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Imagetool_menus February 1988 CONTENTS The Main Menus The Image Menu The Edit Menu The Palette Menu The Zoom Menu The Graph Menu The FTP Menu The Help Menu The Option Menu THE MAIN MENUS The following sections describe in detail the functionality of each option in the main menus and how to use them. The IMAGE Menu The IMAGE menu implements disk I/O operations. The options on this menu allow you to load an image file from disk, save from screen to a raster file, animate from a sequence of images, or store up to 10 frames (with different palettes, optional) into a memory stack. LOAD To load an image from a raw raster file (for a description of file formats, see the File Format help file), enter the file name at the text item labelled "Image", and the image dimensions at the items labelled "Xdim" and "Ydim" on the control panel. Then select LOAD on the IMAGE menu, and the image will appear on the canvas. If you do not enter the correct image dimensions, you will probably see some garbage on the screen. NOTE: Wildcard characters can be used for image file names. You may choose to load an image file in one of the raster file formats supported by Imagetool. Imagetool version 1.0 supports Raw format (a stream of binary, no header; one byte per pixel, row by row, left to right) and the floating point format (Sun floating point format - 4bytes). Future versions of Imagetool will support the NCSA raster file format. To choose a specific format for file loading, select the IMAGE menu item LOAD, pull right to pup up the format submenu, and select the desired format. NOTE: When floating point format is used, Imagetool reads in the original data file (in floating point format), converts it to a raw image file (one byte per pixel, values ranging from 0 to 255) utilizing scaling information the user provides in a dialog box which appears, and then displays it on the screen. It takes a considerable amount of CPU time to do the floating point-to-integer conversion. It is advisory that the user save the converted image under a different name for fast reference later on. SAVE This option allows you to save a single image, a composite image, or a selected region of an image to a disk file. To select a region of the canvas, simply drag out a box by depressing the middle mouse button as you move the cursor. By choosing SAVE, the selected region (otherwise the entire image recently loaded) will be written to the disk. Once you select the SAVE option, a dialog box will appear asking for the file name to be created. You may enter a character string ending with a return key (or select the OK button) to proceed, or click on the CANCEL button to interrupt the operation. Upon completion, a message will appear in the tty window (the top subwindow) telling you the name of the newly created file with the exact dimensions appended. Similar to the LOAD option, you may choose to save the image in a specific raster format. Version 1.0 supports only the raw binary format. ANIMATE To animate a sequence of images, you must specify a character string that represents the sequence containing wild card characters (such as *, ?, etc., all Unix conventions on wildcards apply) along with the correct dimensions. For instance, "denab*" and "denab?[1357]*" are legal character strings that resolve to multiple images. As soon as the animation begins, four temporary buttons will appear on the control panel. They are PAUSE, LAST, NEXT, +, and --. PAUSE is a toggle button with which you can stop and resume the animation. After you pause the animation, you may click on LAST or NEXT to single step through the frames (backward and forward). + and -- adjust the animation speed (increasing and decreasing). To quit animation at any time, click on the CANCEL button. This option also provides you with zoomed (2x2) animation. Use it only on small size images. STACK The STACK option allows the user to store up to 10 frames (possibly with different palettes) into a memory stack so that you can quickly flip through them for examination or comparison. As soon as you select the option STACK, four temporary choice buttons will appear on the control panel. NOTE: The user can make a selection from a choice button either by selecting the desired choice directly, i.e. by selecting from the associated menu with the right mouse button, or by selecting the button label with the left mouse button, which causes the current choice to advance to the next choice (or backup to the previous choice if the shift key is pressed while selecting). You may select on the STORE button to store a frame into the next available slot on the stack, or choose a specific empty slot. After you fill the slots with image frames, you may examine them by clicking the choice button SHOW. Use the DELETE button to clear an entry in the stack, or FLUSH to clean up the whole stack. To exit the STACK operation, press the button Cancel. PRINT Make color hard copy of the canvas or a selected region. The EDIT Menu This menu enables you to edit an image on the canvas. You may cut (copy) a region of the canvas and paste it to another part of the canvas, or clear any region of the canvas. Together with the SAVE option in the IMAGE menu, you are able to do sophisticated image composition. First, define a region to be edited (draw a box by dragging with the middle mouse button down), select the option CUT or COPY from the EDIT menu, which will copy the selected region onto an in-core clipboard. To paste whatever is on the clipboard to canvas, select the option PASTE, hold down the middle mouse button on the canvas, and drag to the desired position, and finally release the button. Until you do another cut or copy, what is on the clipboard remains there (i.e. you may do multiple pastes). You may also clear any part of the canvas you want by selecting the region then choose the option CLEAR from the EDIT menu. The PALETTE Menu This menu enables you to control the color look-up table (CLUT) in various ways. The options in the PALETTE menu include palette load, restore, display, modify (contour, fiddle, rotate and transpose), and save. NOTE: Palette files are binary (8 bits per entry), containing 256 red entries, next 256 green entries, then 256 blue entries. This makes all palette files exactly 768 bytes long. By convention, the names of all palette files end in ".pal". When entering a palette name on the control panel, you may omit ".pal". Imagetool only recognizes files ending in ".pal" as palettes. For example, if you enter /image/pals/denbd as the palette name while you may have other image files as denbd*, Imagetool will look for /image/pals/denbd.pal as the palette. LOAD To load a palette, enter palette file name at the text item labelled Palette on the control panel, and then select the LOAD option from the PALETTE menu. RESTORE RESTORE will reload the previous palette used. In fact, Imagetool only keeps track of two palettes most recently loaded. SHOW This option display a palette as a 512x50 color bar on the canvas. Unless the user indicates a specific location where to draw the color bar, Imagetool will display it under the image recently loaded. You can pick a position by pressing the left mouse button. The following three options CONTOUR, FIDDLE, TRANSPOSE manipulate the CLUT. You can make a color contour palette, modify an existing palette with a linear transformation, or take an inverse of the original palette. The changes to the CLUT are seen immediately as you move the mouse. The option SAVE in the PALETTE menu, allows you to store this new palette onto disk. CONTOUR When selecting CONTOUR from the PALETTE menu, you are in the palette contouring mode. To exit this mode, press the right mouse button. To make a contour palette, it is good to have a palette color bar or an image displayed on the canvas. With the left mouse button down, you may pick a color and change it to white. Holding down the left mouse button and move it across the color bar or the image, you are able to see the contouring effect. While pressing the middle mouse button, you can white out a range of colors as you drag the mouse. FIDDLE FIDDLE does a linear transformation on the original palette while you are moving the mouse across the canvas. Similar to CONTOUR, you are in a fiddling mode when you select FIDDLE option. The right mouse button will get you out of this mode. Keep the left mouse button down while moving the mouse. You can expand or squeeze the palette by moving the cursor up or down vertically, or shift the palette to the left or right by moving the cursor horizontally, or just move the cursor across the canvas to get a combination of all the effect. You also can rotate a palette (or an intermediate one) by holding down the middle mouse button; release the button when you want the rotation to stop. As you see a new palette you want, save it with SAVE option of this menu. TRANSPOSE This is to obtain the inverse of an original palette. SAVE After modifying a palette, you can save it (what you see on the canvas) as a new palette file on disk. Select SAVE from this menu. You will be first asked whether you want to save a palette. If yes, type in some name string for the new palette file. Or select CANCEL button to skip. If the given file name does not end in ".pal", it will be appended with ".pal". You will be asked again whether you want to save the current image as it looks on the canvas. If you answer yes, a new image will be stored with transformed color values such that if this image is loaded back later under the original palette, the one before you modified it, the image will look the same as if it were fiddled. Again, give a file name if you want to save the current image, or cancel the operation. CREATE This is not supported in the version 1.0 Imagetool. The ZOOM Menu The options on this menu provide image expansion capabilities. PIXEL This option performs a 2x2 pixel expansion (implemented by pixel replication) on the current image or a selected region. To zoom a particular region, you must first define a region (drawing a box with the middle mouse button) then select PIXEL from the ZOOM menu. You are also able to do multiple ZOOMs by selecting PIXEL more than once. EXPAND This also performs the pixel expansion as in PIXEL except that it takes two expansion factors (for x and y direction) from the user. The user may enter two integer expansion factors when prompted with the factor dialog box. INTERP This option zooms (2x2) an image or a selected region by doing a linear interpolation on the pixels. You may also do multiple INTERPs. UNDO This option will undo the previous expansion (PIXEL, EXPAND, INTERP). It can be applied more than once until the current image size equals to that of the original image before any expansion. NOTE: When mixed expansion has been performed, for example, PIXEL (2x2), EXPAND (3x4), PIXEL (2x2) were performed in such order, multiple UNDOs will not bring the expanded image back to the original dimension because only one last expansion was recorded. The GRAPH Menu Using the graphing functions of this menu, you may plot line graphs, two-dimensional contour graphs, or three-dimensional graphs from a color image. When you select any of the options XY, CONTOUR and 3-D, a separate graph window will appear. Use the buttons in the graph window to draw, clear, print (from a laser printer), and so on. Select the DONE button to close the graph window and exit the graph mode. XY Selecting the option XY brings you to a line graph mode. You will see a separate graph window with buttons SCALE, DRAW, CLEAR, PRINT, DONE on it. To plot the data values (not the color index) along a straight line across any part of an image as a line graph, you first slice on the image by dragging the left mouse button, then select the DRAW button in the graph window. In the graph window, you also select CLEAR to erase the plot canvas, PRINT to get a hard copy of what you have drawn. PRINT sends a postscript file to a laser printer whose name you must define in Imagetool either using the menu OPTIONS or entering it in the dialog box appeared when selecting PRINT. At the text item labelled Title, you may enter a subject title which will be imposed onto the graph. You may notice that a small scaling info box pops up when you bring up the XY graph window. It allows you to enter some scaling information: the X and Y coordinate limits of your image (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax), the minimum and maximum values you used when converting the data file to raster file (gmin, gmax); specifying either linear or logarithmic as the scaling type. Click on OK button to confirm the setting. Otherwise, cancel the box. Imagetool will notify you the current scale setting by printing the values in the tty window. During the graph session, you may change the scale setting by selecting the SCALE button. CONTOUR To plot a two-dimensional contour graph from an image or a selected region, you must enter the contour levels at the item labelled Contour levels. The contour levels are specified as a sequence of integers ranging from 0 to 255 (the color table index) and separated by a space. 3-D Similar to the above contour graphing. Use Yaw, Pitch and Roll to adjust the orientation of the 3-D object. The FTP Menu The FTP menu provides the capability to animate from a remote application. The basic idea is that Imagetool automatically transfers the output raster files periodically from the remote site on which the application is running and generating raster files, and then loads the raster file to the Imagetool canvas. This is implemented as an animation loop until the user terminates the loop. Before you start the animation loop, you must establish a FTP connection by selecting CONNECT from the FTP menu and typing in the login name and password as usual. To begin the automatic file transfer, select the GET LOOP menu item. You will first be prompted to fill in some option values. You may specify the file name increment (integer), the time interval between two transfers (in seconds), and indicate whether you want the transferred image expanded before loaded to the canvas. NOTE: The time it takes to transfer a raster file from the remote site depends on the network traffic at that moment. If the interval is set smaller than the time required to complete a transfer, you may receive fewer bytes than that the image should have. If this is the case, Imagetool will try to get the same image again before going on to the next one. If this continues for two or three times, you should pause the loop by selecting STOP from this menu, increase the time interval, and resume the loop by selecting GET LOOP again. The HELP Menu This menu allows you to read help files in a separate text window the while you are using Imagetool. The available help files at this point are imagetool_basics, imagetool_menus, imagetool_button, imagetool_examples, and imagetool_errors. There is also a Bug Report option on this menu. When it is selected, a text window will pop up where you may enter your bug report. After you complete your bug report, click on the DELIVER button to send the text to the Imagetool author, and the DONE button to close the window. The OPTION Menu The user can use this menu to set up certain options/defaults for use with Imagetool. Default File Users may set up some default paths for Imagetool so that they do not have to reset these parameters each time they start Imagetool. The first time you run Imagetool (assuming that you do not have a file named ".imagetool_defaults" in your home directory), a dialog box will appear asking whether you need to set up the defaults. Answer yes. Type in the complete path names for the directories that contains your image files, palette files, and Imagetool help files. You also have an option to save all the defaults to a file for later reference. During an Imagetool session, you can change the defaults by selecting the OPTIONS menu. Default Printer Specify the name of the laser printer for the current Imagetool session. Reversed Image In general, we assume that a raster image is (0, 0) oriented at the upper left corner, row by row, from left to right. With the Reversed Image flag set, an image will be taken as being oriented at the lower left corner. Dark Background This sets Imagetool window to a dark background.