With the introduction of RGB math and HDR-mappable Transform components in Filter Forge 2.0, a problem became apparent – it is very difficult to debug and fine-tune complex filters without built-in debugging tools that can show RGB output of components as numbers. To remedy this, Filter Forge 2.0 introduces a Color Inspector that shows the exact RGB output values of any map component, right in the Filter Editor! The Color Inspector fully supports unlimited HDR colors and can show any value – huge or small, positive or negative. To use the Color Inspector, select the new eyedropper button above the preview – or simply hold Shift – and click anywhere in the preview area:
Precision Caveat
There is one fact you should be aware of when using the Color Inspector. While Filter Forge performs the majority of calculations in double-precision floating-point numbers, the final result is stored in a single-precision floating-point rendering cache – mostly to conserve memory and due to the fact that no HDR file format can store double-precision values. Since the Color Inspector pulls the RGB data from the rendered cache, it simply has no access to the original double-precision values, so it shows them truncated to single precision. If your calculations use extremely large or extremely small numbers, you may see infinities instead of ultra-large RGB values, or zeros instead of ultra-small ones. We can implement a double-precision rendering cache if there's a demand for that, so let us know if you need this!
