WebImage: Image Editing

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Q: Why is it that even though I select a section of my image and move it or cut it, it's still there?
A: Unlike WebImage 1.72, when you select part of an image in WebImage 2.0, it makes a copy of the selection which sort of "floats" above the original image. You can then drop this section any time by clicking the right mouse button or clicking on another part of the image. If you need to blank out part of an image there are a couple of ways to do it. One is to copy a white section from elsewhere on an image, or from a newly created white image, and drop it on the current image where you want to erase. The second is to make a selection, select the color adjust tool, turn the brightness all the way up to pure white or down to pure black, then drop the selection.

Q: Why is it that sometimes I go to move an area, it will resize it, even though my cursor is the move cursor.?
A: WebImage currently has a small bug where the action of the cursor does not change exactly at the boundary of the selection. A simple way around this is to simply undo and try again. We are currently working on a fix.

Q: Why can't I select a None option under Buttonize?
A: None is actually above the color Black in the list. To select it, you'll need to move the cursor onto the list, then drag it back up towards the box. The colors will scroll down and the word None will appear.

Q: Why does WebImage crash whenever I resize an image and try to save it?
Q: Why does WebImage crash whenever I emboss an image and try to save it?
Q: Why does WebImage crash whenever I buttonize an image and try to save it?
A: There was a bug in WebImage versions 2.0 that caused the program to crash if an image with transparency was modified then saved. This bug has been fixed in version 2.1.

Q: My image is too dark/light in certain parts. What can I do?
A: There are a couple of ways to adjust an image's brightness, each of which is accessed via the Color Adjust Dialog. The simplest control is the brightness control. Adjusting the brightness adjusts each pixel in the image the same amount. Thus, the entire image will appear darker or lighter depending on the selection. The second way to adjust the brightness is by adjusting the gamma. Gamma works similarly to brightness except that the pixels are adjusted based on how dark or light they already are. That is, by increasing the gamma, the darker areas will become much lighter, where the lighter areas will become only slightly lighter. This is a good adjustment when some parts of an image are too bright or dark, but the rest of the image looks normal. A third way is to use the Equalize filter on the image. This spreads the brightness of the colors over the whole spectrum of brightness. If your image is too bright it will make it a little darker and vice versa. Use WebImage's Preview function to test each setting until you find one that works for you.

Q: How can I reduce the size of my image?
A: One good way is to reduce the number of colors in the image. Usual color levels are millions, 256, 16 and monochrome. An image can have fewer colors, but it will still take up as much space as the next highest color limit. So, there's no sense reducing a Bitmap to 32 colors, because it will still act as if it were a 256 color image. The only differences are GIF and PNG which use only as many bits as necessary to store color information. That is, if you have 32 colors, it will use five bits but 33 will use six bits or 64 colors. (The number of colors increases by a power of two.) In any case, often you can cut the image size dramatically without losing significant image quality simply by reducing colors. WebImage has especially strong color reducing and dithering algorithms just for this purpose.

Q: How can I get rid of white space around my image?
A: Select the part of the image you want to keep and select Crop from the Image menu. This will keep the selection and crop the garbage.

Q: Why can I not paste one picture next to another in the same image?
A: When you paste and drop the selection outside of the image, it gets cut off. If it's all outside the image, it all disappears. The only way to do this is to check both image sizes using File Information. Then create a new image and define the image size to be as big as the two images together. Then paste each image into the new image and save it.

Q: I changed the selection and dropped it. Then I picked up a new selection, but I realized I made a mistake with the first one. I did undo, but it didn't work. Why not?
A: Once you've picked up the new image, you've set undo to undo that action. Since WebImage's undo is only one action deep, the action before that cannot be undone.

Q: If I reduce my image to 16 colors, then make it a little bigger, why does it show that it's back up to millions of colors?
A: When you resize an image, it alters the image with a stretching algorithm. This algorithm operates in the full range of millions of colors (or 256 grays). You will have to reduce the colors a second time. However, it would be better to resize the image first, then reduce the colors, in order to better preserve the quality of the image.

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