According to the logs, there were 5700 hits to my website during the
last three days (the individual images of the galleries that have to be
downloaded with the html pages are counted) and a data-transfer volume
of 500 MB ensued. So there has been some interest by list members.
Locally I got positive feedback from our College of Fine Arts, where I
had conducted seminars in the past.
Concerning the problem of the crashes, I received a detailed commentary
off-list outlining possible causes or contingencies.
As I see it at present, the irregular crashes could be related to image
behavior with masks, meaning related to how the engine handles masked
images.
The last crash occured yesterday while I was online, which caused the
Windows system error dialog to react. The error message - as far as I
could understand it - pointed to an "exception" concerning the engine
and mentioned "images". I tried to get a copy of the error message and
was informed that an error file with a cryptic name would be found in
one of the temp folders. However, apparently because I did not forward
the error message to Microsoft, no such file was to be found afterwards.
Next time I will forward the message to Microsoft and see whether I can
get hold of the error file.
I will now list here a number of peculiarities I encountered while
working with images in Revolution, some of these peculiarities could
probably be assessed as features, others appear to be at least
"anomalies" or even bugs:
1. From the text of stack "More about Masks" of January, 2009,
<http://www.sanke.org/Software/MoreAboutMasksRev3.zip>
on the menu card accessed from the topright introduction button:
A final observation concerning the creation of masks inside Revolution
and using the "import snapshot" format:
If the resulting mask image is not first saved as an external file and
then imported again, meaning if it remains as freshly created inside a
stack or was just copied from another mask-producing stack, then this
mask image will have a different quality, which we might call a "pre-PNG".
Pre-PNGs behave somewhat differently than normal PNGs: You cannot
transfer its alphamask to the image-to-be-masked when the pre-PNG is
hidden, at least not several times with resizing. After you have
resized a pre-PNG during the masking process, you might find that it
is suddenly "empty", but it can be restored when you copy and paste it
(it then appears in its original size and shape).
A workaround to overcome this problem is to store the mask in a custom
property of its own and then to "initialize" the mask each time before
it is used in the calling script:
"put the CPimg of img "transition" into img "transition""
But of course you can easily convert a pre-PNG to a full PNG by saving
the image as an external file.
2. Sometimes when I apply "flip horizontal" to a masked image an
additional part of the image becomes transparent, which may be followed
by even more transparency when the image is flipped back, possibly
leaving only a smaller middle part opaque. I did not succeed in exactly
reproducing this behavior, like the crashes this happens quite
unexpectedly, except that I noticed that I had used an algorithm to
create a "diagonal mirror" of an image among the operations before the
additional transparency appeared.
3. If the mid-square of an image is turned by 90 degrees - as part to
create a special effect - (shifting the pixels by script) this results
in a semi-transparent overlay for the middle part when the width of the
image is odd, i.e. you see both the original middle part and the turned
middle part as if two image were put on top of each other with their
blendlevels set to 50.
4. Some operations cannot be performed on an image when the ink is set
to "notSrcCopy", e.g. replacing a color or color range by a specific
other color
5. Exporting a snapshot to an image with a blendlevel (e.g. set to 50)
leaves part of the former contents of the image intact, meaning you see
both the former picture of the image + the image exported with the
snapshot.--
Question is, are such anomalies in any way connected to the crashes I
experience with my Gradient Kaleidoscope tool? I have never encountered
such crashes when using the "Imagedata Toolkit", but there I did not
make use of masks.
Regards,
Wilhelm Sanke
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>
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