It's here!

What's New in v9.2 - Here s the Short List

Interface beautification

• GDI+ rendering

• Anti-aliasing

• Optional flat or bulgy/gradient styles

• Hot tracking

• Unified color schemes

New tools

• New color picker

Interface improvements

• Combined title-bar and menu-bar for more screen space

• Quick shortcut to replay a brush stroke

• You can now Store an animation (and plenty more of them!)
  

General

• Spherize now anti-aliases around the sphere edges, not just the insides.

• Rewritten Europa filter no longer uses multiple undos

• More undo memory by default

• Smooth scaling is now on by default

Speed improvements

• Faster filmstrip on the brush manager

• Faster print panel

Installer improvements

• Wider system support

• Fewer causes to install as administrator.

Other: Bug fixes, removal of legacy code, internalization of plug-ins, and code maintenance.

• Saving an animated brush as an image sequence saved the first frame as the last file in the sequence.  Fixed.

• Some fixes when loading an AVI file into Animation, including the frame count being off by one. The loader/preview dialogue now properly displays the thumbnails of the first and last frame. 

• The brush manager and brush keyframer are now multithreaded.
  

• Fixed a bug in the znoise filter that corrupted the saved undo.
  
  
• The Shift filter now can reset or negate former parameters.  You can now exactly negate the effect of a former shift operation, for example to work on seamless images and then shift the image back to the original location.
  

Discover v9.2 - Read All About it in Past Newsletters

• coming soon -  Start here: http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/newsletter
  

 Videos & Tutorials

• coming soon - Start here: http://www.youtube.com/pdhowler
  

In More Detail: What's New or Improved in version 9.2 :

• We have roughly 100 additional filters that now allow animation directly, without going through the timeline.  (in addition to the ones that already allowed it)

• Re-timing or restoring a camera motion on the camera stabilization panel no longer crashes if a motion has not yet been recorded.

• The camera stabilizer now supports a dry run mode

• There's now a "subtract frames" animation filter that can be useful for detecting areas in animation where small motions are taking place, such as camera movement.

• Fixed a small screen refresh bug on the exposure sheet when setting a mouth shape.

• It is now possible to store an animation to memory or disc for later restoration, similar to

• current image/brush/selection store options.

• The "Cleanup" button has been removed from the timeline, as this option is now fully automatic, and the program is more thorough in general about cleaning up the temp folder.
  

•  thumbtacks (to pin down a floating window) are now slanted, because we wouldn't want to deviate from the standards, oh no, no, no!

• Fixed a quirk on the saturation filter.

• Fixed a bug when using the mosaic filter with an alpha selection.

• Fixed a bug with the Sunset filter not using the alpha selection when animating.

• Fixed a bug with the color matrix, aka, "adjust all" filter not working correctly with alpha selections.

• Tri-tone filter had a bug animating with an alpha selection.

• Moved "Average frames" from the utilities menu to the animation/frames menu.

• the Glowing edges and Plastic wrap filters did not support rendering into the selection.

• Apply paper did not allow papers to be changed when the filter was opened more than once.  Fixed.

• The following additional filters now have an "Animate..." option without having to go through the timeline
  

Levels
Color FX
woodcut
cross contour
transform
Gaussian blur
motion blur
Mystic Vision (GPU)
Zoom blur (GPU)
Chroma blur
Day for night
Blue enhance
Fog filter
Sepia
Power curve
Halftone
globe
Saturation
tint
Value only contrast
Value adjustment
Threshold
Posterize
hue/saturation/value
Adjust all
Mosaic
Quilt
graphics halftone
map to gradient
Negative
Invert value
Adjust color
Roll channels
Swap channels
Solarize
Color replacer
Simple blur
Box blur
Fisheye
Fisheye correction
Star filter
Digital Photo Enhance
Art sharpen
Gray emboss
Edge detect
Sobel edge detect
Color sobel edge detect
Maximum
Median
Minimum
MinMax
MaxMin
ABS
High pass
Gradient convolve
Convolution kernel
Adjustable median
Adjustable Maximum
Adjustable Minimum
Noise reduction
Value noise
Color noise
Jitter noise
Jitter displace
Jitter blur plus
znoise
Twirl
Color twirl displace
Sinoid
Slate
De-interlace
Reverse fields
Reduce flicker
Video lines
Legalize NTSC
Legalize Pal
TV pixels
Raster lines
Shift RGB
Non-photo blue removal
Waxify
Glowing edges
Plastic wrap
Apply paper
Blue screen
Green Screen
Color Key
Emboss by swap
Normal displace
Cloacking displace
All of the combine modes
 

• Installer improvements. You should not have to run the installer as administrator anymore under most conditions. There may be some rare exceptions to this. If you have trouble with the installation, check if you can temporarily disable UAC and/or the antivirus, if you suspect that may be the cause. Troubleshooting info
  

• Combined menu bar with permanent strip (the permanent part of the context strip, ie, zoom, interactive undo, etc) to conserve screen space.Eliminate system rendered menus to further unify color of GUI. This is particularly useful on laptops with small screens or low resolution.
  

• GUI makes better use of GDI+ for higher quality rendering. We think you will like the more modern look. It is also highly configurable with more styles: light on dark, raised look, flat look,...
  

• Reimplemented full screen mode now combines the menu bar and the titlebar for more usable screen space and less wasted space on the interface. This mode now works if the window is full screen or not. Fullscreen mode is now the default mode, however current users will not have their current settings overridden. It is highly suggested to switch to full screen mode now even if you only work in a window because it converses window space.

• Internal re-organization of controls and menus.

• Color pickers are now anti-aliased.

• Buttons now support hot tracking.

• Store Zbuffer on the 3d designer was broken since internalizing the store plugin in version 9(ish). fixed. You can use 3D Designer to render a scene, then store the generated depth information from the Zbuffer (from our 3D rendering pipeline) and use it for instance through the alpha channel to do adaptive blurring (with Bokeh bleu particularly) based on depth. For example, if you want to blur the background, farther details. Or also to change the hue by the distance and add a touch of blueish tint.
  

• Raw loader was broken in 9 series internalization.

• Installer changes, trying to eliminate Richtext ocx install errors. Some anti-virus block the richtext ocx control installation.

• Removed usage of richtext box on the about box. Some day may eliminate its usage.

• Installer changes. The program is now first run with the installers permissions. Previously the program might not have run due to not running with administrator permissions in order to self register in certain versions of Windows.

• Our custom gui tools can now use system rendering routines. Checkboxes and radio buttons are now included as part of the controls, which should allow the light on dark modes for checkboxes and radio buttons (we were calling the color change code in Windows, but the theme was overwriting it)

• Default undo memory has been increased to 90 megs from 64. Undo memory should be balanced for the type of work you do. If you work on animations, then undo memory is best kept at a minimum of what you need, say 64-80 megs. Allocated undo memory won't be available for other things such as animation frames. If you work on large photographic images regularly, you should increase your undo memory to the maximum.

• smooth scaling is now on by default. If you are on an old, very slow system, you might want to disable it. For most users, this is better enabled. Smooth scaling will smooth the viewed image as you zoom in. Sometimes you prefer not to let that happen, for example if you work on the detailed pixels and need to recognize each pixel even in the zoomed-in state of your view, without it blurring to the neighboring pixels around it.
  

• dragging the text tool / text box no longer produces screen refresh artifacts circia Windows 95.

• The flat shading option has been expanded to include all buttons, which can be either flat/no border, or raised border throughout the program.

• The Europa filter previously needed several steps to undo because it was based on a combination of other filters. This has been fixed. It also now has several parameters. This is a great starting point to explore creating new 3D landscapes with Puppy Ray and other filters.
  

• The brush keyframer could crash after closing and re-opening when re-timing an animation. Fixed

• We have a new color wheel in place of the old "wheel". We think this looks very slick.
  

• The Spherize filter now supports anti-aliasing around the edges of the sphere, where it formerly only anti-aliased the inside. Spherize is great for making planets you'll place into the background of your sci-fi scenes.
  

• The timeline no longer flashes being re-sized.

• The seamless filter no longer asks to replace the current "buffer" if the size doesn't actually need to change.

• the "hand" icon for moving the alpha channel on the context strip for alpha tools did not check if a button was actually pressed when allowing alpha to be moved, resulting in the alpha being moved if the mouse pointer Merely moved over the icon. Fixed.

• The brush keyframer may have crashed if scaled too small. Fixed.

• Clicking on "Non linear tolerance" in the color replacer could crash the program in some situations. Fixed.

• Applying Graphic Halftone to an animation had a serious bug. Fixed.

• Internalized the brush manager.

• Performance improvements to brush manager.

• Internalized the tunnel plugin. This filter (in Animated filters collection) works best with square images of 512x512. It is also a good idea in many cases to make it seamless before tunnelizing it.
  

• The gradient list might have crashed when moving the mouse over it on rare occasions. Fixed.

• the text on the vertical ruler slightly offset. Fixed.

• Our button control now supports proper ghosting (disabled) rendering. Formerly, it had no visible distinction from a non-disabled button.

• The following filters now have an "Animate..." option:
• Levels
• Color FX
• woodcut
• cross contour
• transform
• Gaussian blur
• Mystic Vision
• Chroma blur
• Day for night
• Blue enhance
• Fog filter

• Fixed a bug in the znoise filter that corrupted the saved undo.

• The shift filter now can reset or negate former parameters.  You can now exactly negate the effect of a former shift operation, for example to work on seamless images and then shift the image back to the original location.

• Re-timing or restoring a camera motion on the camera stabilization panel no longer crashes if a motion has not yet been recorded.

• The camera stabilizer now supports a dry run mode to test it without committing to it. (same idea as in the Motion Prediction Module)
  

• There's now a "subtract frames" animation filter that can be useful for detecting areas in animation where small motions are taking place, such as camera movement.

• fixed a small screen refresh bug on the Exposure sheet when setting a mouth shape.

• Ever wished you could temporarily store (stash) away the current animation and easily restore it later, without having to go through exporting it to a file such as AVI or DWA or image sequence? It is now possible to Store an animation to memory or to disc for later easy restoration by just clicking on the stored thumbnail image. This is similar to current storing the current image, storing and managing the current custom brush, or storing the current alpha selection mask.