The Atari image viewer/processor

v5.10 beta 5 released! [970707]

The very latest MGIF version, v5.10 beta 5, was released 970707.
All reported bugs from beta4 should be fixed and, as always, there are some new things in there. ;-)
This is very close to what the final v5.10 release will be like!
(As always, the beta archive is incomplete. You need the v5.01 one as well, which can be found below.)
Only some minor things will be fixed (send bug reports this way), added or extended. As an example, the 'progress monitor' window is not yet fully used by all operations that ought to do so.

The main part remaining is to update the manuals and write some more examples/tutorials. If you have any ideas about what to write, let me know.

I've noticed that someone downloads MGIF v5.01 every other day or so, but I very seldom hear from anyone. If you try the program, please let me know what you think about it.
Criticism is (almost) as welcome as praise. ;-)

It's now been over a year since the v5.01 release of MGIF, which was released two and a half years after the last version before that.
In October '96 my Falcon died, but since 970221 it's now up and running again and the continued development of MGIF is under way.

I need feedback from YOU as much as ever.
Please, email comments, suggestions, bug reports or whatever.

For v5.01 the first DSP code for MGIF was finally written, convolution and median filters. The new routines are _very_ much faster on a Falcon030.
A 3x3 convolution on a 640x480 greyscale image takes about a second.

Work being done on v5.10 (formerly called 5.02)

The scaler has been improved a lot (for greyscale and 24 bit images). The same principle that's used for the double/halve functions can now be used for any scale factor. The improvement (marvelous IMHO) is especially noticeable for down-scaling of line graphics, which scaled rather badly with the old version.
The same kind of interpolation can now also be selected for rotations, giving much better results than before.

MGIF will recognize automatically (for most cases) when an image using only 16 colours is drawn. If there are 16 colours available, the ordered dithering will not be used.

You can now tell MGIF to display the destination image automatically after every image processing operation.

The fastest (AFAIK) GIF decoder is now even faster!
On my tests the speedup ranges from 10 to 300%, depending mostly on the amount of single colour areas in the images.

JPEGD (Brainstorm's DSP JPEG decoder) support is finally enabled!
After talking to people at Brainstorm, I've decided to make this available to the public. The decoder driver is an adaption of some code I got via the internet, which means that it might not be as stable as what you get when you pay the license fee to Atari. It seems to work fine, though.

Support for image tiling has been added, including a way to make tiles where the edges match perfectly (a four way mirroring).

For the updated v5.10betas [960711 and 960806], the cut/zoom coordinate showing has been improved and the mouse handling for scrolling and waiting has been changed. Unfortunately, this didn't fix the problems some people have had running MGIFv5 together with Warp9 as I had hoped. :-(
However, in the third beta there is a way around that. See below.

The convolution dialog and routines have been extended to handle larger kernels (5x5). Naturally, the Falcon will do these using the DSP as well.
It's now also possible to load convolution kernels from files and access the last three quickly from the dialog.

I've modified the GIMP 'bump map' plug-in (see the image processing links below) for MGIF use. The modified version has reached usable speed on a non-FPU machine (about 20 times faster than my initial port) thanks mainly to an integer square root function.
There are lots of other marvelous image processing plug-ins available for The GIMP...
Take a look via the links below and let me know what you'd like the most. Please, bear in mind that some of the effects are very processor intensive and might need an FPU and/or a fast processor to be usable.

A pixel noise function has now been added, covering both additive and binary noise. No gaussian noise (yet), though.

Bluring can now be done separately in the horizontal and vertical direction.

A random pixel spread function has been added.

To enable the use of MGIF's image scrolling abilities on machines with Warp9 (perhaps only some versions of Warp have the bug) a new switch (-wrp) has been added to force MGIF to skip its appl_tplay() calls.
The scrolling will not work as well as it should, but using the keyboard (to increase movement speed or to simply scroll using the arrow keys) its at least possible to scroll around without locking the mouse.

Some new code has made it simple to add 'progress report' windows (like when MGIF loads JPEGs without JPEGD) to most functions. To start with, I've added it to 'Oil paint' and 'Bump map', but it will appear in a few more places for the v5.10 release.

Support for motion blur added. By itself it doesn't look much different from the old blur (just an offset change), but together with 'combine' really nice effects can be achieved.

All dialogs have been put in windows!
Less than two hours of work, about 30 new lines of code and a couple of hundred extra bytes in the executable...
Apart from solving the problem with the popup menu in the save dialog, which could also be done using an external program like multdial, this will for example make the manual accessible even when a dialog is displayed. Some kind of context sensitive help system will appear shortly to take advantage of this.

Any number of dialogs can now be on the screen at the same time!
Easier to do than I thought it would be, but it still took about a day to get it (almost) working. Most of the changes consisted of splitting functions in two (setup/callback), but there were a few new things to add as well.

Text of any font, size and angle can now be inserted if you have NVDI 3.00 or later!

All the stupid 'value entering' dialogs have been replaced with separate ones. The reason this wasn't done before was that I have a very nice combination of all of them coming up, but I won't get it finished for v5.10.

Background operation of dialogs is now possible!
Button presses are always handled, but text input in background windows is optional (the input goes to the window the pointer is over).

Anything (except starting new MGIF operations) can now be done while MGIF is working and displaying the 'Progress monitor' window!
Actually, operations which are safe (like drawing) will be allowed at any time. Very neat if you want to take a look at how things are progressing.

As part of some internal cleanups, it's now finally possible to load and save files from the text interface. Have no plans on improving that interface any time soon, though, so it's not recommended for use.

MGIF now supports the VA_START protocol!
This should make it possible to keep MGIF resident as a file viewer (if you're under a multitasking OS) and it will also respond to drag&drop from for example the Freedom file selector.

The new things in MGIF v5.10beta5 [970707] will be mentioned here later. For the time being you can find them in the relevant history file.

The history file and minimal archive (you'll need the normal 5.01 one below as well) for MGIF v5.10beta (970707) can now be fetched.
If you fetch the beta, please let me know about any problems you have with it. There shouldn't be anything major, but a few things have been fixed since the last release.

The latest history file (for full release versions).
The lharc packed MGIF 5.01 archive.
The 'latest' MGIFv5 manual as an uncompiled ST-Guide source file.
(I hope to turn this into an HTML document in the future.)
An old MGIF v5beta release file (not really of much use nowadays).

Some links to image processing tutorials etc

Tutorials for The GIMP.
Zach's Tips, Tricks and Tutorials for The GIMP.
Zach explains Channel Operations for The GIMP.
Zach's GIMP links.
Zach's main page.
Michael's Tips and Tricks for Creating Images for The GIMP.
Freddy's Detailed Composite Example for The GIMP.
Mike's Rounded Text for The GIMP.
Kai's Power Tips & Tricks for Adobe Photoshop.

If you see a function used here that you'd like in MGIF, let me know.
I won't promise anything, but I'll at least look into it. When it comes to The GIMP plug-ins, I'm actually planning on interfacing those with MGIF.

If you don't have a recent Lharc unpacker or the hyper-text viewer ST-Guide (needed for reading the MGIFv5 documentation), just select and download. The first archive is self-unpacking, but the second needs STZip (also self-unpacking).
A newer version (1.4) of ST-Guide is also available (it's the one I use), but it's in German.

The logo at the top was of course created using MGIF v5.
Two monochrome image files (lines and text) were subjected to some rather simple processing and combined (idea by Eero Tamminen).
(With v5.10, you can actually do it without the image files...)
A complete description of what was done (to get a very similar image) and the two IMG files are included in the distribution archive.