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  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


Description

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.

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Installation

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

(NOTE: This is only for version 0.6.0 beta - future versions will come with an installation tool)
  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.

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Supported Image File Formats

  BMP Windows Bitmap .bmp, .rle  
  supported: all Windows & OS/2 formats  
 
  PCX ZSoft Paintbrush Image .pcx  
  supported: all Windows formats  
 
  GIF Graphics Interchange Format .gif  
  supported: all formats  
  unsupported: multi images and animations (only the first image is used)
text extensions
 
 
  PNG Portable Network Graphic .png  
  supported: all color formats and alpha channels (up to 64 bit per pixel)
transparency for indexed color scheme
 
  unsupported: transparency for RGB colors (this makes no sense to me)
some additional chunks are ignored

NOTE: Photoshop did NOT read/write correct 16BPS PNG files (funny enough, the 16BPS files written by Photoshop did look right when imported again, but these are incorrect PNG files!)
Internet Explorer & Netscape Communicator did not apply alpha and transparency correctly. But if you wish to convert your GIF-images to PNG this should not be a problem, because GIF uses only one channel for complete transparency and images that do not use the more sophisticated features that PNG may give, seem to be displayed correctly by those browsers.
 
 
  TIF Tagged Image File Format .tif; .tiff  
 (in other words: Thousands of Incompatible File Formats)

  supported: Macintosh and PC file format
strips and tiles
Chunks and planar image data
16bit color depth (up to 80 bit per pixel)
alpha channels
gray response curve
dot range
and about 30 more commonly used tags

compressions:
Uncompressed
Packed Bits RLE
Huffman RLE
CCITT Group 3 fax (one and two dimensional)
Thunder Scan RLE
LZW (w/wo prediction)
LZW "old" format (obsolete since TIFF spec. 4.0 but still alive)
ZZ77 Deflate (w/wo prediction)
DCT (embedded JPEG new format as defined in technical note 2 1995)

color schemes:
black and white
grayscale
indexed color palette
RGB true color
CMYK true color
CIE L*A*B true color (sometimes called YUV)
YCbCr true color (with subsampling and coefficient tag)

 
  unsupported: about 50 tags (lots of them are private and not well documented)

compressions:
CCITT Group 4 fax
Old JPEG (obsolete since 1995)
NEXT RLE (do you remember the next cube?)
IT8 CT w/padding
IT8 Linework RLE
IT8 Monochrome picture
IT8 Binary line art
Pixar companded 10bit LZW
Pixar companded 11bit ZIP
Kodak DCS encoding
ISO JBIG
(and some more I even didn't know the name and meaning)

color schemes
LUV high dynamic range colors (but will be implemented soon!)

NOTE: most of the TIFFs you will find can be read because the unsupported features are very rarely used. Indeed I believe that LILYview is one of the most powerful PC-based tiff-reader you can get.
 
 
  JPG .jpg, .jpe, .jpeg, .jfif  
  supported: all formats  
 
  TGA Targa True Vision Graphic .tga, .vst, .vba. .icb  
  supported: all formats  
  unsupported: interlacing (obsolete since 1986)  
 
  PNM Portable (Any)Map Graphic .pnm, .pbm, .pgm, .ppm  
  supported: portable bitmap
portable graymap
portable pixelmap
ascii and binary format for reading and writing
(in other words: all formats)
 
  SGI Silicon Graphics Image .sgi, .rgb, .rgba  
  supported: 8 and 16 bit per color channel
Grayscale and RGB True Color
Alpha channels
uncompressed and run length coded
(as far as I know: all formats)
 
  PSD Photoshop Image File Format .sgi, .rgb, .rgba  
  supported: all color formats compressed and uncompressed alpha channels
  unsupported: layers
more than 5 channels (there can be up to 24 channels)
additional colormetric informations
 
  XTC eXtended True Color .xtc  
  supported: all formats
 
  BUM Poser Bump Map .bum; .bump  
  supported: all formats (this is actually nothing more than a BMP)
 
  WMF/EMF Windows Metafile & Enhanced Windows Metafile .wmf; .emf  
  supported: all formats but only for reading
 
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Some Hints

(in no particular order)
GDI

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).

ICC
In the current program version, all additional photometric information written to image files is lost, when saving the image. For instance Photoshop includes a complete ICC (Internationl Color Consortium) profile to the PSD and TIFF images.

PNG

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.

Blackout

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.

Crash

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.

To view an image do one of the following (this is only for the newbees)...

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).

TIFF

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.

Print

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.

GUI

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

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.

Poser

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.

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History


Updates and bugfixes in version 0.6.0 beta (released)
  • a bug that was added with version 0.5.7 to the PNG writing code is removed again.
  • a bug in the TGA run length decoder that caused in some rare cases a crash has been fixed.
  • a bug in the median cut algorithm used for color reduction that caused LV to loop infinitily if the original image did have just a few more than 256 colors is fixed. (And BTW, I did improve the algorythm for better image quality, as far as I can see without adding new bugs.)
  • new feature to add and change transparency for GIF and indexed PNG images. (LV can now easily convert GIF files using transparency to PNG - and the resulting PNG is always significant smaller than the original GIF)
  • addition to the info window: pixel position, color and palette index where the mouse did actually point to.
  • new feature to crop the image. (Very useful with scanned images to remove the border.)
  • some more FX filters: solarize and posterize.
  • and finally so many undo/redo levels as disk space is available.

  • Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.9 beta (internal)
  • PNM 'Partable Map Graphic' format support added.
  • 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.

  • SGI 'Silicon Graphics Image' support added. The following extensions are commonly used and are now supported: *.sgi, *.rgb and *.rgba.
  • TIFF using DCT or embedded JPEG compression can now be read. (As specified in TIFF technical note 2 from 1995)
  • TIFF using "old style" LZW compression can now be read. This is obsolete since TIFF revision 4.0 from 1989, but it seems that still some "old fashioned" images exist. In former versions LV did a message saying "Invalid TIFF LZW decoder value".
  • TIFF using the CMYK color scheme in planar mode and/or packbit RLE compressed can now be read. (Due to the TIFF specification the packbit compression was only designed for use with b/w images. But because some applications even did use it for RGB images, I did implement it for all color formats - except for CMYK in planar mode. Maybe still hoping that no application will do such nonconforming stuff - but surely some does. Namely "Embellish", former a sold image processing software, but since 1998 available for free and widely used in asian regions (as far as I have been informed right now).
  • New feature to read a signature from and add to TIFF, PNG and PNM images.
  • New Popupmenu called 'Workbench' added (comes down with [Shift - Right mouse button] and maybe also with the [Mouse middle button]. Used for quick access to the image processing abilities of LILYview.
  • Some basic and well known filters added: soften, blur, sharpen, edge enhance, trace contour, emboss.
  • Basic color manipulation abilities added:
  • Tune RGB (brightness, contrast, gamma)
    Tune HLS (hue, lightness, saturation)
    Change and split RGB color range by histogram usage.
  • A very poor help system added - but its the first step towards a real one.
  • Removed the animation from the popup drawing engine to avoid the millisecond problem that happened on some windows versions/configurations. Also some small design changes.
  • Removed the localized version for showing keyboad shortcuts in the popup menus. It did not work correct in all countries/regions. For the moment, all has switched back to plain english. (But the time/date formating seems to work - so this feature will stay enabled.)

  • Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.8 beta (released)
  • Lots of changes in the internal program logic to better reflect the new abilities of LILYview. (It was no longer useful to assume that LILYview has access to an image file, because the image source can also be the clipboard or a scanner. This did require a lot of work and testing - but I hope this is now done! Looking foreward to my testers.)
  • Just for fun a new design for the main popup menu and the about window. I think it looks cool.

  • Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.7 beta (internal)

    Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.4 and below
    All primar versions are internal builds and not released or documented.


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    Future

    (sooner or later)



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    Contact

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



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    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.



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    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.

    http://www.irfanview.com/

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



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    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/


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    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.



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    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.



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    The Usual Stuff


    Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Cooperation.
    Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe.
    Poser is currently owned by Curious Labs.
    and so on bla, bla...


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    Have fun, Ive.