CompuServe Messages

Set Display Aspect —————— This feature is designed to provide a way for you to tell Imagemaster about your monitor, video display settings and so on. The issue is, if an image is to look aspect correct – that is, the correct ratio of width to height, not "squished" or "skinny", then Imagemaster has to know just how wide and high your display is. Since this varies with a number of things; monitor size and brand, width and height controls on your monitor, graphics mode, etc.. we have to tell it. It's not enough to "assume" a particular aspect based on Amiga display mode. So, you do this: use Set Display Aspect.. a box appears. Hold a 3.5 in floppy disk (either unused or bad, preferably) up to the display. Now, resize the wireframe box to fit evenly around the edges of the floppy. Next, hit "Apply To All Modes". Then press done, and (important) save your defaults so this information is kept around for next time you run Imagemaster. At this point, because we know the size of the floppy, we now know the size and exact aspect of your monitor setup. That means that Imagemaster has all the info it needs to display an image *exactly* as it should appear as long as the image itself carries accurate aspect information. In many cases, they don't – so you'll go into the Buffer panel, use Set Current Aspect and DPI, and set the aspect to the correct values for the image – usually, it's obvious. You can always get pretty close if the aspect is weird – but is almost always square (scans, mac and vga images) or one of the video res (toaster, dctv, Amiga screens) and we have presets for all of these. If you change your monitor's width and height controls, remember to use the Set System Aspect operation again – we can't tell you've done that aand will display distorted images (sizewise) until you re-inform the program about the new settings. When both of these situations (informing im of system aspect, and individual image aspect) are correctly addressed, Imagemaster displays the image perfectly. You can zoom and etc, and the image *still* remains perfectly oriented. You can "clip" long, vertical slices out of an image, and the new buffer with the clip in it will be a (you guessed it) a long, vertical slice – that looks perfect, and into which you can zoom if you need to, with panning available at all times. One of the things that had been missing from Amiga imaage manipulation software until we did this was decent support for images of a non-video aspect ratio. Our exact/entire image modes were inadequate; other methods in other software also didn't help you out. Now you can actually edit and design images in aspects meant for other display hardware, and the images WILL be right. When understood and used correctly, the exact aspect and associated Set Display Aspect control are going to be a very powerful tool for inter-machine work. Do we take care of you, or what? <grin> –Ben …via AutoPilot