Page 226 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Multimedia Systems

notes Here are some features typical of image-editing applications and of interest to multimedia
developers:
• Multiple windows that provide views of more than one image at a time.
• Conversion of major image-data types and industry-standard file formats.
• Direct inputs of images from scanner and video sources.
• Employment of a virtual memory scheme that uses hard disk space as RAM for images that
require large amounts of memory.
• Capable selection tools, such as rectangles, lassos, and magic wands, to select portions of
a bitmap.
• Image and balance controls for brightness, contrast, and colour balance.
• Good masking features.
• Multiple undo and restore features.
• Anti-aliasing capability, and sharpening and smoothing controls.
• Colour-mapping controls for precise adjustment of colour balance.
• Tools for retouching, blurring, sharpening, lightening, darkening, smudging, and tinting.
• Geometric transformation such as flip, skew, rotate, and distort and perspective changes.
• Ability to resample and resize an image.
• 134-bit colour, 8- or 4-bit indexed colour, 8-bit gray-scale, black-and-white, and customizable
colour palettes.
• Ability to create images from scratch, using line, rectangle, square, circle, ellipse, polygon,
airbrush, paintbrush, pencil, and eraser tools, with customizable brush shapes and user-
definable bucket and gradient fills.
• Multiple typefaces, styles, sizes, and type manipulation and masking routines.
• Filters for special effects, such as crystallize, dry brush, emboss, facet, fresco, graphic pen,
mosaic, pixelize, poster, ripple, smooth, splatter, stucco, twirl, watercolor, wave, and
wind.
• Support for third-party special effect plug-ins.
• Ability to design in layers that can be combined, hidden, and reordered.
plug-ins
Image-editing programs usually support powerful plug-in modules available from third-party
developers that allow to wrap, twist, shadow, cut, diffuse, and otherwise “filter” your images
for special visual effects.

Plug-ins appeared as early as the mid 1970s, when the EDT text editor running
on the Unisys VS/9 operating system using the Univac 90/60 series mainframe
computer provided the ability to run a program from the editor and to allow
such a program to access the editor buffer, thus allowing an external program
to access and edit session in memory

13.5 painting and Drawing tools

Painting and drawing tools, as well as 3-D modelers, are perhaps the most important items in
the toolkit because, of all the multimedia elements, the graphical impact of the project will likely
have the greatest influence on the end user. If the artwork is amateurish, or flat and uninteresting,
both the creator and the users will be disappointed.

220 LoveLy professionaL University