[MGIF logo]

The Atari image viewer/processor

3rd v5.10beta 'released' 960806!

MGIFv5 has now, two and a half years after the last version, finally been released. Still, the development goes on and I need feedback from YOU as much as ever.
I'm especially interested in hearing from people running MGIF on non-standard hardware, such as graphics cards, accelerators, Medusas, etc.
Please, email comments, suggestions, bug reports or whatever.

The first DSP code for MGIF has finally been written, convolution and median filters. The new routines are _very_ much faster on a Falcon030.
A 3x3 convolution on a 640x480 greyscale image takes about a second.

Work being done on v5.10 (formerly called 5.02)

The scaler has been improved a lot (for greyscale and 24 bit images). The same principle that's used for the double/halve functions can now be used for any scale factor. The improvement (marvelous IMHO) is especially noticeable for down-scaling of line graphics, which scaled rather badly with the old version.
The same kind of interpolation can now also be selected for rotations, giving much better results than before.

MGIF will recognize automatically (for most cases) when an image using only 16 colours is drawn. If there are 16 colours available, the ordered dithering will not be used.

You can now tell MGIF to display the destination image automatically after every image processing operation.

The fastest (AFAIK) GIF decoder is now even faster!
On my tests the speedup ranges from 10 to 300%, depending mostly on the amount of single colour areas in the images.

JPEGD (Brainstorm's DSP JPEG decoder) support is finally enabled!
After talking to people at Brainstorm, I've decided to make this available to the public. The decoder driver is an adaption of some code I got via the internet, which means that it might not be as stable as what you get when you pay the license fee to Atari. It seems to work fine, though.

Support for image tileing has been added, including a way to make tiles where the edges match perfectly (a four way mirroring).

For the updated v5.10betas [960711 and 960806], the cut/zoom coordinate showing has been improved and the mouse handling for scrolling and waiting has been changed. Unfortunately, this didn't fix the problems some people have had running MGIFv5 together with Warp9 as I had hoped. :-(
However, in the third beta there is a way around that. See below.

The convolution dialog and routines have been extended to handle larger kernels (5x5). Naturally, the Falcon will do these using the DSP as well.
It's now also possible to load convolution kernels from files and access the last three quickly from the dialog.

I've modified the GIMP 'bump map' plug-in (see the image processing links below) for MGIF use. The modified version has reached usable speed on a non-FPU machine (about 20 times faster than my initial port) thanks mainly to an integer square root function.
There are lots of other marvelous image processing plug-ins available for The GIMP...
Take a look via the links below and let me know what you'd like the most. Please, bear in mind that some of the effects are very processor intensive and might need an FPU and/or a fast processor to be usable.

A pixel noise function has now been added, covering both additive and binary noise. No gaussian noise (yet), though.

Bluring can now be done separately in the horizontal and vertical direction.

A random pixel spread function has been added.

To enable the use of MGIF's image scrolling abilities on machines with Warp9 (perhaps only some versions of Warp have the bug) a new switch (-wrp) has been added to force MGIF to skip its appl_tplay() calls.
The scrolling will not work as well as it should, but using the keyboard (to increase movement speed or to simply scroll using the arrow keys) its at least possible to scroll around without locking the mouse.

The things mentioned below are not in the released v5.10beta
Some new code has made it simple to add 'progress report' windows (like when MGIF loads JPEGs without JPEGD) to most functions. To start with, I've added it to 'Oil paint' and 'Bump map', but it will appear in a few more places for the v5.10 release.

The Gaussian blur I'd planned to include in the v5.10 release will most likely have to wait for v5.11 or so.

The history file and minimal archive (you'll need the normal 5.01 one below as well) for MGIF v5.10beta (960806) can now be fetched.
If you fetch the beta, please let me know about any problems you have with it.

The latest history file.

The lharc packed MGIF 5.01 archive.

The latest MGIFv5 manual as an uncompiled ST-Guide source file.
(I hope to turn this into an HTML document in the future.)

An old MGIF v5beta release file.

Some links to image processing tutorials etc

Tutorials for The GIMP.
Zach's Tips, Tricks and Tutorials for The GIMP.
Zach explains Channel Operations for The GIMP.
Zach's GIMP links.
Zach's main page.
Michael's Tips and Tricks for Creating Images for The GIMP.
Freddy's Detailed Composite Example for The GIMP.
Mike's Rounded Text for The GIMP.
Kai's Power Tips & Tricks for Adobe Photoshop.

If you see a function used here that you'd like in MGIF, let me know.
I won't promise anything, but I'll at least look into it. When it comes to The GIMP plug-ins, I'm actually planning on interfacing those with MGIF.

If you don't have a recent Lharc unpacker or the hyper-text viewer ST-Guide (needed for reading the MGIFv5 documentation), just select and download. The first archive is self-unpacking, but the second needs STZip (also self-unpacking).
A newer version (1.4) of ST-Guide is also available (it's the one I use), but it's in German.

The logo at the top was of course created using MGIF v5.
Two monochrome image files (lines and text) were subjected to some rather simple processing and combined (idea by Eero Tamminen).
A complete description of what was done (to get a very similar image) and the two IMG files are included in the distribution archive.