I was over at Bruce Carson's house a few weeks ago, and he told me he was considering working on a Windows booklet like his famous Golden Rules of Modem booklet, and he told me he wanted to walk me through some of the things he was going to discuss, because he had a question to ask me. Since he was going to walk me through the examples, I asked him to hold the demonstration for just a minute, until we could go online to the internet to capture a copy of a program called LView, because I wanted to have it available while he showed me what he was going to discuss. The reason I wanted to have it available, is because when one wants to illustrate how some thing works in windows, it is nice to have LView running but minimized while one goes through the steps, and at critical points press Print Screen, which puts a copy of the screen in the clipboard, Alt Tab to LView, press edit, paste, and the entire screen is in the LView window. You can then use the crop feature in LView to eliminate all of the image except the part you want to illustrate, and if necessary use the Resize feature to enlarge the image to better illustrate what you are trying to show.

We got LView, and Bruce began walking me through what he plans to write about, and he explained that the thing he wanted to ask me was how can he capture images of the screen, to use as graphical illustrations in his booklet. In other words, great minds work along the same paths, and Bruce and I both realized at the same time that he needed a way to capture images for his booklet, and LView is the ideal way to do that.

LView Pro is one of the easiest image viewers and editors

available for download from either Tucows (http://www.tucows.com) or Stroud (http://www.stroud.com) or from its own web site (http://world.std.com/~mmedia/lviewp.html). Useful utilities include screen capture, transparent background (for WWW gifs), ability to open multiple files, diagnostic information, quick print, slideshow, image filtering, and many, many image enhancing attributes. Supported image types include GIF, JPEG, BMP, PCX, TIFF, PBM, TGA, DIB, and several more. Both interlaced GIF 87a and 89a image types are supported. On-line help for LView Pro is extensive, including the JPEG FAQ document available on the 'net. While not the fastest image viewer or the most complete image editor, LView remains one of the best all-around programs for viewing and manipulating images, and at $30 (32-bit version or commercial use of the 16-bit version) or for free (16- bit non-commercial use), it's definitely worth the price.

Last month I received two pictures of kids at the Bethesda Boys Ranch in Mounds using the computers we donated to them from our Refurbishing Project, and one of them was too dark to publish as is, but I just loaded it into LVIEW, clicked on Retouch, and Contrast Enhancement, and lightened the shadows, and got an image acceptable for publication. Retouching options include Gamma Correction, Color Balance, Contrast Enhancement, YCbCr Adjustment, Interactive RGB, Exp Enhancement, Log Enhancement, SineH Enhancement, GrayScale, Negative, Palette Entry, Color Depth, and Image Filters.

A few of those are fairly obvious, but some of them are a bit hard to understand, but LVIEW has a very extensive on-line help, and checking it we see that YCbCr Adjust allows for Y, Cb and Cr adjustment for all pixels in the imag is utilized for TV color broadcast in Europe. Y is known as the "luminance" com on pixel color, but on pixel luminosity. Cb and Cr are know as the "chrominance" together define the color for each pixel. Roughly speaking, Cb and Cr represent Blue and Red in relation to Green. As in the Retouch/HSV Adjust command, YCbCr editing may be useful to correct ima scanned (in terms of color balance). While the Y component may be used to darken the commands Retouch/Log Enhance, Retouch/Exp Enhance, Retouch/SineH Enhance and Retouch/Gamma Correction will probably yield better results for that purpose.

Exp Enhance is used to set the desired level of Exponential enhancement, which brightens dark pixels in the image, while simultaneously reducing overall image contrast. It may not be adequate for images in general, but comes in handy for highly contrasted images.

Log Enhance is used to specify the desired level of Logarithmic enhancement for all pixels in the image, which brightens dark pixels, while keeping already bright ones from becoming too bright. It may not be adequate for images in general, but often produces better results than Retouch/Gamma Correction for brightening dark images.

SineH Enhance is used to specify the desired level of Hyperbolic Sine enhancement for all pixels in the image, which brightens dark pixels, while simultaneously increasing overall image contrast. It may not be adequate for images in general, but comes in handy for poorly contrasted images with dark areas.

HSV Adjust is used to edit the Hue, Saturation and Value components for all pixels in the image. Hue is a circular value denoting the "dominant" color tendency (among Red, Green and Blue). Saturation is the amount of color (0 saturation produces a grayscale image), Value is a measure of lightness, tendency to white. For Saturation and Value, scrolling to positive values will increase the component. For Hue, the scrolling extremes will take you back to Hue == 0. HSV editing may be useful to reduce/increase the amount of color in certain images, by varying the Saturation control. The Value control may be used to brighten/darken an image, although the Retouch/Log Enhance, Retouch/Exp Enhance, Retouch/SineH Enhance and Retouch/Gamma Correction will probably do a better job. Hue is useful to adjust some images that were originally scanned with excess of yellow or green (due to bad scanner setup).

All of that is admittedly a bit hard to understand, and we may need to ask Paula Sanders to translate it for us, but the nice thing about LView is that you don't need to understand what the tools are doing, you can manipulate the image and see if it improves or hurts the image. If it makes it worse, just click Cancel, and the image is back the way it used to be. If it is better, then save the improved image.

LView is certainly not the only program of its kind. There are also program available for download like Paint Shop Pro, Thumbs Plus, VuePrint, Graphics Workshop, HyperSnap, ACDSee, GraphX Viewer, PolyView for Windows 95, JasCapture, and Fractal Viewer, all of which are reviewed in an article available on Stroud (http://cws.iworld.com/32image-reviews.html)

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