Digital Light & Color

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Ref: msi 180403 / PWP 8.0.exe 180407

Currently PWP 8 will allow:
1) Using Windows File Explorer ‘Rename’ and Notepad ‘Save As’ to:
...a. Rename/migrate “*.cc” to “…/Picture Window Pro/Color Curves/*.color curves.txt”
...b. Rename/migrate “*.crv” to “…/Picture Window Pro/Curves/*.curves.txt”

With the “*.txt” extension, these files can also be ‘Edit’-ed if a preference with Notepad and still be seen and selected in the ‘Load’ and ‘Save As’ Setting option dialogs for Color Curves, Brightness Curve, and MaskTool-BrightnessCurve …

…but not “*.cln” to “…/Picture Window Pro/Color Lines/*color line.txt” to be seen or selectable for the Tint transform Setting options ‘Load’ and ‘Save As’…

Requests:
...1) Allow the Tint transform to see/select/load migrated “*.color line.txt” files
...2) Allow Tint, Mask and Masks transform setting files to be edited with Notepad, ie, seen and selectable with their respective Setting option ‘Load’ and ‘Save As’ dialogs, ie, “*.tint.txt”, “*.mask.txt”, and “*.masks.txt” files
...3) It may be desirable in the future that other Default Setting files be ‘Edit’-able, so perhaps provide this access to all of the file types in the Default Settings Folder for PWP 8: “textures”, “shapes”, “layout”, etc?

Jonathan… …FYI, I was able to produce a PWP8 HSV ‘Vibrance Skin-Hue Mask’ with migrated “*.crv” files and MaskTool-BrightnessCurve but still would like to be able to specify MaskTool-ColorRange settings… …if “*.mask” and “*.masks” become editable/selectable, I can adjust Color Range settings there without any other pop-up dialogs which would probably be rarely used by others…

I really appreciate the organization of all these files into a central folder… …in PWP7 they are/were rather scattered and user dependent to organize and centralize.

…den…

You can use Notepad to edit files without a txt extension by right clicking on the file and selecting Open With... in Windows Explorer and then selecting the Notepad app.

Not sure why ".color curves.txt" and ".curve.txt" worked at all - this seems to be some kind of quirk in Windows as they should not match.

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Got an 'error' message when attempting to Load an edited/saved *.mask file in the manner you suggested:
1) opened with Notepad, edited, and saved to Mask folder
2) tried to Load edited/saved file with Mask Tool upper Settings icon options Same thing will happen with an added *.txt extension

Added edit: Seems to me that this same error will occur with the Tint transform when attempting to load a migrated/renamed PWP 7 *.cln file using the lower right Settings icon options.

Agree that the *.txt extension is not needed but got into the habit of adding/keeping it with PWP 7 to differentiate the modified file from supplied program files.

...den..

Apparently Notepad and Wordpad do not read Unicode files with byte order marks (see Wikipedia) correctly. I use UltraEdit which works fine but costs $99 and is overkill for just editing settings and scripts. I tried EditPad Lite and it was able to load and save a mask file without mangling it, but it did not display the file properly. The one I tried next was BabelPad (http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html) and it worked just fine, so that's what I recommend using, at least for now. It downloads as a zip file that contains the exe file - no installer, just run the exe to start it up.

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Will need to do a bit more experimentation but BabelPad seems to be working for *.mask file edits for those files that are initially 'Save As' with the Mask Tool dialog. Will move on to *.cln file/save migrations for the Tint transform later. Will be traveling for the next three days

I believe that the difficulty in using Notepad is that it encodes at UTF-8 but the PWP 8 Default Setting files are encoded at UTF-16. The BabelPad Save As shows UTF-16LE as its default encode.

Really do not know enough about this... ...it may be that the UltraEdit program default encoding is beyond Win10 64-bit Home OS Notepad capabilities.

...den...

Yes, I see the problem now -- unlike other text files in PWP, settings files are being saved as 16-bit Unicode with no byte order mark. I fixed this for the next release. I tested it and in the next release, you can now edit Mask files in Notepad again.