1. Description
2. Installation
3. Supported Image File Formats
4. Hints
5. History
6. Future
7. Contact
8. Request
9. Greetings
10. Credits
11. Licence
12. Disclaimer
13. The Usual Stuff

General

This Program was primarly written to get a small and fast image browser which needs as less system resources as possible. This means the load and display time for big images also should be acceptable on weak systems (lets say below 64 MB ram). As well the program is fast on well equipped machines too.

Step by step the program did increase its abilities but also the additional features did eat up more memory. So, if only used as image viewer LILYview is still easy to satisfy but all the image processing features require more systems resources.

The next goal was to provide almost complete support for the PNG image format, which I personally prefer. It's a clear designed file format which includes all important features (up to 16 bit per color channel, alpha channel and colormetric informations) and achieves in almost any case a higher compression ratio than any other lossless compression format. And it is FREE - so no trouble with for example LZW patent rights will occure.

Finally, since playing a little around with Poser 4.0, I got tired of renaming the Poser bump map files from *.bum to *.bmp and back again.

Basic Features

• Read and write support for many image file formats.
• Directory browsing with some options.
• Use of the windows clipboard for data exchange.
• Twain compatible import function.
• Printing.
• Some basic image processing abilities.
• Unique Features
• It is small, fast and stable.
Maybe not yet but soon, LILYview will be the most powerful PC-based TIFF reading application. (In fact I already did know no other application being able to read such a wide range of TIF-formats as LILYview does).

• Beside of the PNG-reference-viewer RPNG2.EXE (it can be found at the PNG homepage), LILYview is the only PC application I did know, that can CORRECTLY display ALL 149 PNG images from the testset for PNG-(de)coders created by Willem van Schaik. (To download this test suite also visit the PNG homepage.)
• LILYview achieves very good results in compressing PNG files (much better as e.g. Phososhop, who does a very bad job for this task).
• And BTW LILYview's build in resample filters are able to produce better quality than Photoshop when resizing images.
• LILYview can read all JPEG color formats (there are 4) correctly. IE and Communicator as many other applications do not.
• LILYview is available for free and this is very cheap.

Requirements

• Any version of microsoft's 32 bit windows (95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP).
• Some RAM.
• Some free disk space (at least 1 MB).
• Some pointing device (like a mouse).
• Some images to look at.
• Some very basic knowledge how to use the operating system.

Recommandation

As much RAM as possible for use with big images.
A display system that supports true color mode but at least more then 256 colors.

Installation

1. Delete any prior installed version of LILYview.
   Also delete any file assiciations you may have created. This is very important, because since version 0.6.0 LILYview comes with an additional setup program that shouls be used to create and remove the associations.
2. If you have not already done, create a new directory anywhere you like (e.g. c:\program files\lilysoft).
   Extract the complete contend of the archive LILYview060 into this directory.
3. Use LVsetup to create any desired file association and select your prefered icons.
   You also can create a shortcut on the desktop and in the start menu if you like.
   Since version 0.5.8 there is a file called splash.png. You can use this file (or any other png file if it's named 'splash') to be displayed on startup if no file is loaded. If you prefere a blank screen, simply delete splash.png.

If you don't know how to do these things, just have a look in your windows help files, tutorials and manuals - this is not the place to teach you how to use windows.

Deinstallation

1. Use LVsetup and click button "unregister"
2. Delete the directory (and all its contend) you have installed LILYview.

Supported Image File Formats

Some Hints

The windows GDI (Graphical Device Interface) sometimes refuses to display big images (what 'big' means depends on available ram and video memory) but the program did not get any message from windows that the OS did run out of memory - so from the programs point of view everything looks right, but you did not see the image!
To avoid this problem you should check the 'draw tiled' option in the configuration menu. When checked, the GDI drawing routine will not be called for the whole image, but instead the image will be devided into small tiles which can be drawn by the GDI. This will slow down the drawing, but you can tune this behavour just to kick in when its neccesary (use the configuration dialog).

The PNG write routine uses an adaptive filtering. This means, it decides for each row individually what filter would be the best one.

To get the best compression ratio you should check all filters when saving a PNG image. But if your goal are images with reduced loading time, you may wish to exclude the Peath filter, which is the most computing intensive. In this case also use a compression setting not above 6.

When used with indexed color schemes the program does some optimisation by itself - so, for your concvenience, the filter check boxes are simply disabled.

And still remember, all settings have no influence on the image data itself, the PNG format uses a lossless image compression.

If the image view is just the background color and nothing else, it seems that there is an alpha channel present, but without any alpha information (no transparency). To view the image without alpha just click [Backspace] or use the option in the configuration dialog.

If the program does not work properly or crashes without any warning I am really sorry, but I've tested it on different machines with many and many of pictures but surely there are such a lot possible combinations of used hardware, software configuration, image and color formats that there may still exist some undiscovered bug.

Drag 'n' drop some image from the explorer window to the LILYview executable icon or to any shortcut you may have created.
Double click the LILYview executable or any shortcut to it for getting the open image dialog.
When LILYview is already running you can...
Drag 'n' drop any image from the explorer window into the LILYview display window.
Right click with the mouse and select open from the popup menu list.
Press the F2 button.
Use the up and down arrows to select the previous, next image in the active directory.
Popup the list window and select any image (with the mouse or the arrow keys if the list window is activated).

The TIFF Save Image dialog allows you to select ZZ77 compression. This is a new TIFF feature (in fact it is not so new, it came from TIFF revision 6.0 dated back to the 3rd of june 1992, but still some developers are thinking that it is a very new feature), so most applications will not be able to import this image. Surprisingly enough, Photoshop does import correctly.

But note: This means photoshop does import ZZ77 compressed images being written by LILYview correctly, I have found some applications doing also a ZZ77 compression, but the resulting files cannot be imported by Photoshop.
The reason for this is that Adobe did define ZZ77 as compression tag number 32742 with TIFF specification 6.0. But for some unknown reasons a few years later, so about 1995, they decided that compression tag number 8 whould also be a good value for ZZ77.

So we have two valid tag numbers, both meaning the same. But it seems, that the good guys at Adobe being responsible for the TIFF specification did forget to send the Photoshop developers at Adobe a copy of the new TIFF revision made by Adobe.

For good results with printing, you should always use a scaling of 100%. Use the scaling in the printing dialog just to preview the result and then make use of LILYview's resample function and do the image scaling there. Using LILYview's build in scaling function should result in better quality than let windows do the task.

And if you did not have realized them already, here are some user interface feaures:
All spin editors (used for getting decimal numbers) will reset to the default value (if any) by double clicking.

All underlined characters in the popup menus work also as a hotkey. If a non-modal window (the list or info window) owns the focus they still work in combination with the [Ctrl] key. Additional Hotkeys are displayed in the popup menus, some others are mentioned elsewhere, but all are listed in the Keyboard Shortcuts helpfile (press [Ctrl]-[F1] while LILYview is running).

Photoshop uses a own color management system and includes some additional tags to any written TIFF. These tags are private, registered to Adobe and not well documented. So any other application that tries to read those TIFF's has a problem in interpreting the colors correctly (or lets say in the same way Photoshop does).
But also Photoshop has a problem (and this is not only my private oppinion, for more information you may have a look at Google Groups Graphics because I think Photoshop does wheight the "green" to much and the "blue" to less.
Also some pictures from the "SGI Tiff Test Suite" and CMYK images created by other image processing applications do definitely look "wrong" when loaded into Photoshop.

This is for all people in the poser community, who are creating beautiful textures, bump- and transparency maps and trading or giving away their work for free. Thanx to you all - but it seems that many of you have no idea about image file formats and how to use them effectively. Here are some hints for you:
1.) Do not use JPEG for transparency maps. Due to the lossy character of the jpeg compression there will be "seams" where it should be completely transparent and this is visible like an "aurole" when rendered. Removing this without any more loss of quality is nearly impossible. Use any lossless image format as PNG to save transparency maps.
2.) Do not save transparency and bump maps as true color formats. Save them as grayscale images. This gives you 2/3 less data size without any loss of information. Again, PNG is a very good format to do this, but you can save bump maps also as JPEG, but be sure to convert them to grayscale before doing so.
3.) You can use in almost any case JPEG for textures but if your texture includes plain areas of reflective material (such as plastic, metal, polished leather) do not use a too low quality setting when saving the JPEG file because even if the artefacts produced by the compressor will not be visibe on the image file itself, they will propably when the renderer creates some specular highlight on those texture parts.

History

This means 4 more file extensions by one strike: *.pbm Portable Bitmap for B/W images, *.pgm Portable Graymap for, you guessed it, grayscale images, *.ppm Portable Pixelmap for RGB True Color images and *.pnm for any of the above mentioned.

• LILYview has now access to the windows clipboard.
• Twain support added.
• Printer support added.
• Reader for windows metafiles and enhanced metafiles (.wmf, .emf) added. Which was quite easy because the windows GDI does indeed most of the work.
  
• LILYview can now launch some other image processing application.
  
• A bug in the PNG writer that sometimes created corrupted images when writing interlaced is now corrected.
  
• LILYview's behavior on startup can now be customized (Splash screen, open dialog at startup).
  
• The 'check dib' dialog is now removed. It will be replaced some day with some hopefully working histogram and image processing features. I will try to implement them for version 0.6.
  
  Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.6 beta (internal)
  
• LILYview now uses the windows region settings to format the output of time and size information. Also the hotkey shortcuts should now reflect the real keyboard layout (e.g Ctrl in english is Strg in german), but does this also work with middle east regions? I dunno, looking forward to the next test release.
• LILYview will now start with multiple instances if more then one image was bombed on it. Well, thats live during wartime. But still, if more than one image is dropped at the running application, only the first one is used. I don't see no way, to handle this in a logical manner.
• The PNG writer does now a palette sorting for indexed color schemes and achieves higher compression rates for them.
• Made the save PNG options dialog behave a little bit smarter (the filter check boxes are automatically disabled when the user selects no compression or palette image).
• Added a lot more functionality to the list window. Also changed the design.
• Now the user gets an information if the image file that is currently displayed has been changed outside of LILYview (which can happen in multi user, multi tasking, multi everything environments). This caused malfunction in former versions.
But there is still the problem that some software does a testwrite or whatever that causes the message to be fired up twice. That's not nice, but for the moment I have no idea to do some workaround.

• Also everything should work fine if the user does rename, remove or delete the currently diplayed image file. Some users have really strange ideas.
• In case the user does remove the whole active directory (I don't see any reason for doing this except by brute force trying to kick ass poor LILYview) nothing special will happen.
• The ugly system message that did appear if you are opening LILYview with an unreadable or corrupted image file saying 'application error at address ... ' will no longer come up. BTW this was quite difficult to fix 'cause at this time LILYview has not yet installed its own error handler to catch any system events.
• Image files with corrupted compression data are now displayed as far as possible. I think this is more useful as in the former version which did not disply any part of such images. Naturally the display still remains black if the corruption was detected right at the beginning of the data stream.
• added functionality to the About dialog: start the mail client by clicking on e-mail address.
• all message, error and information windows that came up do now use the system sound settings done by the user.
• LILYview does now recognize and use the DPI setting (if any) of PNG files. This information will now also be written to PNG files. (For some reason I have simply forgotton to do this earlier.)

Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.5 beta (released)

• GIF reader bug fixed. LV did loop infinitely when no EOI code was found, which SHOULD be present, but it isn't in every GIF. Some may say this is a bug of the software which has written the GIF, ...but who cares?
  
• Correct interpretation for JPEG using the CMYK color scheme.
• Correct interpretation for TIFF with more than one alpha channel. Still only the first one is used, but in the former versions this caused a serious program crash.
• Notification and use of the TIFF halftone hint tag added.
• A real big bug hidden in the rotation code was hunted down and killed.
• In the Windows status bar is not longer LILYsoft displayed, but instead the image file name. I did love it, to see my company name right on this place, but I must agree that it is now much more useful, at least when running more than one instance of LILYview.
• The user was not informed when running out of disk space while saving an image. Now he gets the message.
• Sometimes the display was not updated when loading the same image again after having applied changes (resizing or format conversion). LILYview tries to do as less painting as possible because windows sends a lot of messages to repaint any region or the entire image. But many of them are not necessary and always repainting the image when windows says to do so results in flickering. You may have noticed this with some applications. I have done a quick 'n' dirty workaround and will later check the internal program logic.
• Lots of minor bugfixes (of more or less cosmetic nature).
• Correction of some orthographical bugs in the documentation.

Future

(sooner or later)

• More TIFF import formats (for the Pixar files and LUV high dynamic range color format).
• JPEG 2000 support.
• Read ICC profiles from PSD and TIFF (if any).
• Presave and apply colormetric informations (ICC profiles) when saving images.
• Presave and apply alpha channels when saving images.
• Replace the GDI image drawing by a DirectX drawing engine.

Contact

Any feedback (including bug reports) is welcome and will not be ignored. Please feel free to contact the author at:  feedback@lilysoft.com

Request

I have found just very few TIFF images in the YCbCr color format. So this feature is not well tested and maybe buggy. If you know some place to find more, please send me the URL.

Due to the UNISYS LZW patent right problem, some developers have decided to make it possible to save GIF files uncompressed (this is against the GIF spec but who cares?). Yet, I did not have found such GIF images and LILYview will be unable to read them. If you have such files or know an application to create them, please send me the URL to download them.

Greetings

To Irfan Skiljan who has created a very fine image viewer (it is my favourite), but he still did not support alpha channels and the CIE L*A*B color format.

To all PNG and ZLIB developers.
Visit the PNG home page at: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/

Credits

Dipl.ing. Mike Lischke - I did use parts of his code as startup for the implementation of the Photoshop file reader.

Thomas G. Lane from the "Independent JPEG Group's software" - Many parts of the IJG library are used for the implementation of the JPEG coding/decoding.

Brad Stowers - I used some of his very fine programmed delphi components in the LVsetup program. (And if I would have discoverd his page earlier, I didn't have wasted so much time by doing things by myself.) For a look at his free delphi resources you can visit: http://www.delphifreestuff.com/

Licence

The program LILYview is FREE. You are allowed to use it in any way you like but you are not allowed to sell it or contain it into a collection which is to be sold. You can redestribute it only on a nonprofit based form that makes clear that this program is available for free.

Under no circumstances the programmer is responsible for any damage and/or loss of data that may be caused by the use of LILYview.
Also the programmer is not responsible for any loss and/or waste of time that is caused by the use of LILYview.

If you do not agree with all of these terms, you are NOT allowed to use the program LILYview.

Well, thats it.

Disclaimer

This software is provided "AS IS" without any warranty of any kind, either express or implied. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the software is with you. Should the software prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction. In no event shall the author, copyright holder, or any other party who may redistribute the software be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental, or consequental damages arising out of the use or inability to use the software (including, but not limited to, loss of data, data being rendered inaccurate, loss of business profits, loss of business information, business interruptions, loss sustained by you or third parties, or a failure of the software to operate with any other software) even if the author, copyright holder, or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

The Usual Stuff