Image-editing application is specialized and powerful tools for enhancing and retouching existing bitmapped images. These applications also provide many of the feature and tools of painting and drawing programs and can be used to create images from scratch as well as images digitized from scanners, video frame-grabbers, digital cameras, clip art files, or original artwork files created with a painting or drawing package.
Here are some features typical of image-editing applications and of interest to multimedia developers:
• Multiple windows that provide views of more than one image at a time
• Conversion of major image-data types and industry-standard file formats
• Direct inputs of images from scanner and video sources
• Employment of a virtual memory scheme that uses hard disk space as RAM for images that require large amounts of memory
• Capable selection tools, such as rectangles, lassos, and magic wands, to select portions of a bitmap
• Image and balance controls for brightness, contrast, and color balance
• Good masking features
• Multiple undo and restore features
• Anti-aliasing capability, and sharpening and smoothing controls
• Color-mapping controls for precise adjustment of color balance
• Tools for retouching, blurring, sharpening, lightening, darkening, smudging, and tinting
• Geometric transformation such as flip, skew, rotate, and distort, and perspective changes
• Ability to resample and resize an image.
• 134-bit color, 8- or 4-bit indexed color, 8-bit gray-scale, black-and-white, and customizable color palettes
• Ability to create images from scratch, using line, rectangle, square, circle, ellipse, polygon, airbrush, paintbrush, pencil, and eraser tools, with customizable brush shapes and user-definable bucket and gradient fills
• Multiple typefaces, styles, and sizes, and type manipulation and masking routines
• Filters for special effects, such as crystallize, dry brush, emboss, facet, fresco, graphic pen, mosaic, pixelize, poster, ripple, smooth, splatter, stucco, twirl, watercolor, wave, and wind
• Support for third-party special effect plug-ins
• Ability to design in layers that can be combined, hidden, and reordered.
Plug-Ins
Image-editing programs usually support powerful plug-in modules available from third-party developers that allow to wrap, twist, shadow, cut, diffuse, and otherwise “filter” your images for special visual effects.
