- Description
- Installation
- Supported Image File Formats
- Hints
- History
- Future
- Contact
- Request
- Greetings
- Credits
- Licence
- Disclaimer
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- Use LVsetup and click button "unregister"
- Delete the directory (and all its contend) you have installed LILYview.
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BMP |
Windows Bitmap |
.bmp, .rle |
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supported: |
all Windows & OS/2 formats |
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PCX |
ZSoft Paintbrush Image |
.pcx |
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supported: |
all Windows formats |
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GIF |
Graphics Interchange Format |
.gif |
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supported: |
all formats |
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unsupported: |
multi images and animations (only the first image is used)
text extensions
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PNG |
Portable Network Graphic |
.png |
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supported: |
all color formats and alpha channels (up to 64 bit per pixel)
transparency for indexed color scheme
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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.
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TIF |
Tagged Image File Format |
.tif; .tiff |
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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)
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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.
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JPG |
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.jpg, .jpe, .jpeg, .jfif |
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supported: |
all formats |
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TGA |
Targa True Vision Graphic |
.tga, .vst, .vba. .icb |
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supported: |
all formats |
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unsupported: |
interlacing (obsolete since 1986) |
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PNM |
Portable (Any)Map Graphic |
.pnm, .pbm, .pgm, .ppm |
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supported: |
portable bitmap
portable graymap
portable pixelmap
ascii and binary format for reading and writing
(in other words: all formats)
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SGI |
Silicon Graphics Image |
.sgi, .rgb, .rgba |
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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)
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PSD |
Photoshop Image File Format |
.sgi, .rgb, .rgba |
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supported: |
all color formats compressed and uncompressed alpha channels
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unsupported: |
layers
more than 5 channels (there can be up to 24 channels)
additional colormetric informations
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XTC |
eXtended True Color |
.xtc |
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supported: |
all formats
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BUM |
Poser Bump Map |
.bum; .bump |
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supported: |
all formats (this is actually nothing more than a BMP)
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WMF/EMF |
Windows Metafile & Enhanced Windows Metafile |
.wmf; .emf |
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supported: |
all formats but only for reading
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(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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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)
- 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.
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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(sooner or later)
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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