Image Optimizer

The Image Editing window is divided into five process areas. At the bottom is a list of all the images in your report - maps, photos, exhibits, etc. - except the for the Sketch images which are WMF or EMF files and are already in a optimized state. You can scroll through the list. Just click on the image you want to modify. The highlighted image is the active image in the editor. No changes to the image will be transferred to the report until you click the Save button located in the upper right which is our first process area to cover.

Use the Save As button to save the active image (and any changes to it) to a file. You can save the image in seven different formats: JPG, PCX, TIF, BMP, EPS, PNG, GIF. Image editing is a sequential process meaning that if you lighten or darken an image, change it color depth and then resize it, you may not be able to get back to the original. But in this Image Editor, you can. Use the Restore button to get back to the original.

Viewing the Image 

The active image is viewed either as "Fit to Frame" or in actual size. To clearly see the effect of the changes you make, view the image in "actual size". You will have to scroll, but it will give you a pixel to pixel representation of the changes to the image.

Cropping an Image

The first step (if needed) is cropping the image. If you need to crop the image to get just the house and not a lot of trees, this is the first thing to do. This is where you use the cropping tool. Click the Crop Image button and move the cursor to the image. The cursor will become a "+" or crosshair cursor. Click and drag the mouse to create the cropping area. When you release the mouse, only the image within the cropped area will remain. If you made a mistake, click the Restore button. Note the checkbox "Keep Aspect Ratio When Cropping" next to the Crop image button. When this checkbox is checked, the cropped area will maintain the same ratio (height to width) as the original image. This is good for minimizing distortion. If you want to do "free" cropping, make sure the checkbox is unchecked.    

Rotating, Flipping and Darkening and Lightening an Image

The next process area you want to deal with when editing an image is this one. Rotate or Flip the image as necessary. Usually maps require a rotation or flip to get them oriented properly. Next lighten or darken the image as necessary. You can use the Track Bar indicator with the mouse or you can type in the value you want. Be sure to press the Tab or Enter key after typing in a value so the editor knows to process the new value. The values range from -100 (Darkest) to +100 (Lightest). When in this process area, if you want to get back to the original enter a value of "0" and press Enter.

Changing the Image's Color Depth

The third process area to move to is the image color or bit depth. Generally you will not modify the depth of the image. Note that the default selection is "Do Not Change". The color depth refers to the number of bits used to represent a single pixel in the image. For "true color" this is 24 bits; for black and white it is 1 bit. Changing color depth from 24-bit to 8-bit color will drastically alter the quality, but not reduce the image size significantly after compression. This is why we recommend leaving the image color or pixel depth unaltered. Also going from a 1-bit black and white to 24-bit color will not change the black and whiteness of the image, but dramatically increase the file size. So you generally do not want to go from less bits to more bits. But do experiment with it and check the results. You can click on the different color depth options to see what the resulting color will be like. For maps, which do not have much color, changing the pixel depth can result in smaller image sizes. If you change the color depth and then check the optimization (see below), you will have to use the Restore button to get back to the original color depth.

Optimizing Image File Sizes

The final stop in editing an image is the optimization step. There are two items that affect image size, one is the compression ratio which affects the quality; and the actual size of the image, its dimensions, (height and width). Some images do not exactly fit the cell they are displayed in, so optimizing for cell size can dramatically reduce the image size and your file size.

Image Quality: Your options are High, Medium and Low. We recommend a Medium setting (default is High) because it gives a good balance between good compression and good quality. This is the current setting in ClickFORMS when it compresses images pasted in from the Clipboard. A setting of Low is still acceptable and will reduce the image size even further.

Experiment: Change the quality settings and click on Optimize to see the resulting image size.

Image Size Optimization: As we mentioned above, this option will resize the image to the current cell size and can dramatically reduce the image size. Note that on black and white images, optimizing the dimensions may reduce the quality. Experiment: Check and Uncheck the Optimize Image Size option and then click on the Optimize button to see the resulting image size.

Optimize All: When you press this button, the Image Editor will optimize all the images in the report at the specified Image Quality and Image Size setting. When it is complete, a dialog similar to the one below will be displayed. If you click Yes, these changes will be saved to the report and cannot be undone. If you click No, all the changes will be undone, and you can either try another setting or optimize the images individually.

Note that as you individually optimize images, you can still use the Optimize All option. Only the un-optimized images will be optimized. Optimized images will be indicated by the word "Optimized" in their column heading, if you just modified the image without optimizing, the word "Modified" will be displayed in the heading. Images that have been modified or optimized individually will not be altered during the Optimize All procedure.

To Save any modifications or optimization of the image you have to click on the Save button. Until you do this, you can undo any changes. So to save the changes to the report, click the Save button.

Lastly, when you close the report, you will be seeing a new dialog. It will be similar to the one below. This is a notification that your report contains images that are larger than a preference-set image size. If you click ok, the Image Editor will be started so you can optimize the sizes. If you click No, the report will close as normal.

You set the image size threshold in the application preferences. This setting is located under the Edit menu in Preferences for the Application, under the Saving tab. You can have ClickFORMS check for images sizes (or not, by un-checking the checkbox) and you can set the threshold image size that you would like to be notified about as shown in the image of the dialog below.