Getting Started

This document is intended to give you a high-level introduction to using Picture Window Pro. To keep things simple, it omits lots of details you can find elsewhere in the help file.

-- Getting Help

Any time you see a help button like the one above it means help is available for whatever user interface element the button is part of. The startup screen includes two help buttons -- the one in the main tool bar takes you to the main help topic. The one at the top of the image browser takes you to image browser help.

Step 1 -- Load an image

Select File/Open from the main menu and select an image you want to open. A sample image is included with Picture Window which we will work on as an example. It is installed along with other Picture Window files here: My Documents\Picture Window Pro\Sample Images\Bird.jpg. Navigate to this file and open it using the standard Windows File Open dialog box.

The left side of the screen is called the image browser and it contains small versions of all the images Picture Window is currently working on. These small images are called thumbnails. The collection of all images is called a workspace. The right side is the main image area which displays the current image.

You can drag the separator line between the image browser and the main image area left or right to adjust how much of the screen is dedicated to each part by dragging the white diamond in the middle of the separator bar. You can make the images in the browser larger or smaller using the zoom tool bar just above the first image. Similarly, the zoom tool bar just above the main image area is used to zoom in, zoom out, zoom the image to fit the available space, or zoom to 1:1 so you can see each pixel in the image. If either the image browser or the main image area is too small to display everything, scroll bars appear so you can move around.

The small number in the upper left corner of the main image area indicates the type of the image (1-bit binary, 8-bit black and white, 24-bit color, 16-bit black and white or 48-bit color).

Step 2 -- Apply Transformations

Much of the power of Picture Window comes from its transformations and tools. In most cases, a transformation combines an input image and a group of settings to produce an output image. To try this out, select Transformation/Gray/Brightness Curve from the main menu.

This displays the Brightness Curve dialog box in the lower left corner of the screen. You can drag it to some other location on the screen or even to a second monitor if you have one. It also creates a second image in the image browser that represents the output of the Brightness Curve transformation.

Note: Like all other transformations, there is a button at the top -- clicking it displays the help topic for the transformation.

Most of the brightness curve dialog box is taken up with a curve control used to adjust the brightness of the input image. In this case, we can see from the image histogram displayed as a background for the curve that there is quite a bit of room above the histogram to increase the brightness and contrast of the image.

To check where the top end of the histogram is located, click the button to expand the histogram and then drag the control point in the upper right corner of the curve control to the left as shown above. This brightens the image which is also reflected in the small version in the image browser. Click OK to close the dialog box. If you want to come back later and change the curve, you can double click on the image in the browser to restore the Brightness Curve dialog in exactly the state you left it.

Each new transformation you apply creates another image below the current image, forming a branch with the original image at the top and the end result at the bottom.

To select an image, click on it in the image browser -- this displays the corresponding image in the main image area.

The caption of the current image is highlighted in white in the image browser.

Now, let's add another transformation to get rid of the green color cast in the image. Select Transformation/Color/Balance from the main menu to bring up the Color Balance dialog box.

Without going into the details of how the Color Balance transformation works, it turns out its default is to automatically identify and remove any color cast it finds in the image highlights. In this case it does a reasonable job without further adjustment. This transformation automatically switches to a split screen display showing the input image on the left and the output image on the right. You can click on a color in the input image to define a color cast to remove. Note that in this case, since the input and output images are the same size, zooming and scrolling of the two halves of the split screen are synchronized so the zoom tool bar for the left half of the main image area is grayed out. Zooming or scrolling the right half performs the same operation on the left half. For other transformations that do not preserve the size of the input image, both zoom tool bars are active.

Selecting What Images are Displayed

You can use the buttons at the top of the color balance transformation to switch the display between the input image only, the output image only, or split screen. If split screen is selected, you can also toggle synchronized scrolling.

Click OK to close color balance.

Step 3 -- Save the Result

To save an image, click on it to make it the current image and then select File/Save As... from the main menu. This brings up a standard Windows File Save dialog box. Select the desired file type and filename and click Save.

Congratulations, you have just edited an image.

Saving with Scripts

If you want to be able to reload the original image file and all the changes you made to it, be sure to select Include Script with Image Names when you save the image file.

If you subsequently need to edit the file, open the saved script file and Picture Window will re-open the original file and rebuild the image tree used to create the saved image. At this point you can make any changes you want and re-save the image either with the same name or under a different name if you want to preserve the earlier version.

Thumbnails, Transformations and Images

Thumbnails are the small images displayed in the image browser. The current thumbnail is highlighted with a white caption background.

Every thumbnail has an associated transformation -- the name of the transformation is displayed in the caption of the thumbnail, but you can change the caption to something else if you wish. In the example above, the first transformation is File Open and the one below it is Brightness Curve.

Every transformation generates an output image -- a scaled version of the output image is displayed in the main image area when the thumbnail is selected.

Some transformations such as Brightness Curve operate on an input image which is the one whose thumbnail is just above it. They process this input image according to the settings of the transformation to produce an output image. In this example, Brightness Curve processes its input image (the output image of File Open) by adjusting its tonality according to a curve, and you can see the output image is noticeably lighter than the input image.

Other transformations such as File Open do not have an input image. These top-level transformations always appear at the head of a branch.

The same transformation with the same settings can produce an entirely different image if one of its input images happens to change.

When you select a transformation from the main menu or double-click on a thumbnail to edit its transformation, a transformation dialog box is displayed to let you adjust the settings.

The caption of the transformation dialog box contains the name of the transformation -- in this case Brightness Curve.

When it starts up, Brightness Curve is set to split screen display -- the input image is displayed on the left and the output image on the right. This side-by-side display helps you compare the input and output images to see the changes, but if you want you can display just the input or just the output image using the display tool bar at the top of the dialog box:

The first button displays the input image only, the second displays the output image only and the third displays both side-by-side.