Windows Imaging Applications

Image Viewer Control

Most imaging applications need to display images. Graphics Mill for .NET provides powerful image viewer, thumbnail list, printing manager, and several auxilary controls which have the following key features:

• Rubber-band rectangular selection which can be either free-hand, or have fixed proportions. You can "shade" the portion of the image outside of the selection. It is useful when you are using selection for cropping.

  

• Zoom:
  • Manual zooming (by mouse wheel or modifying appropriate property of the control);
  • Automatic zooming including such modes as "fit to page" (fit entire image in the control), "fit to width" (fit the image in the control width), etc;
  • Several quality modes for zoom in/out display. Supports scale-to-gray resize technique for bitone images (makes such images look smooth and prevents the text from being unreadable);
• Correct displaying of semi-transparent images (with alpha-channel).
• Color management can be applied when the image is displayed.
• The actual physical size of images (in device-independent units as inches) is handled properly. It is especially important for images that have different horizontal and vertical resolution, for example fax images.
• A special navigator control can be associated with the image viewer. Navigator controls specify behavior of the mouse events at the viewer - pan, zoom in/out, zoom in the selected rectangle. Custom behavior can be specified;

Thumbnail List Control

Another handy control shipped with Graphics Mill for .NET a thumbnail list view. This control implements a lot of features, including:

• Four view modes:
  • Thumbnails;
  • Icons;
  • Detailed list;
  • Simple list.
• Ability to add/remove list items dynamically.
• Implementation of list items based on file system, including:
  • Files;
  • Folders;
  • Drives;
  • Special file system objects like My Computer, My Documents, etc.
  • Local network objects;
  • Removeable media such as Flash readers, digital cameras, etc.
• Ability to implement your own kinds of list items, e.g. images stored in database, or in memory.
• Activation ("opening") of an item with a mouse click or keyboard.
• Item sorting using different criterias.
• Item arrangement (including automatic).
• Multiple selection.
• Checkboxes for each item.
• Ability to derermine whether an item is in one of three states - selected, checked, or focused.
• Editable labels for each item.
• Drag-n-drop support.
• Asynchronous loading of thumbnails and other list item data.
• Ability to specify the work area of the control and this way specify how new items should be added (e.g. the thumbnail list can grow vertically or horizontally).
• Customizable appearance (including thumbnail size, distance between thumbnails, etc).
• Customizable list of columns in the detailed list.

Printing Control

Graphics Mill for .NET also provides a control which simplifies printing. It has the following features:

• Printing of multipage TIFF files;
• Printing of a collection of images:
  • Single image on each page;
  • Multiple images on each page;
• Optimization of multiple images layout on a page;
• Automatic printed image physical size and position handling:
  • Auto resizing;
  • Auto cropping;
  • Auto centering;
  • Proper handling of portrait/landscape orientation of the image;
• Footer and header captions;
• Memory-friendly implementation;
• Integration with standard .NET print dialog;
• Demo application with source code is included.

Multi-layer Image Control

Whenever you need a control which allows to work with a composite image (e.g. several photos inside a postcard template, or vector image which consists of different objects like rectangles, ellipses, lines, etc), Graphics Mill for .NET is helpful here as well. It includes the multi-layer image control with the following features:

• Multiple layers.
• Each layer can contain multiple objects (in terms of this control, these objects are called v-objects).
• V-objects of the following types are supported:
  • Bitmap image
  • Rectangle
  • Ellipse
  • Line
  • Polyline
  • Freehand
  • Multiline text
• Custom v-objects can be easily implemented.
• Appearance for v-objects can be modified in run-time (for example, outline color, fill color, font settings, etc).
• V-objects can be transformed by a user (using a mouse - by dragging the object or one of its control points). The following actions are supported:
  • Move
  • Resize (proportionally or with free aspect ratio)
  • Rotate
  • Skew
  • Specify text block bounds (for text v-object)
• Custom actions can be implemented for custom objects.
• Each of aforementioned actions can be disabled if necessary.
• Undo and redo operations support.
• Z-order of v-objects and/or layers can be easily changed.
• Multiple v-object can be united into groups (by a mouse or programmatically). Manipulations on entire group can be carried out at once.
• The content of the multi-layer control can be rendered into a bitmap.
• Each layer can be easily hidden (without removing its v-objects).
• All v-objects inside a layer can be easily locked (i.e. the user will not be able to modify any of v-objects of a specific layer).
• The content of the control can be serialized, say, into a file, and then restored from a file.

Powerful Demo Applications

Graphics Mill for .NET is shipped with powerful demo applications that can be used as a perfect starter kit. Here you can find a lot of code samples. It also includes a number of ready-to-use dialogs for all the effects.

The following demo applications are available:

• Image editor.
• Color management demo application.
• TIFF viewer.

  

• EXIF and IPTC data viewer.
• Image database demo application.

All demo applications source code is available both in VB.NET and C#.

Source Code Available!

The source code for the Windows controls is available upon purchase. The code is written on C#.

Note, the source code for the core class library is sold separately.