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New Functions in Version 13.50

Dialogs

Unified Design

Most dialogs have been redesigned to simplify their handling. They now have a common structure:

at the top there are the presets
at the left side there are the settings
at the right side there is the preview
unten links die Vorschausteuerung
at the bottom there is the preview control and OK, Cancel und Reset

Dialogs Now Scalable

Dialogs are now scalable. This way it is possible to enlarge the built-in preview.
Additionally there are controls for adjusting the zoom of the preview.

Preview Now With Curtain Control

The preview built-in in many dialog now often has a "curtain control". By using this you can view the original image at the left side of the preview control and the edited one on the right side. If the curtain control is moved to the very left, a single click on the preview will show the original image.
Aside from that the full preview of many functions has been sped-up.

Show Extreme Values

The preview now optionally allows to mark extreme values. Extreme values are areas, that are very dark or very bright. This way you can see at once if the corrections made were too strong.

Reset

Most dialogs now have a Reset-button.
By using this button PhotoLine will reset the dialog settings to the standard values of the current function. By holding Shift while using Reset, PhotoLine will show the values that were used on entering the dialog.

Enhanced Functions

Golden Section

The rectangular lasso is now able to display the Golden Section and a grid dividing the selection in three parts.

Isolated Groups

PhotoLine is now supporting isolated groups. Isolated groups are always displayed as an entity. Layer intensity and display mode are therefore directly applied to group and not inherited to the children inside the group. By doing this ugly effects are avoided, if partly transparent layers are overlapping. The following example will make this effect clearer:

Additionally isolated groups allow to restrict working layers to the content of a group.

New Picture/Layer

New Picture and New Image now allow to create images with 16 bits per channel.
New Picture/Layer

Selection of Layers

If you are editing complex document, selecting a layer nested deeply in groups can be annoying. Therefore PhotoLine has enhanced the selection tool:

Layer Tool: By holding "Shift+Ctrl" (Windows) or "Shift+Cmd" (Mac OS X) layers inside groups can be selected directly.
Layer Tool: By pressing and holding the mouse button, you can switch through all layers au the current mouse position by using the keys arrow-left and arrow-right.
Text Tool: Text layers are always selected deeply, that means you can always directly select text layers inside groups.

Miscellaneous

Speed-up
The speed of PhotoLine has been enhanced in many areas. This was possible by optimizations and by utilizing multiple processor cores more often.
Open Images
After opening images are now optionally scaled to show them as large as possible.
Browse/Create Picture Catalog
Aside from many other information the file time can now be shown, too.
Show Extreme Values: Single Channel Mode
Show Extreme Values now has an option to mark areas if only a single - and not all - channel exceeds the given limits.
Filter/Digital Camera/Rectify
Cropping is now optional in Rectify.
Close All
There is now the menu command Close All.
Create Multipage Document
The order of the pages of the now document can now be modified by dragging.
Brush List
It is now possible to import brush lists of PS.
Healing Brush
The healing brush can now its modifications into a new layer. This way the original data won't be modified.
JPEG-Export
Optionally High Quality can be turned on to reduce color sub-sampling. The resulting file will be larger, but strong color contrast will stay sharp.
PDF Export (1)
Vector and text layer masks are now longer rasterized on export.
PDF Export (2)
The resolution of rasterized layers can now be controller finer.
PSD Import
PSD files are now imported even better.
PSP Import
Simple PSP files and Tubes can now be imported directly.
Dialog Layers/Channels
This dialog saves now the size of thumbnails separately for Layers and Channels.
Picture Info With Icons For Angle And Length
By using icons for the fields Angle and Length the dialog size could be reduced.

New Functions in Version 13

Image Processing

Channel Mixer

The Channel Mixer (Tool/Channel Mixer) allows to replace the single channels of an image by a combination of the existing channels. The Channel Mixer is mostly used to convert a color image to gray by using user-defined rules. Aside from that it can be used as an effect.

Easier Post-Processing of Photos

In order to simplify the enhancement of photos PhotoLine offers new automatic and half-automatic functions. Aside from the already existing Automatic White Point Correction there are now functions to automatically correct the brightness (Filter/Automatic/Brightness Correction) and the color saturation (Filter/Automatic/Color Correction). Automatic Correction combines these three functions to one. Furthermore there is the Correction Wizard to correct the white point, the brightness, the saturation and the sharpness step by step. Each step allows to optimize the precalculated values according to the current image.

Rectify

Rectify (Filter/Digital Camera/Rectify) removes perspective distortions from digital photos. You only have to define four edges, that should be straight. The rest is handled by PhotoLine.
Rectify

High Pass Filter

The filter High Pass (Filter/Other/High Pass) keeps strong contrasts and converts weak ones to gray. By combining the result of the filter High Pass with the original image by using the display mode Screen the edges of the original image will be enhanced.

The Healing Brush

The new tool Healing Brush can be used to remove disturbing parts of an image. This is accomplished by copying the structure of a source area to the destination.

Mark Extreme Values

If Mark Extreme Values (View/Mark Extreme Values) is turned on, all parts of the document windows will be marked which are full black or full white. This way excessive corrections can be identified immediately.
The options can be used to set-up the color used for marking and the tolerance of black and white.

Light/Shadow

The function Light/Shadow has been reworked.

Browse

Keyword-View

There is now an additional tab in the Browse window: Keyword. This tab lists all IPTC-keywords used in the active directory. Behind the keyword the number of occurrences is shown.
The list can be sorted alphabetically and by numbers.
Keyword-View

External Software

The Browse window now is able to call other applications in order to edit the currently selected files.
External Software

Copy and Paste

Files can now be duplicated by using the standard commands Copy and Paste. On Windows 2000 and XP Cut is supported, too.

Links

The directory tree of the browse window now lists links to directories, too.

Load/Save EXIF Data

EXIF data can now be saved as a separate file and afterwards be appended to an image file again.

Copy EXIF Date

If images taken by a digital camera are edited and saved, of course the file date is modified, too. But often this behaviour is not wanted, because sorting by date will use this modification date and not the date of taking. Copy EXIF Date fixes this problem by copying the date of taking stored in the EXIF data to the file date. This function can be applied to every selected file or to all files in a directory. In the latter case all subdirectories can be included, too.

Change EXIF Date

If the internal time or date of a digital camera was not set correctly when taking a photo, the date of taking can be corrected by using Change EXIF Date.

Additional Information

The thumbnails in the Browse window are now showing additional information by adding small icons:

whether the photo was taken upside-down
whether there are EXIF or IPTC data
whether the file is a Raw image

Furthermore additional EXIF data can be shown textually under the thumbnail.

Text Enhancements

Text Styles

Text styles are used for uniform formatting of long text.
A text style stores all attributes needed for formatting a text. There are two different kinds of text styles in PhotoLine:

Character Styles
Character styles contain all settings defining the appearance of text like the font family, the size, the color and so on. Character styles can be applied to single characters or to a block of text.
Paragraph Styles
Paragraph styles contain all settings of character styles. Additionally all options needed for paragraph formatting are defined: line and paragraph distance, left and right edge, and so on. Paragraph styles are always applied to full paragraphs.

If a style is applied to a text and this style is modified later, the text will change its appearance automatically accordingly.
Text styles can be created hierarchically. This means a new text style can inherit all settings of another style and only differs in some points. Changing the base style will modify the settings of the derived style, too, if the derived style hasn't defined this settings on its own.
Styles

Spell Checking

On Mac OS X PhotoLine is supporting the built-in spell checker. On Windows ASpell, an Open Source spell checker, is supported which has to be installed separately. ASpell can be downloaded from: http://aspell.net/win32
The spelling is checked while entering the text. Unknown or incorrectly spelled words are marked red.
The context menu of a marked word offers proposals for correct spelling if there are any.
Spell Checking

Crop Text Flow

Crop Text Flow is a comfortable way of splitting a text flow that uses several text layers. There are two basic working modes:

The text can be splitted, so that every text layer will keep the currently shown text.
The text can be kept in one piece and be attached to the first layer. All other layers are emptied.

Serial Document

The function Serial Document combines a CSV-file and a template document and creates a serial document. The template document controls which data field to insert in the result.

Miscellaneous

Support of Multiprocessor Computers

If you run PhotoLine on a computer with more than one processor core, PhotoLine will utilize these additional cores.

Support of USB-Sticks

PhotoLine can now start directly from an USB-stick. You just have to create a directory named "UserSettings" in the application directory of PhotoLine (on Mac OS X in the "Resources"-subdirectory), and PhotoLine will use it to load and save its settings.

The Curve Creation Tool

This new vector tool allows to create and edit new vector graphics in a single step.

Create Multipage Document

Create Multipage Document allows to combine all open pictures to a single document. Each picture will be on a separate page.

Im- and Export of DDS-Files

PhotoLine is now able to load and save DDS-files. DDS-files are mainly used by computer games.

Windows: Set and Get Wallpaper

PhotoLine can now get and set the background image of the desktop.

Card Is Now View

The Card-dialog has been renamed to View, because it now additionally contains a list of the opened documents and a list of the pages of the active document.
Card

Menu reworked

In cooperation with the users and beta testers of PhotoLine the menu entries have been reordered.

Windows: Docked Dialogs Now Minimizable

Docked dialog can now be minimized.
Docked Dialogs

Minor Enhancements

Rotate Layer
Rotate Layer offers now several types of interpolation.
.
Working Layers With Display-Switch
In the Attributes-dialog the working layers now have switch which allows to turn off the work temporarily. This way the layer itself can be edited more easily.
Color Picker
The info-windows of the color picker can now be turned off by using the options.
Import/Digital Camera Raw Data
The import function of raw-files now offers an export-function.
Standard Filter
Most standard filter now allow a filter size smaller than 1 pixel.
Image Noise
Image Noise has been reworked and enhanced.
Adaptive Soften
The filter Adaptive Soften has been enhanced.
Histogram Correction
The RGB-histogram now shows additionally the single color channels, too.
Optimize Contrast
Optimize Contrast is faster now.
PSD-Import
Histogram and Curves working layers can now be imported.
PDF-Export
The PDF-export optionally exports only the printable layers.
Grid
The origin of the grid can be adjusted.
"Change Layer Name" Recordable As Action
Renaming a layer can now be recorded as action.

What was new in:
Version 12
Version 11.50
Version 11.00
Version 10.50
Version 9.50