Most dialogs have been redesigned to simplify their handling. They now have a common structure:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The rectangular lasso is now able to display the Golden Section and a grid dividing the selection in three parts.
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 and New Image now allow to create images with 16 bits per channel.
If you are editing complex document, selecting a layer nested deeply in groups can be annoying. Therefore PhotoLine has enhanced the selection tool:
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.
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 (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.
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 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.
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.
The function Light/Shadow has been reworked.
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.
The Browse window now is able to call other applications in order to edit the currently selected files.
Files can now be duplicated by using the standard commands Copy and Paste. On Windows 2000 and XP Cut is supported, too.
The directory tree of the browse window now lists links to directories, too.
EXIF data can now be saved as a separate file and afterwards be appended to an image file again.
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.
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.
The thumbnails in the Browse window are now showing additional information by adding small icons:
Furthermore additional EXIF data can be shown textually under the thumbnail.
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:
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.
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.
Crop Text Flow is a comfortable way of splitting a text flow that uses several text layers.
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.
If you run PhotoLine on a computer with more than one processor core, PhotoLine will utilize these additional cores.
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.
This new vector tool allows to create and edit new vector graphics in a single step.
Create Multipage Document allows to combine all open pictures to a single document. Each picture will be on a separate page.
PhotoLine is now able to load and save DDS-files. DDS-files are mainly used by computer games.
PhotoLine can now get and set the background image of the desktop.
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.
In cooperation with the users and beta testers of PhotoLine the menu entries have been reordered.
Docked dialog can now be minimized.
