Long time passed since our last Graphics Mill 4.5 release. All this time Graphics Mill team was working over new version of the product.
Unfortunately the new version is late for about a month but it is not wasted time. The team spent this time to refactor the code, complete the implementation of several important features and fix some problems. We hope that new Graphics Mill 5.0 is the exact imaging software our customers were waiting for and it will meet their expectations. It is high time to tell what our new Graphics Mill 5.0 is.
Now Graphics Mill supports x64 platform. It is long-awaited feature for our customers. Now you should not compile your application in backward compatibility mode and run it using WOW64. Especially it is important for the guys who develop web-based applications and host them on 64-bit version of IIS. Before there was no option to use Graphics Mill in such kind of services except to switch IIS to 32-bit mode. It means that all web applications on the server had to be running in 32-bit mode.
It is not a secret that modern computers have multi-core processors. And software vendors tend to develop software that able to utilize these hardware resources. Especially it is important for imaging software because this class of operations requires a lot of computing resources. We did the first step in this direction. Now Graphics Mill supports multi-core calculations for resize and interpolation algorithms. And you need to do nothing to start to support multi-core platforms in your application with Graphics Mill. It analyzes the platform during start-up of application and does calculations in the most effective way.
We did some work to improve text rendering support in Graphics Mill 4.5. Upcoming Graphics Mill 5.0 will make the step in this direction too. New Graphics Mill can render formatted text now. It means that you can mark your text up with special XML-like syntax. It will allow you to render portions of multi-line text with different justification, font and color settings. This feature will provide the customers who develop pre-print solutions with flexible text-rendering tool.
Now Graphics Mill supports extra channels for TIFF format. We know that ordinary image formats support well-defined set of channels. For example, if we have RGB JPEG image we know that it contains 3 channels: red, green and blue. But according to TIFF specification this format can contain unlimited amount of channels in addition to basic ones. And these extra channels are used to store some specific color information. And Graphics Mill is able to handle them now.
Now Graphics Mill supports Adobe color management engine. Now you are able to switch color management engine between lCMS and Adobe CMM. It is important for those customers who care about quality of color management in their software.
Red Eye Removal transformation moved to Graphics Mill assembly. Now it is not add-on and you do not need to pay additional money to use this functionality in your software. Now it is included to Graphics Mill license.
Also the upcoming Graphics Mill 5.0 contains a lot of minor improvements and bug fixes. We hope you will like new version.