Short tutorial on How to use "Color control" component to load images

This tutorial is copied from this Thread I have already done
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Short tutorial on How to use "Color control" component to load images

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Using the "Image" component you can load ONLY one image or photo into the FF and all the "image" components you put in the filter will be making reference to the SAME source image loaded through the "Load image" menu on FF.

BUT there is also another way to load MORE images and photos into the filter and that is using the "Color control" that you can see here ---> http://filterforge.com/more/help/Comp...ntrol.html

If you add a "color control" component the default configuration is as shown below



And this way this ONLY allows to have colors input, BUT if you change the "External Images" from "Not Allowed" To "Allowed" it will LET you upload your own images apart from the one you have already loaded using the "Image" component


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You can see a good example on how the color control is used to load additional images by opening and editing inside the FF Filter Editor this very good filter made by Morgantao that uses many of them.

Image Ball Pit
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ANOTHER OPTION

If you will NOT use any kind of color input into the filter, there is a better option to change the "Allowed" to "Allowed as override" and then this is converted into something very similar to the original "Image" component.

This works overriding the original "Image" component that you need to connect for this to work, and any loaded image will override the original source image loaded by FF menu.

When you first select "Allowed by override" some errors will happen as shown below



To be able to solve this errors is very easy, you only need to add to the "color control" component as "Default source" the "Image" component that is going to be overriden, AND load any kind of image that you want so there is one source and is not empty.

Here below is how should look after adding the Image component and loading the image

Thanks for the comment

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Morgantao wrote: Now if someone could just explain the "Image Placement" window... I haven't really tried it, but at least with the default FF preview images it does absolutely NOTHING

YES; Sorry, I forgot to explain about the "image placement", I will do it.

I have tried much and have seen how it works when I have used the excellent filter Origami Butterfly from Carl. It includes a very good offset controls to move the images inside the shapes, BUT also can be done (in much worse way) using the "image placement" of the color control.

IS TRUE that the default FF preview images does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, BUT this is because they are SQUARE images, ANY square image that you load using the "color control" will fill the whole "image placement" so you willnot have any control over it.

As far as I know the "image placement" is only useful and can be used when you have IRREGULAR AND NON-SQUARE images or photos.

Yeah, I thought so, but didn't find time to check it out. Thanks for clarifying this.

BE aware that Transparent images will fit accordingly to the real size of the file dimension and not the cut out of the image inside

I also found a way to MOVE a square image and be able to have image placement control too thanks to Butterfly Origami filter made by Carl

Look for it in this thread here --> http://filterforge.com/forum/read.php?FID=9&TID=9408

As it appears in the FF Help

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Alpha Channel Determines how the alpha channel for the image or color will be set. Available options are Disabled, Enabled for Colors, Enabled for Images, Enabled Everywhere

So if you load an image that has a transparent background and you do not want that the transparent background (alpha channel) shows in Filter Forge, you can disable it

Here is the default version with alpha channel active

This happens because you can have a non square image with a square image inside, and then as the rest of the background is transparent is taken the image as a square one, but when disabling the alpha channel, it is converted to a non square image.

To cover the above transparent gaps you will need to use the "Image Placement" as explained above to fill this gaps

You can´t only enlarge the black part to fill all, as now all is one image, so if your image gets distorted with any of the available options in the placement options, the only to fill this with out distortion is to:

resize the image externally (in Photoshop or any other graphic software) so that only shows the black part (cut the transparent part)

or fill the gaps with black, save the image and load it back

To see why this has been removed, please see the text from the beta FF 4.0 page

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A Fly in the Ointment Implementing groups and instancing came at a cost: for the first time in history, we decided to retract a feature from Filter Forge. That feature is the ability to use external images as overrides, an obscure option in the Color and Grayscale Control components. To be more specific, we removed this option from Filter Forge 4.0 and, retroactively, from 3.0, and updated the two (yes, only two) filters in the Filter Library that used it. We decided to remove this feature because it interfered with our decision to adapt Control Components for their second role, group inputs. Keeping both image overrides and dual-role Control Components was too complex for us to implement and maintain.

HI there
Thanks for your sharing.It's really important for me.I have googled a code for image loading:
using RasterEdge.Imaging.Basic.Core;
using RasterEdge.Imaging.Basic.Codec;
using RasterEdge.Imaging.Basic;

namespace RE__Test
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string fileName = "c:/Sample.png";

REImage reImage = REFile.OpenImageFile(fileName);

REFile.SaveImageFile(reImage, "c:/reimage.png", new PNGEncoder());
}
But it display nothing after i entering it.What's wrong with my code.Thanks a lot.

I put this again if anyone would be intereseted in it and may find it useful

Also want to discover what is the problem with this color control, placement and the Scale component tthat sometimes gives weird or not expected results, will tell more when I know exactly what happens

Thanks Lexart, glad that you found it and is useful for you