VizPaint2D's tools give you maximum freedom to manipulate paint, text, and images on canvases.
In developing VizPaint2D, we worked closely with Kodak, to ensure that your final images meet their quality specifications for color fidelity.
You can read and write images in a variety of formats, including Wavefront (.rla, .rlb, and texture files), Alias, Kodak Cineon, PostScript, Pixar, Quantel, Silicon Graphics, SoftImage, Targa, TDI, TIFF, and Vista. For a list of supported formats, see table 1 on page 355.
VizPaint2D provides a complete set of computerized paint tools. You can access these tools with either a mouse or a pen and pressure-sensitive tablet.
When choosing colors, you can:
If you make a mistake or want to restore your work, a single-step undo lets you back up one step in the paint process.
You can use VizPaint2D to touch up or enhance images from other 2D or 3D graphics systems, as well as images you have scanned or grabbed from print, film, or videotape.
Once in VizPaint2D, you can adjust the image's contrast, clear or color-correct portions of the image, zoom in for detail work, and restore portions of the images by using other images.
VizPaint2D includes tools for adding special effects-such as flip, fill, grade, offset, pattern, and reflect.
You can use it to create a background for an image, then display the background behind the image to preview the composited effect.
Five fonts let you annotate your images. You can adjust a font's size, kerning, and leading, give the text a color, and add drop shadows to create the effect you want.
VizPaint2D's paste-up tools let you combine images or parts of images in a single picture.
With the paste-up tools, you can cut out portions of images, then combine cut-outs and whole images. You control the size and position of each cut-out, either with the mouse or by entering keyboard values. You can save cut-outs to disk for future use.
A pattern tool lets you create a pattern from an image or cut-out, then paste the pattern as many times as needed to fill an area.
If you are working on a series of images, you can use the sequence tool to load the sequence so that all images are readily available. You can loop through the images one after another, or view one frame at a time for detailed inspection.
The sequence tool holds up to 30 frames at video resolution, so you can hand-paint entire sequences without the overhead of loading, painting, and saving one frame at a time.
Our unique layer tool lets you preview your compositing plans on-screen before actually modifying either layer. You can change a layer-select a different shade for the background, make the foreground more transparent, and so on-then immediately view the final, combined result.
The alpha (or matte) channel contains transparency information for each pixel in the image.
When a composition has multiple layers, the alpha channel controls which areas of the background show in the final piece.
By painting the alpha channel, you can change the matte without removing the red, green, and blue color channels.
With VizPaint2D's masking feature, you can block off portions of your images so that they are not affected when you paint other areas. You can paint a mask freehand, or you can generate a mask from an image's alpha, chrominance, or luminance values.
Once a mask is created, you can invert it so that the opposite areas of the image are protected. Masks can be saved to disk as separate .msk files for future use.