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Previews - A desktop application for Image creation, preparation, decoration and printout.

Previews supported 5 specific work steps.

Acquire - Photos can be scanned directly into the application or loaded from disk. Photoshop like tools (filters, paint-brush tools, clone tools, eraser tools, cropping, resizing, rotating, magic-wand, masking) enabled users to clean up the images.

Section: Vector tools and masking tools enabled users to define groups of paintable-regions and non paintable regions. Each group can be associated with a specific set of colours to decorate that group of regions with.

Tuning: Allowed users to apply and save specific colour / hue adjustments to each decoratable region.

Decorate: Users could decorate and (colour) print the decorated images. Colour schemes can be saved with each image for later re-call. Named colour-scheme libraries can be created to maximise scheming efficiency.

3D: 3D Studio-Max models can be imported, viewed and manipulated - this feature was developed to support Design Studio's 3d capabilities.

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Previews was built with Visual C++ (6) / MFC. A custom (MFC) UI library was developed to support dockable persistent tool-bars, tabbed dialog boxes , etc.

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Photoshop-like paint tools: All paint tools generated strokes with anti-aliased (soft) edges.

Undo / Redo system used by the paint tools was very memory efficient, using keeping track of actions with memory-mapped tiles, tracking only the changed parts of the image.

Masking could be "painted" with paint tools, and / or by using a "magic wand" tool - the magic wand tool worked far better than we expected

Decorate module provided sophisticated colour management to enhance print-out colour colour accuracy.

 

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Scott Ritchie - the pixelshifter extraordinaire

Siamak Aghi and Igor Fenster - a great team, an even greater pair of Quake Players