%ents; ]> Hauke Hildebrandt

hauke.hildebrandt@iup.uni-heidelberg.de

Sirtaj Singh Kang Developer Lauri Watts

vampyr@atconnex.net

Reviewer 2001 Hauke Hildebrandt &FDLNotice; 01/02/2001 1.00.00 &kview; is an image viewing program. It is small and fast and has some simple image processing commands. You can work with many different graphic file formats and convert your images to them. &kview; is not a fully-fledged image processor but it is sufficient for many of your everyday tasks (like making a nice new desktop background...). KDE kview kdegraphics image graphic viewer &kview; is an image viewer for the &kde; desktop. You can view graphics of many different formats such as &PostScript;, TIFF &etc; By saving your files in a different format than the original you can easily convert images to other graphics formats. In addition, &kview; provides some nice little features for doing simple image processing, like stretching/shrinking, rotation and filtering. You can tile your images directly onto the desktop as a background picture, or arrange them in a little slideshow. This chapter is a quick tour through many of &kview;'s functions to get you quickly going to work with this program. You will find a complete description of all available commands in later chapters. After you have started &kview; (using the panel menu, or typing kview at the command prompt) the &kview; main window shows up with an empty workspace: Starting &kview; A new &kview; application window. A fresh new &kview; window All those creative people like you and me are discouraged by an empty sheet, so let's quickly open a new image. However, first we change the way that &kview; resizes its main window and the image after loading a new one: Select Configure KView from the Settings menu. A dialog leaps up: Changing options The settings dialog. To resize or not to resize Select No Resize from the On Load group box. This means that neither the &kview; main window nor the image will be resized after loading. Now open Dasding.jpg which you find in the ./share/wallpapers subdirectory of your main &kde; path (possibly /opt/kde or /opt/kde2). Ahh - that's looking better! Image loaded The wallpaper loaded into &kview;. A beautiful image loaded... Let's make a new background wallpaper out of the loaded image. We only need the &kde; logo (the gear-wheel on the right), not the whole picture, so select the logo by drawing a box around it. Press the left mouse button, hold it down and move the mouse. A dashed box appears, marking your selection. Repeat this until you are happy with your choice. Then go on and cut the selected region from the image by choosing EditCrop from the menu bar or it's equivalent shortcut, CtrlC. Your workspace should now look like this: Image cropped An important selection Reduced to the essentials If you are not satisfied with the cutting you can always restore the image's original state with EditReset, or the shortcut CtrlR. We wanted to be creative, didn't we? &kview; provides some filter functions to manipulate images. They are (conveniently) placed in the Filter menu. Firstly, we will change the so-called gamma factor. This value affects mostly the mid-tones in the picture, leaving the brightest and darkest parts more or less untouched. Choose FilterIntensityGamma correct from the menu bar. A dialog box appears. Change the value to 0.4 and hit the OK button. The picture is somehwat darker now: Gamma corrected Gamma correction After the gamma correction For a little psychedelic touch we use the brightness function. Selecting Brightness again brings up a dialog. This time you can enter the new brightness expressed in percent relative to the original value (so 100 percent means initial value). Enter a value of 300.0300> and watch what happens: Brighter Brighter than ever &kde; brighter than ever before Finally, we blur the image a little with Filter Smooth. Apply this filter two or three times (or more often if you can't stop!). The smoothing filter reduces the contrast between neighboring pixels: Smoother Smoother than ever &kde; - smooth as silk Before we use our masterpiece as a desktop background we better save it. At the moment, our picture is a JPEG image, but for some reason we want to store it in the PNG format. Easy - just call FileSave As and enter a filename with the extension .png: Saving Saving the picture Saving and converting in one The great moment has finally come: Choose DesktopDesktop Tile and admire your incredibly artistic background: Background A new background KDE - wherever you look When you start &kview; you see the typical application layout: a workspace containing your documents (images in this case), a menubar that provides access to the various commands, a toolbar with shortcut buttons for some of them and a status bar at the bottom to display status messages. When you have the loaded an image into &kview;, there is also an additional context menu available which is diplayed by clicking your right mouse button over the image (you knew that already, didn't you?). Below, all menu entries are explained in the order= that they appear in the menubar. CtrlO File Open Opens a new image in &kview;. The size of the &kview; main window and the image after loading are determined by your settings. If you open several images, only the last one is shown, but all of them can be accessed using the image list. File Open Recent Displays a list of recently opened images. Selecting one from this list reopens the image. CtrlS File Save Save the current image. File Save As Saves the image under a different name. By choosing a new file format you can convert the image to a different graphics type. CtrlW File Close Closes the currently displayed image. Ctrl P File Print Prints the image. Ctrl N File New Window Creates a new (empty) application window. Ctrl X FileClose Window Closes the currently active window. If you have only one window open this effectively finishes your &kview; session. CtrlQ File Quit Quits &kview;. If you have several &kview; windows open, all of them are closed. Ctrl ShiftF Edit Fullscreen Mode This option maximizes the &kview; window and the currently shown image so you can have a closer look at it. Even the window decorations (titlebar etc) are temporarily removed. Selecting this option once again switches back to normal mode. C Edit Crop If you have selected any part of the image (by drawing a box around it using your mouse) you can cut off all the rest around it by using this option. Your image is effectively reduced to your selection. CtrlR Edit Reset Resets the image to its original state (right after opening it). View Zoom... Opens a dialog for editing the zoom factor. This value is given in percent and always refers to the initial size of the picture. Ctrl+ View Zoom In Enlarges the image by ten percent. Notice that this refers to the current size of the picture. Ctrl- View Zoom Out Reduces the image size by ten percent. Again this refers to the current size of the image. ] View Double size Doubles the current image size. [ View Half size Cuts the image size by half. As above, this refers to the current image size. M ViewMax size Maximizes the image size. The image is scaled to the window size. This action does not preserve the aspect ratio. A View Max/aspect Maximizes the image size. Again, the image is size is maximized, but this time keeping the aspect ratio constant. This menu offers commands for simple geometrical operations: rotation and reflection. ; Transform Rotate clockwise Rotates the image by 90=B0 in the clockwise direction. , Transform Rotate anti-clockwise Rotates the image by 90=B0 in the counter-clockwise direction. V Transform Flip vertical Flips the image along the vertical. Mathematically, this does a reflection along the image's horizontal center line. H Transform Flip horizontal Flips the image along the horizontal. Mathematically, this does a reflection along the image's vertical center line. Desktop Desktop Tile Tiles your image to the desktop background.. Desktop Desktop Max Wallpapers your image to the desktop. This scales the image to the desktop size, possibly changing its aspect ratio. Desktop Desktop Maxpect Wallpapers your image to the desktop. This scales the image to the desktop size, but keeps its aspect ratio constant. &kview; provides some functions for simple image processing: Images List... Displays a list of the currently loaded images. You can flip through the images by either double-clicking on them or using the Previous and Next buttons. Shuffle rearranges the images in a random order, Sort arranges them alphabetically. Pressing Start Slideshow will start the slideshow with the current settings for interval and looping. In addition, you can save and load your image list using the corresponding buttons. AltLeft Arrow Images Back Switches to the previous image in the list. AltRight Arrow Images Forward Switches to the next item in the list. S Images Slideshow On/Off Starts or stops the slideshow. &kview; provides some functions for simple image processing: Filter Intensity Brightness Changes the brightness of the image. Enter the new brightness in percent (with respect to the initial value). Filter Intensity Gamma Correct... Adjusts the gamma factor. Filter Greyscale Converts a color image to a greyscale image. Filter Smooth Smoothes the image by reducing the contrast between neighboring pixels. This menu provides options for configuring &kview;, changing its appearance, shortcuts and standard behavior. CtrlM Settings Show Menubar Toggles the menubar on/off. Settings Show Toolbar Toggles the toolbar on/off. Settings Show Statusbar Toggles the statusbar on/off. Settings Save settings Saves the current settings. Settings Configure Key Bindings... Opens a dialog for changing the key bindings. Using this option you can change the standard key shortcut for &kview;'s commands or create new ones. Settings Configure Toolbars... Opens a dialog for configuring the toolbar. You can add and remove toolbuttons for &kview;'s commands with this option. Settings Configure KView... Opens a dialog for changing some options and your keybindings: On Load This option determines if the window and/or the image will be resized after loading a new picture into &kview;. With Resize Window enabled, the &kview; window will be resized so that it snuggly fits around the loaded image. Notice that this can reduce the main window almost to a vertical arrangement of menu entries if you load a small button pixmap (you can resize the window afterwards in the usual way, of course). If your image is pretty large (in terms of pixels), sometimes the &kview; window is resized in such a way that the caption bar completely moves off your screen. Similarly, Resize Image resizes the image to fit into the &kview; workspace (keeping its aspect ratio intact). And with No Resize as your choice, both &kview; and your image keep their size. Slideshow Here you can change the parameters for the slideshow: the interval between the different slides, and if the show should continuously loop. F1 Help Contents Starts the KDE help system at the KView Handbook - you have done this before, haven't you? Help What's This? Gives a short description of the item you select. The cursor changes to some sort of help pointer. Just click on the thing you are not too familiar with and a description of it is shown. Help Report Bug Opens the KDE bug report dialog. If you have found a bug (and maybe know its cause and have already fixed it?) then send a bug report so the authors can deal with it. Help About KView Displays the version and the authors of KView. Help About KDE Displays the standard &kde; info window. &kview; can be started directly from a terminal like &konsole; or xterm. Several command line options are available. kview --help Lists the command line options (see below). kview --help-qt Shows the options specific to &Qt; (the GUI library that &kde; is based on). kview --help-kde Shows the &kde;-specific options. kview --help-all Displays all command line options. kview --author You want to send your warm wishes and euphoric cheers to someone? Here they are! kview -v, --version Displays the version number of &kview; (and that of &Qt;/&kde;). kview --license Shows under which licenses &kview; is being published. &kview; Program copyright 1997-2001 Sirtaj S. Kang taj@kde.org KParts integration by Simon Hausmann shaus@neuro2.med.uni-magdeburg.de Maintainer: Matthias Kretz kretz@kde.org Documentation copyright 2001 Hauke Hildebrandt hauke.hildebrandt@iup.uni-heidelberg.de &underFDL; &underGPL; &kview; is part of the &kde; project and can be found in the kdegraphics package. For more information on obtaining and installing &kde; please see http://www.kde.org. Since &kview; is part of the &kde; desktop you need a working &kde; installation to use it. However, some additional libraries are needed by &kview; to use the various graphics file formats. For example, to handle the PNG format &kview; needs the corresponding library libpng. &kview; uses the libraries that are registered by kdelibs/kimgio. Currently, libtiff, libpng and libjpeg are supported. &kdedocindex;