the lighter areas do not receive the same adjustment and the whites stay white. Since the image in the Custom Region is sharp (over sharp, in fact), the transitions between those parts of the original image which are darkened and those which stay the same is more abrupt. This makes the image appear sharper and may also be used to adjust colors in the darker areas of the original image by also adjusting the color sliders in the Contrast Tool. This technique requires an image with some detail to begin with, but often produces fantastic results. Try loading HIBCUS.TGA from the Tutorial directory and experimenting! Note that it is also possible to have multiple Contrast Tools operating on one image in this way without any image degradation. (Hint, you may want to invert the image in the Custom Tool with a contrast adjustment to also isolate light areas for adjustment.) Q - Printing is not giving me satisfactory results. Is there a solution? A - Although the full color bitmap is typically rendered in well under one minute with ColorWave, the Warp print drivers take considerable time (with much swapping) to dither the image for print purposes. Try adjusting the resolution in the Photo>Graphics output settings to be one half of your final print resolution to reduce the demand on the Warp drivers. Bo not be surprised by jagged text on black & white printers - text is anti-aliased in the 24-bit ColorWave output stream which does not equate to sharp edges on black and white output. Also, check out the Warp fixpak for updated printer support! 2.0 Reporting Bugs ================ Photo>Graphics is an extremely complex program, carefully tuned to run in a small RAM footprint while providing an unmatched, high quality, seamless combination of image processing, text and vector draw artistic capabilities. In some cases the program is performing floating point calculations at the limit of Pentium power, in others, it is doing 64 bit and in many cases, 128 bit integer arithmetic with your every mouse move. Unfortunately, it is impossible to test all possible combinations of objects on all possible combinations of hardware with the various versions and drivers available for Warp. Consequently, you may encounter problems - but at TrueSpectra we pride ourselves in our unstoppable quest for uncompromised quality in every aspect of our products and will seek feasible solutions to your concerns. Please report any bugs that you feel should be addressed -- but keep in mind that we are often facing a number of driver issues which may be beyond our control. E-mail: support@truespectra.com Fax: (416) 224-0309 Describe the difficulty, and if possible how to recreate the situation. Please include the product version number, serial number and for crashes also include the SYS number and the crash address in the form: TSPECTRA.EXE at 0001:0006f341 all other information on the crash screen is unnecessary for reporting purposes. Also, please include a description of your system including the type of computer, video display, display driver, printer, printer driver, and version of OS/2 as well as providing us with a way to contact you by Internet e-mail, fax or telephone. Note that the Autosave function is designed to periodically save your work so that should Photo>Graphics encounter difficulty, your work may be recoverable the next time you start the program. Check that the Autosave directory in the Preferences Dialog is set correctly and that you do not run out of hard disk space while running Photo>Graphics. Autosave will not be able to recover a file until you have saved a copy of the GDO at least once to your hard disk. 3.0 Product & Company Overview =========================== TrueSpectra Photo>Graphics... Photo, Text and Graphics Creativity - Made Easy! Unleash your creative power with TrueSpectra Photo>Graphics. Photo>Graphics is the easiest high-quality graphics package to use, enabling anyone to achieve stunning artistic results with little or no experience. Photo>Graphics is not just for the novice. Photo>Graphics provides the power and flexibility required to create custom tools and effects to produce even the most intricate business or Internet graphics. Objects are created with drag and drop ease using intuitive controls that simplify image editing for any level user. Ease of Use ---------- Drag-and-Drop user interface. Cut and Paste clipboard support. Context Sensitive dialogs and commands. Wide Array of Creative Special Effects ------------------------------- Quickly create Ellipse Fades, Ramps and Custom Masks. Incorporate Bitmap Images, Color Fades, Blurs, Emboss, Custom Tools designed by you, and many more special effects. All objects (image, text & draw) may be manipulated in a consistent manner including Rotate, Mirror, Skew, and Stretch options. Architecture and Bitmap File Support ------------------------------ The TrueSpectra ColorWave render engine is the heart and sole of Photo>Graphics. ColorWave provides the never-before-possible ability to work with draw, images and effects at different resolutions at the same time. ColorWave creates and reads TrueSpectra's GDO file format for efficient use of computer memory and disk storage resources. ColorWave 2.0 handles multiple 24-bit images with ease and supports popular bitmap formats including JPG, GIF, BMP, TGA, TIF and PhotoCD. It also supports vector draw with a number of innovative additions including softness control and the ability to mix draw with image processing techniques such as pixelate and wave. ColorWave also provides a full range of text manipulation techniques. With Photo>Graphics, it is easy to get professional effects by combining specialized regions and design tools. These effects objects are truly interactive as they are layered on draw and image objects which maintain their properties, even when appearing to have been radically transformed. Beginning at its outset in 1992, Photo>Graphics (known on the Internet during an extensive beta program as TrueSpectra Light) has been engineered without compromise, fully capitalizing on 32 bit, multi-threaded object-oriented technologies. Many programs use the term "object", but in Photo>Graphics, it does not simply refer to a static blob on the screen! About TrueSpectra Inc. ------------------ TrueSpectra Inc. designs, develops and markets digital image editing and graphics software products for home and professional use. The powerful ColorWave render engine, found in all TrueSpectra products, manages image, text and draw objects producing high quality finished artwork in far less time than traditional packages. TrueSpectra is the Image of Imagination. To order additional copies of Photo>Graphics, contact TrueSpectra for the name of an OS/2 software distributor near you: E-mail: sales@truespectra.com Phone: (416) 224-2787 Fax: (416) 224-0309 Web Site: http://www.truespectra.com TrueSpectra Inc. 4950 Yonge Street Suite 802 North York, Ontario Canada M2N 6K1 TrueSpectra and Photo Graphic are registered trademarks and Photo>Graphics, ColorWave and The Image of Imagination are trademarks of TrueSpectra Inc. Program copyright 1993-96 TrueSpectra Inc. All rights reserved.