Problem adding picture format to Beyond Compare

[Milla]

I'm trying to add extra picture formats to Beyond Compare using NConvert (http://www.xnview.com/en/nconvert/) to convert them to PNG format.

The command I am using is:

nconvert -out png -o %t %s

I can see two files being created in the Temp directory, with names like BC34C72_1.tmp and BC34C73_1.tmp, but BC doesn't display the images and shows a "Conversion Error". If I manually compare the *.tmp files using Picture Compare, BC displays them correctly.

[Aaron]

Hi,

*_1.tmp is the Nconvert output, but our files are the original *.tmp (which, is size 0, correct?). These then detect as size 0 and fail.

You'll need to add -overwrite to replace the original tmp with the converted file, which then will open in BC3.

[Milla]

Thanks! It's now working

Converting to BMP seems marginally faster than PNG, so my command is now:

nconvert -overwrite -out bmp -o %t %s

[Aaron]

No problem.

You may be interested in helping us test the next release of our BC4 Beta (post-17905). It will have several large changes to the Picture Compare once it is released.

http://www.scootersoftware.com/beta.php

Depending on your formats, you may not need the conversion. We don't have a set date for when the next beta build will be available, but we're working on wrapping it up.

[Milla]

I downloaded the BC4 beta. The new picture comparison looks really good. The format I want to compare (DirectDraw Surface) is still not supported, but my custom File Format still works fine.

BC4 now seems to be displaying the alpha channel, but I can't find a way of switching it off?

[Zoë]

I'm actually expanding the alpha channel support right now. Do you just want to compare and display RGB?

[Milla]

I've attached two images comparing BC3 with BC4.

In BC3 you can see the images without the alpha channel, and the comparison image is completely black (the images are identical).



In BC4 the images are obscured by the alpha channel - maybe an option to toggle this on or off?

Also, the comparison image isn't showing as black in this case - is that correct?

[Zoë]

Can you email a copy of the .tga you're comparing to [email protected]? BC3 should be displaying the alpha channel with checkerboarding too, and I'm curious what changed.

As for the comparison image, that was an intentional change unrelated to the alpha channel, but I can see where the confusion comes from, and we'll take your feedback into account. The comparison now uses grayscale for the matching areas so that you can see the differences in the context of the rest of the image. In BC3 you could explicitly enable that mode in the Options dialog by changing the "Tolerance mode" settings from "Solid color" to "Gray scale", and in BC4 we've been trying to eliminate unnecessary options so we made that the default behavior.

[Zoë]

Nevermind about sending in the .tga. Decoding .tga is broken in the current v4 alpha, so it's coloring things incorrectly. We're doing a lot of work on the picture compare backend right now, and I'd forgotten that that was fixed.