Transparency - Image Degradation

[andrewglavin]

Hello. I recently purchased Orphalese and absolutely love it. The only thing that's disappointing me is that I have a few circular decks that I use frequently and the transparency feature degrades the image quality significantly. Is this a known bug, or am I doing something wrong? I've tried using PNG with the background transparent, PNG with the background as a color, and JPG. The transparency feature works perfectly at removing the background and giving me a nice crisp circular card, but the image is degraded regardless of which image type I use.

Anyone know how to solve this?

[WebWeaver]

It's not something I've noticed before, but I haven't used a round deck in a while. I'll do a test and see if I notice it.

[WebWeaver]

I do see what you're talking about, I'm going to put together some png's and see if it works better.

[andrewglavin]

Thank you. I'm not a Tarot reader (at least, not primarily or professionally), but I do use Tarot and other symbolic cards in my work as a Jungian Coach. This application is actually something I've been searching for for a long time! I think there is a whole market out there of folks like me who are not Tarot readers but who do work that this would be really useful for. I know many coaches and therapists who work virtually and utilize various types of image-based card decks with their clients and would love an alternative to having a camera setup to display their physical desktop.

That said - a lot of the cards that we work with are not rectangular, so this issue is a significant one for us.

[Programmer]

Hi Andrew,

It's been a long time since I used a non-rectangular deck but I just tried it and I see what you mean about the image quality. I programmed that feature about twenty years ago, and I know that at the time there wasn't any appreciable difference. I think what has happened is in the intervening time everything is graphically much better so the difference really notices now. I will revisit how those transparent regions are generated in the hope that there is some better technique I can use now, but I don't have any definite idea about that.

[WebWeaver]

Yeah with what I worked on this weekend I couldn't find any work around. What I'm wondering is now that png is a usable images type and they are not jpg maybe just use the actual transparency from the image and not make the program do the work. It would just be a image with transparency and no "added" background" which should just show what isn't transparent.
You can see the one on the left looks fine, but has a background added.

[andrewglavin]

Yes - when I use a png with a transparent background and the transparency feature OFF, the software seems to fill in the transparent portion with that off-white color.

orphalese.png (124.08 KiB) Viewed 5 times

[WebWeaver]

I changed the background to match that color, and then it looks like it's a circle. So that is one option.

Options > CurrentDeck : check Apply custom Background options for Current Deck
Click on Colour and then Define Custom Colors and change it to match the background.

You'll need the hsl color number to do it.

There is a color picker in Windows Power Tools or I use Pixie (http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php)