General Tips

There are many ways to organize your workflow, but here is one method that works.

1) Store all you photographs in one folder hierarchy, and make this your default folder (see Set Default Folder). Within this folder, arrange image files in sub-folders, one for each photo shoot. Include the location and date in each folder name. For a multi-day photo shoot, make sub-sub-folders for each day.

2) When you take a set of photographs, create a new sub-folder in the default folder and copy the images from the memory card to the folder. If you shoot both RAW and JPEG files, you can store them in separate sub-folders of the new folder if you wish. Also create another sub-folder of the new folder called Final (or something similar) where you will place the best images. Always copy all the images from the memory card to your hard drive before editing them since saved scripts will otherwise try to re-open the image from the memory card instead of the hard drive, and you will need to manually locate the original files in order to rebuild the script later. Finally, erase the memory card so it will be ready for the next shoot and put it back into your camera.

3) If you are working with RAW files, you need to use a separate raw program to process the images you want to work on and export them as 16-bit TIFF files. There are many programs available that can do this, some commercial and some free.

The most important things to do in the raw converter are: exposure adjustment to recover highlight and shadow detail, correction of lens distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting (if available), and possibly noise reduction for high ISO images. Export the images from the raw converter as 16-bit TIFF files back into the same folder as the raw files. Some RAW converters let you call Picture Window directly (see Integrating with other applications).

4) Open the JPEG or processed RAW files you choose to work on in Picture Window, do your editing, and, if you like the results, save the processed images in the Final sub-folder as 16-bit TIFF files, with a script included. Don't delete the original JPEG or RAW files for any image you work on as this will make it impossible to recreate your final image from the originals at a later time or to go back and change the way you processed it.

5) Later, if you want to revise a processed image and preserve a record of your changes, use the following procedure:

Open the script file you previously saved along with the image file you want to work on. This re-opens the original JPEG or processed RAW image file and re-applies all the editing steps you made to create the final image. Next, add to or modify the editing steps as necessary to make the changes you want, and then save the image with a script. You can save the image with a new version number, or you can save it over a previous version. Save as a new version if you want to keep the old version around. Overwrite an existing version if you want to discard it and replace it with the latest version. Overwriting the image file will overwrite the associated script file as well.

6) Back up your main image folder regularly and also back up My Documents\Picture Window Pro regularly as this folder contains your settings files.

Specialized operations are usually best performed by specialized software. The following programs work well with Picture Window:

Since the cost of memory has declined sharply in the last decade, Picture Window Pro 8 has been designed to target newer computers with lots of RAM and multiple processing cores. If you are working with large image files and have an image tree with lots of images, the total amount of memory required can add up quickly. If you don't have enough physical memory on your computer to hold the Windows operating system, all the programs that are running and all the masks and images in the image tree, you can configure your computer to use virtual memory by allocating space on one or more of your hard drives. This generally works OK but performance can get very slow if there is a lot of disk swapping, so adding more memory if you can is always preferable. Your only other recourse if you keep running low on memory is to keep the image tree small by saving intermediate results, closing all the images and opening the saved files to start with a new tree.

When selecting an image within a transformation dialog box by clicking on an Image Picker Control, if you have lots of images, it can be hard to find one you want.

While the image menu is displayed, another way to pick an image is to simply click on its thumbnail in the Image Browser. If the image you click on is in the image menu, it will be selected.

Enter -- Simulates clicking the OK button in the currently open transformation dialog box, if any

Esc -- Simulates clicking the Cancel button in the currently open transformation dialog box, if any

Ctrl-B -- Cycle the border color (the color displayed behind the images in the main image area) through four options: preferences, black, gray and white

Ctrl-D -- Cycle the display among Image Browser Only, Main Image Area Only, and Both

Ctrl-F -- Display the current image full-screen -- press any key or click the mouse button to return to normal display

Ctrl-R -- Reload the last used settings for the currently open transformation dialog box, if any

Ctrl-Shift Click -- Toggle selection of an image and all the ones below it on the current branch

Shift Click -- Select all the images between the current image and the one you Shift-click on, assuming they are on the same branch

Pretty much anywhere you can enter a number, you can enter an expression instead. For example, when using the Add Border transformation and entering border widths, you can either type a number such as 0.5 or an expression such as (1/2 + 0.125)/3.5. Expressions may include spaces and parentheses and can be constructed using any of the following operators and functions. Normal operator precedence is observed (e.g. multiplication is performed before addition). Angles for the trigonometric functions are in degrees.

x+y	addition
x-y	subtraction
x*y	multiplication
-x	negation
x/y	division
x^y	exponentiation
not i	logical complement (integer only)
i and j	logical and (integer only)
i or j	logical or (integer only)
i xor j	logical xor (integer only)
i << j	left shift (integer only)
i >> j	signed right shift (integer only)
abs(x)	absolute value
sqrt(x)	square root
log(x)	log base 10
ln(x)	log base e
pi	pi
sin(x)	sine
cos(x)	cosine
tan(x)	tangent
atan2(y,x)	arc-tangent (4 quadrant)
atan(x)	arc-tangent (2 quadrant)
asin(x)	arc-sine
acos(x)	arc-cosine
exp(x)	exponential
mod(x,y)	modulus
e	e
hypot(x,y)	hypotenuse
int(x)	integer value

Depending on the current locale, the comma used to separate arguments may need to be replaced with a semicolon. For example, when comma is being use as a decimal point, then hypot(x,y) needs to be entered as hypot(x;y).

Sliders are maintained internally to a resolution of one part in 10,000. While this resolution exceeds what can be displayed on a monitor, you can make micro-adjustments to sliders by holding down the Shift key while you drag the slider left or right. For double sliders, click either above or below the line to adjust the white or black slider.

If you hold down the Ctrl key and click on a slider, it bumps the current slider position by 4 pixels left or right depending on whether you click to the left or right of the current postion. If you hold down both Ctrl and Shift, the position is adjusting by 1 pixel instead.

You can temporarily reset an amount control by shift-clicking on its white mask square. This resets the amount to zero for as long as you hold down the mouse button and restores its previous value when you release the mouse button. This is a handy technique to temporarily toggle a transformation on and off so you can observe what effect it is having.

If a tool, transformation of mask dialog box gets in the way of working on the current image, you can temporarily shrink it down to a small rectangle in the lower left corner of the main window by clicking the minimize icon (the one that looks like a horizontal line) in its title bar.

To restore the original size and location of a minimized dialog box, click on

icon in the minimized window. Depending on the resolution of your monitor, the minimized dialog may or may not include a caption.