Working with the thumbs pane

The thumbs pane provides a handful of thumbnail images depicting the major colours in the image, as detected by tintii. Each thumbnail shows a greyscale version of the image overlaid by a cloud marking the colour and area assoiated with that thumbnail.

Beneath the thumbnails are two buttons:

Add iconAdd a colour. The colour detection algorithm is rerun looking for one more colour than previously.
Remove iconRemove a colour. The colour detection algorithm is rerun looking for one less colour than previously.

If there are more colours than can fit in the window, scrollbars will appear, allowing access to all colours. Up to 16 colours can be displayed.

Note that it is not possible to instruct tintii which colour to add or remove. These buttons simply control the number of colours for which to search. The underlying colour detection algorithm decides which are the major colours of the image.

Tip:One of the first things worth doing when working with a new image is to set the number of colours appropriately. If tintii is not distinguishing between the colours that are important to you, use the Add button to add additional colours. If one or more colours are very similar, use the Remove button to reduce the number of colours, and so simplify your adjustments.

Simple operation

The simplest way of working with the thumbs pane is to simply click on the thumbnail images to select and deselect them. Areas of the image associated with a selected thumbnail will be shown in colour in the preview pane, while those associated with a deselected thumbnail will be shown in grey. Previous versions of tintii only supported this simple mode of operation, useful for basic selective colour effects.

Advanced operation

The thumbs pane provides three sliders for each thumbnail to make further adjustments to the image beyond the simple operation described above. In order from top to bottom these adjust the:

  1. Hue of pixels, from -180 degrees at the left, to no change at the centre, to +180 degrees at the right.

  2. Saturation of pixels, from completely grey at the left, to no change at the centre, to completely saturated at the right.

  3. Lightness of pixels, from dark at the left, to no change at the centre, to light at the right.

Beneath each slider is a gradient indicating the approximate affect of the slider according to its position.

If the Hardness slider on the postprocessing pane is all the way to the right, each pixel in the image is affected only by the sliders of the thumbnail to which it most closely matches in colour. If the Hardness slider is set otherwise, each pixel is affected by all thumbnails, according to how closely it matches the colour associated with each.

If the Saturation slider for a thumbnail is all the way to the left, the Hue slider becomes disabled, as it has no effect on the image in this state. Likewise, if the Lightness slider for a thumbnail is all the way to the left, both the Hue and Saturation sliders become disabled, as they have no effect on the image in this state.

Tip:Incremental changes to the sliders in combination with adjustments in the postprocessing pane, particularly Decay and Edge, will allow you to best control the effect.