Option to enable/disable filtering in viewer

Help & Support
1

Hi guys,

I'm waiting since weeks for a time when there are less posts here, but that doesn't seem to happen, so I'm just posting my suggestions now.

They are all related to the image viewer. Currently I still need to use another image viewer too, which is IrfanView at the moment. It's just because of some (probably minor) details, that I miss in the Dopus viewer. All the suggestions are kind of standard in other viewers by the way, so XNView and IfanView does have all these basics included, so I don't ask for anything extraordinary.

I know you guys want each suggestion in a single thread, so I'm staring with suggestion #1:

#1) Suggestion image viewer enhancement: Option to enable/disable filtering:

Filtering is great for photos and images, but I'm doing a lot of GUI stuff and very often have to zoom into a screenshot to verify a position on pixel basis. In that case, filtering is very counterproductive and it would be a big help to easily recognize each pixel.

It would also be great if this can enabled/disabled with a button, not via preference menu.

2

Are you talking about this option in Irfanview?

3ccd0c577876730d3b060abb39a2818f6f2c6c48.png590×576 23.6 KB

3

A tool like Microsoft's Zoom It is very useful for checking UI stuff up-close, without any filtering. It works with actual windows as well as pictures of them, and I use it all the time. I just tap Ctrl+1 (or similar) whenever I want to zoom in and check pixel-level details in any program.

(Only downside is it goes a bit crazy if you have multiple monitors at different DPI scalings. High DPI is fine, but mixed DPI is broken in it. But the same is somewhat true of Windows itself, so I avoid mixed DPI anyway.)

4

I think that resample option (on and off) is something that is interested. Maybe if you made that improvement over image scaling (I hope is on "to do" list), you can also add turn off smoothing/resampling option.

5

@Ric:

yes, that's exactly the option I was talking about. In IrfanView there is also a similar option in the dropdown menu for even faster access:

248f726330ac22daaa4f2758c66614be033abe83.png868×599 25.5 KB

Sorry for the german screenshot.

@Leo:

Yes, I'm aware there are many third party tools and currently I'm using these because Dopus lacks of the requested functionality. However, I would prefer to do those standard jobs with Dopus too, just because it's more convenient. I can use the new image marking feature or the ability just to switch between the selected images and of course many more cool Dopus features, that I can't use with the third party tools. The Dopus viewer already supports 95% of what I need for my daily tasks, but because of those tiny details I still need an external viewer too. I already don't need XNView any longer as an image browser, because the Dopus listers have everything I need and comes in a much better approach. With the suggested details implemented, the viewer would be lifted on a similar level which would be a great plus in my opinion.

Many thanks for all considerations,
Kind regards,
Skeeve

6

Skeeve, thank you so much for showing me that option in the View menu. I never noticed it before. And, like you, I am frustrated by "fuzzy" pixels when enlarged to select or just look at specific pixels.

I do wish an easy toggle for the smoothing of pixels when zooming was available in the DOpus viewer. It would be nice to get away from Irfanview and use just DOpus. We are so close, though, aren't we?

7

No, we're not close, unfortunatelly. I wrote about extra functions in image conversion for example and I get answer that DO is not powerfull imageviewer, so it never will be as good as IrfanView. Maybe it's right - not every special option is needed and DO should not be Photoshop replacement. But what starts to be annoying is when in other posts (not just my own) I saw similar arguments against improvement FTP functions (parallel transfers, SFTP speed etc), copying files (partially fixed - I hope it is not the final fix), improving movies playback, making backups etc.

I don't say that everything should be made and fixed "right now", but at least "we will try" will be good start.

Everything going better every version, but I think "so close" is not right description here. :slight_smile:

8

I understand what you're saying, peterb, but the three requests Skeeve has made are really small steps that make a lot of sense for a viewer. Some of the features in Irfanview that aren't in DOpus are things I don't want in DOpus. Why? Because as more features are added, the program gets larger and larger and will introduce a much greater possibility of bugs. I want DOpus to remain fast and easy.

A long-time friend (a former co-worker) of mine said she always liked to "pick her battles." She found it frustrating when people asked for 10 items and got none of them, only to find out later that if they had asked for the top 2 items, they probably would have gotten them. So, she was careful to ask for what was truly most important and of greatest use to our team.

If Jon and Leo are pushed into a corner by asking them to make DOpus' Viewer behave like Irfanview, they can just say, "So, use Irfanview."

Can we, please, ask them to add a small number of features to DOpus' Viewer that will make it much more useful for many more people?

9

I understand your point of view and it seems to be correct. But... If we found 10 bugs, we should report just one or two? :slight_smile: Of course some of them may be important, others not so much, but still - more suggestions will make Opus better in long term.

10

Re image filtering, we are somewhat at the mercy of the API we are currently using, at least if we want things to remain performant.

In the future we may re-write the viewer from the ground up in a new API (one that can take advantage of GPU acceleration would be nice), and if that happens we'll keep in mind the desire for different image scaling/filtering options.

(For anyone who really wants them right now, there are two viewer plugin APIs, one which allows you to supply bitmaps to the internal viewer and another which allows you to replace the entire viewer with a completely custom UI using any rendering and scaling technology you like, as long as it can boil down to an embedded HWND.)

11

[quote="DesertDwarf"]I understand what you're saying, peterb, but the three requests Skeeve has made are really small steps that make a lot of sense for a viewer. Some of the features in Irfanview that aren't in DOpus are things I don't want in DOpus. Why? Because as more features are added, the program gets larger and larger and will introduce a much greater possibility of bugs. I want DOpus to remain fast and easy.

...

If Jon and Leo are pushed into a corner by asking them to make DOpus' Viewer behave like Irfanview, they can just say, "So, use Irfanview."

Can we, please, ask them to add a small number of features to DOpus' Viewer that will make it much more useful for many more people?[/quote]

Absolutely agree with you Ric. The Dopus viewer is already pretty good and lacks only of a few handy functions, that's at least my opinion. Other people might want to see more extensions, but I understand when Jon & Leo don't want to go down the road to make a Mini-Photo-Shop :slight_smile: I think that would be the wrong way, because all these fine programs exist and can be used. (Although I support Peters suggestion for an improved filtering quality.)

To me, the suggestions are just kind of standard for a graphics viewer, at least for the more advanced ones. You'll find the same in XNView, in IrfanView, etc. And some of them are hopefully not too time consuming to implement, although each feature can be tricky :slight_smile:

On the other hand I'm totally aware of how many suggestions and technical requests are posted here every day, so I know not everything can be implemented. (By the way I'm already filtering my posts, hehe. Could post much more, but I try to focus on bugs and things I think are most important.) And of course not only my voice counts, so if other users need these functions too, please drop a note. It might help to convince Leo and Jon.

Thanks everyone,
Kind regards,
Skeeve

12

[quote="leo"]Re image filtering, we are somewhat at the mercy of the API we are currently using, at least if we want things to remain performant.

In the future we may re-write the viewer from the ground up in a new API (one that can take advantage of GPU acceleration would be nice), and if that happens we'll keep in mind the desire for different image scaling/filtering options.
[/quote]

Hi Leo,

Thanks for the info. Well, it's by no means urgent but already happy that you consider to improve this some day.

Many thanks,
Kind regards,
Skeeve

13

Do you know if there is any hardware vendor independent API like that upcoming?

Would a vendor dependent (e.g. NVIDIA based) solution be considered?

14

There is Direct2D on newer versions of Windows. It'd involve a complete re-write of the viewer, though, which would take time away from other things we could do, but could also be nice once done.

15

+1 for an option to disable oversampling for zoomed in and generic image viewing (zoomed out).
For me it's a speed thing rather than being able to differentiate between pixels as good as possible.

I know, maybe one day.. got that! o)

16

I'm not sure there is much speed difference between bilinear and nearest neighbour on modern graphics hardware (assuming the graphics driver uses the GPU; although I doubt it makes much difference even if the CPU is used, the calculations are so simple). The inefficiencies probably come from elsewhere.

In fact, I am pretty sure we had an option for this back in the Windows 95/98 era and we removed it around the Windows XP era because it literally made no different in terms of speed by then.

17

I'm also not sure! o)
But I think there is a difference (speed improvement) when disabling the oversampling in JPGViewer or FastRawViewer. I don't know how these tools are implemented though, I assume they already make use of some GPU routines, but I can't tell for sure.

Anyway, I'm always looking for things that speed up image viewing. I upgraded to SSD recently with little hopes and yes, still not there where I think a relatively modern computer should be when viewing JPGs - speed wise.

1 Like
18

I'd like to see this too. Mostly for viewing icons I'm making.