You will see a window of thumbnails appear, each one slightly different.
The central thumbnail (surrounded by a red box) is the "this is what the image will look like when you click on [Update image] button" thumbnail.
Initially, it'll be the same as the original image. A fullsize view on that may be opened by clicking on [View full]
-- New with version 0.20 --
Shift-Adjust dragging a thumbnail now rescales the image within it.
(useful for seeing fine detail of the changes effects like filter will have)
Reminder: Shift-Select dragging moved the image behind the thumbnail in 0.18
Clicking on a thumbnail places that one in the centre and causes the others to be recomputed.
Thumbnails to the left of and above the central one lead the effect in one direction. Thumbnails to the right of and below take you in the other. The usual RISC OS standard of ADJUST having the opposite effect works to reverse the above just as you'd expect.
When you're happy with the look of the central thumbnail you can choose [Update image] or simply double click on it to make the same change to the full size image.
[View full] gives you a view of this and via the menu attached to this window, the option to save it as a sprite or jpeg. It also allows you to revert to the original and to save the thumbnails as a sprite or draw file. Eventually it will also give you the the ability to compare the modified image with the original, undo, scale the view, etc...
[Reset] resets the effect offsets and redraws the thumbnails.
The step size slider controls the distance of each thumbnail step from the previous. The idea is you'd initially have this set fairly high, click on thumbnails until the central image starts to look like what you want, then reduce the slider to see a series of variations that are very close to each other and choose from one of those before applying the change to the full image.
-- New with version 0.20 --
Simple image transformations. Rotate +/-90°, Flip horizontally, vertically,
Crop. Requested by yet another person (sorry, I'm terrible with names!)
Click...... Menu > Image over the thumbnail canvas and select appropriate option. Most of the options are self explanatory. The crop option permits a choice of pre-selected crop ratios or the user can drag/move the cropping frame to any required size.
The last opens an interesting window (mostly functional). Drag a corner/side to change the size of the cropped area. Drag over the image to move the region to be kept around. Size/aspect are controlled depending on setting of the radio buttons in the attached pane. Few small oddities here still, and still to do: Adjust drag to drag out a new region, arrow key fine control.
Currently implemented effects are Hue (though this one is *slow*),
Saturation, Brightness, Gamma, Contrast, Colour (Sepia/tint), Fade, Shape, Border,
Filter, Pontillist.
The following effects take notice of a mask if one is present and use it to attenuate and control the effect on a pixel by pixel basis:
Saturation, Brightness, Gamma, Contrast, Sepia/Tint and Filter
(Currently Hue, Border, Fade and Shape ignore any mask ...probably will be fixed, but I'm not sure what use masking would be for Border etc. Hue is too slow and horrible to be usable and internals of this will be re-written from scratch)
Masks allow you to alter user defined regions of the image and leave the rest of it untouched.
To edit an existing mask (or create one if it doesn't exist) click menu over the variations window and choose "Edit mask..."
MENU over the mask window that opens gives you a simple menu. The function of items in this should be pretty obvious (but save mask doesn't work yet). Invert can be particularly useful once you've created a masked region.
Click and drag in the window to paint using the chosen tool (available tools are in the toolbar to the left of this window. Clicking on a tool in this toolbar will also usually also open a settings window for it).
Tools are [from left-right, top-bottom] :
Just opens mask options window.
"Mix image and mask", when on displays a combination of the mask and the image. This uses more memory and is slightly slower to redraw but lets you see what pixels in the image will be altered by the mask. Associated options let you set the colour used to represent the mask, and an intensity slider so you can see partly through it if you wish.
When the "Mix image and mask" option is off the mask is represented by grey pixels. Black=transparent, white = solid (you don't see the image).
"Auto update thumbnails", when on, updates the variations thumbnails after each change made to the mask (the effect applied to these is filtered through the mask).
When off, thumbnails are only updated when the mask window is closed.
Magic wand region selector. *NOT YET IMPLIMENTED*
Select click in the mask to paint "solid", Adjust click to paint "transparent". Amount of each applied is controlled by the Brush option "Opacity"
The brush options window is opened by clicking on the brush icon (highlighted initially) in the pane attached to the left of the mask editor.
Brush size, softness, opacity and step options are available via sliders/bump arrows (writables are not fully working yet - don't type numbers in and expect them to be recognised...I hardly ever use writables...can you tell? ;-).
Experiment with these sliders. Try dragging one to one extreme, painting in the mask, then going to the other and see if you can work out what they do. Then try playing with combinations of different settings [size and softness].
Turning on Coordinate "Smoothing" lets you draw smooth curves in the mask at the cost of the painting stroke lagging behind the mouse a little. Alter the number of smoothing steps to get a setting you feel comfortable with.
Select regions by drawing around them. *NOT YET IMPLEMENTED*
(no user interface for options, does something but may be buggy) *NOT YET IMPLEMENTED*
Fill tool giving options of flat, graduated [default] or circular fills. Contents of the options window that opens should be self-explanatory. Click and drag out in the mask editing window to do a grad. fill.
This is the view scale onto the mask (1:1 is 100% view). Click on this to return the view scale to 1:1
Let you adjust the scale of the view onto the mask and zoom in for pixel-by-pixel control.
In addition to the above tools the mask is also offered up to the PCA system.
If you have available other PCA compliant tools that can edit 256 level greyscale sprites they will appear in a dialogue box attached to the bottom of the mask edit window and clicking on one will activate it.
Via this route some users will already have available useful drawing, stamper (cutout), painting and multi line text object tools which may be used to alter and create masks.
[I am working to try and make these tools available for all]
Some effects add their own controls. I leave it up to you to discover what these do.
Fade, Shape and Border are extendable - look at the appropriate directories within Variations. You can add drawfiles or ArtWorks here and as long as you follow the naming convention used they'll be picked up next time the program is run.
Fade and Shape have the options to change background colour or use a texture - drag a tiled JPEG to the load target arrow in the pane that pops up.
You can of course, edit the built in fade, shape and texture resource files though you should ensure that they are contiguously numbered and that "000" *always* exists.
The only other thing to mention is that the thumbnail window can be resized and this will cause the thumbnails to be recomputed (they're antialiased thumbnails too BTW - its not just doing a simple sprite scale - though it should fall back to that if you're short of memory).
Options to save the current size of the thumbnail dialogue and vary the number of thumbnails displayed (3x1, 3x3, 5x5 or 7x7 grid) are provided in a rudimentary choices dialogue box available from the programs iconbar menu.
As new features are added they are documented in the ChangeLog file so if you are a new user, or have updated from an old version you might like to skim-read this to see what has been added since these basic instructions were written.
Window size & position saved with choices (handy for Iyonix or Viewfinder users, for whom the hardwired default is a bit small...)
Change: Previously, clicking on a thumbnail to make it the central one also transferred its offsets to the central one too. Now this doesn't occur so if you want to move a thumbnail to make the image position nicely behind a fade or shape move the *central* thumbnail (one surrounded in red)
Unfixed BUG: Scaling thumbnails makes things go wrong with fades/shapes/borders (switch to another effect and hit 'Reset' to get things back to normal if you accidentally do this.) Use the border size control in choices instead to scale the border/fades.
Weightings for colourise/tint effect. Requested by someone (I forget who). This allows you to modify the amounts of red, green and blue (or their 'weights') in converting to greyscale/contone.
*Lots* of work on Pointillise (and a spelling fix!). Have a play with the new options in the attached pane (and don't forget the variations are cross blends back to the original so you may want to click a bit there).
Pointillise objects are now drawfiles (directory 'Pointill' inside the program. New ones will be picked up...I'm trying a new scheme for finding these so they can have *any* name unlike fades/shapes). Probably build a menu of them too at some stage rather than making you click on the button to move through.
Mode controls the rendering effect used (only makes sense to use anything other than normal if 'Clear first' is *off*). Negative gaps can be used to produce some nice effects (particularly with 'darker' mode but they can make things very slow. (Up to several minutes to process a large fullsize image on Iyonix where -gaps=sizes).
High quality interactive scale and move
When on, the effect is rendered when you're moving/scaling a thumbnail. When off (default) it is only rendered when you stop dragging. Iyonix users can have this option on -most of the time-. Everyone else will probably want to leave it off as it'll make moving/scaling slow. :-)
Choices Misc section:
Fast JPEG loading
When off, if Variations thinks there is anything 'odd' about a jpeg being loaded it pipes it through a program called 'djpeg' which can handle virtually anything. It is very slow with big files though. When this option is on Variations assumes the OS plotting routines can handle the JPEG file being loaded.
You may however then get an error loading EXIF (digital camera) JPEGs on RISC OS < Select or 5.02 with this option turned on...if you do, try turning on 'EXIF hack' as well. If *that* fails turn both options off and try again...if it is valid the JPEG should load....
...oh heavens!
*I* can't understand that! :-)
Maybe this'll help:
| OS | Fast JPEG Loading | EXIF hack |
| Select/RISC OS 5.03 | ON | OFF |
| RISC OS = 5.02 | ON | ON |
| RISC OS <= 4.02 | ON | ON |
| Problems? | OFF | OFF |
Its worth playing about with these. On a large test JPEG the difference is considerable - 3 seconds to load with these options on and 14 with them both off...
Keyboard controls
When on, keyboard controls as added in 0.18 (see below) work. When off (default) they don't - instead you get a reminder dialogue if you press a key.
Bouncy crop edges
This influences the way the crop area behaves (in the crop window) when you drag it to the edge of the image - when on, the other side moves away.
New memory management. By default 'Auto' chooses Application slot on Iyonix, Dynamic areas on older hardware. This may be forced either way and the size of dynamic areas created by modifying system variables in !Variations.!Run
...if this bit is all greek to you just ignore it!
I've added some other stuff too but its all way toooo buggy and is turned
off or hidden for this release.
Variations is free. I make no request for any sort of financial recompense for the time I have put (and will put in the future) into this.
However, as the author of this software I believe that legally, (and more importantly in my opinion, *morally*) I have the right to expect that as a (hopefully) decent person you will consider obeying a few simple requests.
Namely:
1. That you do not distribute a modified version of this program.
2. You do not pass it off as your own work nor use any part of it in any other software you write.
Distribution
Variations is currently being developed. For the moment I ask that you do *not* distribute copies of this application to *any* third party.
Please do not place it on web sites, ftp sites, CDROMs, give it to friends on floppies, tie it to the leg of a carrier pigeon etc. etc. It is unfinished, buggy and a later version will almost certainly be available here: http://compo.iconbar.com/variation.htm
Please do tell anyone you think who might be interested where they can get hold of it.
At some point when development settles down I'll replace the above with a less restrictive clause and make the source code available.
Feedback
I invite comments, bug reports and suggestions for ways in which this program can be improved. I'm writing it for my own personal use and enjoyment but I often find that other people suggest useful improvements to my software that I'd never have thought of making myself.
Friendly, positive (or at least encouraging) feedback is more likely to bear fruit. If you are abusive or overly critical you very probably will be ignored or be told to "just delete it then".
Warranty
None whatsoever. :-)
Included the section from the changelog (0.17) about masking since it is fundamental to the operation of the software.
Page designed by R Ashbery (my additions in bold/italic violet).
Variations, version 0.20 (20th May, 2003) programmed by Rob Davison: Download the latest version
This HTML manual is based on the original supplied with Variations, version 0.18.
Anything I've forgotten then please refer to the latest changelog document supplied with the software.