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The toolbar on the left consists of three areas: switches, drawing tools, and actions. Some of the tools (circle, freehand, magic brush, blur)have a popup settings window, which can be found by holding down the left mouse button over the appropriate toolbar button. |
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Switch between double and single layer mode. In double layer mode, the image is shown beneath the transparent overlay. All images are grabbed or loaded into the bottom layer. Drawing and MegaShape creation is done to the top layer. You cannot select an area of the image as a shape. In single layer mode, there is no image layer. Images can be loaded or grabbed directly into the overlay, and drawing is done directly onto this. Shapes are selected from this area. It is therefore possible to create a shape from an image, mask or texture. |
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Switch between constrain image (locked) or don't constrain (unlocked) image. When the image area is constrained, the size is fixed and all images are resized to this, regardless of where they came from. If you require shapes to appear in the same position on the pixi as they do in Viewer, constrain must be turned on. In the unlocked position all images will be loaded or grabbed with their original size and aspect ratio. |
One of the following drawing tools will be selected at any time. The selected tool is highlighted.
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Select mode allows you to select an area of the image. This is used to select only part of the shape or image, as well as to specify an area for use in plugins. By default (and when any other tool is in use) the whole area is selected. |
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Circle mode allows you to draw soft edge circles. The left mouse button draws a white circle, the middle mouse button draws a black circle. The circle tool has a popup window which allows you to adjust the softness of the last circle, as well as the aspect ratio and size of the last circle drawn. |
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Freehand mode allows you to draw freehand hard-edged shapes. The left mouse button draws in white and the middle mouse button draws in black (erase). This tool has a popup window which allows you to change the size of the brush. |
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Fill mode performs a bucket fill (in either white or black) of the area under the mouse. |
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Magic brush mode traces shapes from the image area underneath the overlay. This tool has a popup window which allows you to specify the threshold at which the tracing is done. |
The other buttons are actions that can be performed at any time.
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Blur. This softens the overlay area. A popup window is available which allows you to specify the size of the filter. |
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Undo. Undoes the last action. There is one level of undo. Pressing this button again without doing anything else will redo the action. |
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Recall. Recalls the shape from the current channel and event in the list back into the viewer. It can then be re-edited or downloaded to a different channel. |
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Grabs the current image from the video input into the image (or overlay) layer. This performs exactly the same function as the physical 'Grab' key. |
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Save. Saves the overlay as a shape in the "shapes" area of vault. |
A reset button can be found in the top right hand
corner of the Viewer. This clears the overlay area and resets the
shape. If a box has been selected (using Select), only that area will
be cleared. Press twice
to clear the whole image.
There is also a horizontal button area at the top of the viewer next to the reset button. This is mainly used for external plugins. By default, only two plugins are present, but more will be available as an optional extra for image restoration in the future.
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MegaShapes mode. When the image restoration plugins are available, there will be alternative modes and this may be turned off occasionally, but under normal MegaShapes operation this will always be selected. |
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Waveform. With future hardware updates attached, this will allow live data monitoring of the video input. |