LILYview

Version 0.6.5

Release date: 17th of Mai, 2002


Content

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


Description

General

This Program was primary 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 do require more system 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 will happen as with LZW patent rights.

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

Unique Features


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Installation

Requirements

Recommandation

File association

Run the menu item "Image File Associations" aka the LILYreg.exe program to create file associations with LILYview.
You can also choose the icons for any supported image file format.

Deinstallation

  1. If you have done some file associations use the LLILYreg.exe program and click button "Unregister"
  2. Run the uninstall program.

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Usage

It is the intentional concept of LILYview not to waste any screen space with menues and speed buttons. But all the common items (file open, file save, print and so on...) are still accessable via menues.
There are two drop down menues, the main menu comes down by clicking the right mouse button or by pressing the popup-key on the keyboard.
The workbench menu comes down by clicking the right mouse button or the popup-key together with the shift-key.
Most commands can also be executed by using keyboard shortcut strokes. See the Shortcuts.hlp file for more details. Or simply press [Ctrl-F1] while LILYview is running.


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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 formats  
 
  GIF Graphics Interchange Format .gif  
  supported: all formats and in addition to the GIF spec is it possible to write uncompressed files to avoid the UNISYS LZW patent right problem (and note that these files can still be read with any other software).  
  unsupported: multi images and animations (only the first image is used)
text extensions
 
 
  P(i)NG 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!)
More bad news: Photoshop 6.0 does not read/write correct 1BPS PNG files, but the former versions did. So shame on Adobe.
Internet Explorer & Netscape Communicator did not apply alpha and transparency correctly. But if you wish to convert your GIF-images to PNG this should be no problem. 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 well displayed by those browsers.
 
 
  TIFF Tagged Image File Format .tif, .tiff  
 (in other words: Thousands of Incompatible File Formats)

  supported: Macintosh and PC file format
strips and tiles
interleaved 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 dimensional)
Thunder Scan RLE
LZW (w/wo prediction)
LZW "old" format (obsolete since TIFF spec. 4.0 but sometimes still alive)
LZ77 Deflate (w/wo prediction)
DCT (embedded JPEG new format as defined in technical note 2 1995)
LogLUV RLE (used to encode the 32bit LogLUV format)

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)
LogLUV high dynamic range (16bit grayscale, 24 and 32bit color format)

 
  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)

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.
 
 
  JPEG Joint Picture Experts Group .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)
 
  RAS SUN Rasterfile .ras  
  supported: 8 and 16 bit per color channel
Monochrome, grayscale and RGB True Color
uncompressed and run length coded
 
  IFF Interchange File Format (Amiga) .iff, .lbm  
  supported: 1 to 8 planes for indexed color schemes
24 planes for rgb true color
uncompressed and run length coded
 
  PSD Photoshop Image File Format .psd  
  supported: all color formats compressed and uncompressed alpha channels
  unsupported: layers
all data above 5 channels is ignored (there can be up to 24 channels)
additional colormetric informations
 
  PCD Kodak Photo CD .pcd  
  supported: all image formats but only for reading
  unsupported: image overviews
 
  WMF/EMF Windows Metafile & Enhanced Windows Metafile .wmf, .emf  
  supported: all formats but only for reading
 
  BUM Poser Bump Map .bum, .bump  
  supported: all formats (this is actually nothing more than a BMP)
 

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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 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.

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 (or the mouse wheel) 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).

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 coding 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.
In some rare cases the images even did compress better when no filtering is used. So, if you go for the best possible compression ratio, you have to play around with the settings.
When used with indexed color schemes the program can do some optimisation by itself - so, for your concvenience, there are no filter check boxes but you can decide to let the program do a color table optimisation. If you need the color table untouched, you had to uncheck this option.
And still remember, all settings have no influence on the image data itself, the PNG format uses a lossless image compression.

TIFF

The TIFF Save Image dialog allows you to select LZ77 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 LZ77 compressed images being written by LILYview correctly, I have found some applications doing also a LZ77 compression, but the resulting files cannot be imported by Photoshop.
The reason for this is that Adobe did define LZ77 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 LZ77.
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.
LILYview for sure does recognize both tags.

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. Please mail me a description of what did happen and do not forget to include some information about the system you are working with (OS, RAM, CPU).

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 and sliders will reset to the default value (if any) by double clicking.
All underlined characters in the popup menus work also as a hotkey. 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).

Color Table Dialog

When running the color table dialog, the apply alpha and transparency setting is automatically switched on, even if you have turned it off in the configuration dialog. This makes sense, because the color table dialog gives you the possibilty to change the transparency and the background color. And be not confused, these settings will switch back to yours when you finish the color table dialog and this may change the appearance of the image.
Transparency and background settings are only read from and applied to GIF and PNG images. All other image formats do not support these information. Also the background setting is ignored by most other applications (e.g IE), so use it with care.
When you save an image with transparency information to a file format without transparency support, it will be saved in the way it currently did appear in the LILYview window. So you can modifie the way this image will be saved by changing the background color in the configuration dialog (or simply press [B]) and also by switching the apply alpha feature [Backspace].
And some more about background settings. There is first the LILYview background as set in the configuration dialog. This one is used (I think you guess it) for the background color in the LILYview window (also full screen) and as the background for any given transparency in the image file - but only if the file does not define a background color by itself. In this case, the window background is still the same, but the color used as background "behind" the transparent image parts is set as defined by the image file. And once again: these settings are ignored by most other applications.
Two more thing to mention: You can use the mouse to select the "active color" not only by selecting from the color table but also by clicking somewhere into the image.
To make it even easier to work with transparency, you can select the LILYview window background also while running the color table dialog by pressing [B].

Photoshop

Photoshop uses an 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 opinion, 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 when rendered. Removing this without any more loss of quality is nearly impossible. Use any lossless image format like 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 0.6.5 (released) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.6.4 (RC#1 internal) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.6.3 (released) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.6.2 beta (released) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.6.1 beta (internal) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.6.0 beta (released) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.9 beta (internal) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.8 beta (released) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.7 beta (internal) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.6 beta (internal) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.5 beta (released) Updates and bugfixes in version 0.5.4 and below
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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:  ive@lilysoft.com


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Request

I have found just very few TIFF images using the YCbCr color format. So this feature is not well tested. If you know some place to find more, please send me the URL.
If you find any image in a format that is described as supported, but is not properly displayed you can send it to me. But please have a look to the image format description section first. Do not send image files that are marked already as unsupported.
To send any image, you should use the "virtual parcel service" at: http://www.lilysoft.com/contact/


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Credits

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

Dipl.ing. Mike Lischke - I did use parts of his code as startup for the implementation of the Photoshop and Photo CD 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.

Anthony Dekker - for his NEUQUANT Neuronal-Net quantization algorithm.
See "Kohonen neural networks for optimal colour quantization" in "Network: Computation in Neural Systems" Vol. 5 (1994) pp 351-367. for a discussion of the algorithm. Or visit his homepage and have a look at some examples at: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~dekker/NEUQUANT.HTML

Gregory Ward Larson - for destributing code that makes it easy to implement the LogLUV high dynamic range color format. For more information and over 100 example images (some scanned and many CGI) you can visit: http://positron.cs.berkeley.edu/~gwlarson/pixformat/tiffluv.html

James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner, John F. Hughes - for writing 'Computer Graphics - Principles and Practice', some call it the 'bible' for computer graphics programmers.

Ralph G. Lindner - for hosting the LILYsoft homepage. So he's the one who made it possible for you to download the LILYview stuff.


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Licence

The program LILYview is FREE.
You are allowed to use it in any way you like as long as you are not a business company with more than 25 workplaces. In that case you had to contact the author and request a customized business licence.
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.