LabVIEW's 256-Color VI Icon Colormap?

[MartinD]

QUOTE(rolfk @ Jan 27 2007, 02:26 PM)

Yes! The icon resource format used by LabVIEW originates from the original Macintosh OS icons. They have no explicite color table but instead use the application color table initialized by an application at startup and LabVIEW simply adopted that idea and ported it to all platforms. Changing that now would be a bit of a difficulty although I guess they could add a new million colors icon format to the internal resource table.

But that would be a lot of work since quite some low level routines would have to be updated and retested (where I think the LabVIEW developers would rather not use that resource format anymore if they could), the icon editor would have to be seriously overhauled, quite a bit of bitmap handling would have to be adapted to support that new icon format and last but not least the color picker tool itself would need to be taken care of too.

And I have some feeling that there are quite a lot of other projects on the todo list that have a higher priority and would require less work to do than this and with a lot less risk to break existing code.

I do think that the original color picker from older LabVIEW versions which had the actual colors in the 6*6*6 matrix was better for the icon format but they had to update it to support the color box which could take millions of colors.

Rolf Kalbermatter

Hi Guys,

This is a litte of the subject but:

I have an 8 bit png file that I'm loading onto a picture control. I want to use one of the 256 color pickers (that I can create easy enough thanks to your posts), to draw on the image. My problem is when I read the file using the labview VIs and look at the color map it only contains the colors in the image file and not all those on the color picker, so what can I do? If say I want to draw with red and it does not exist in the files colormap I can't just add it to the color map as there is no room left (256 color limit), I can not replace one of the colors in the colormap because it may be required else where in the image. Am I missing something? I have tried using the labview standard 8 bit colour map for the image instead of that read from the file info and guess what, the image goes all the wrong colors! Anyone know what I shouild be doing?

-Martin

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE(MartinD @ Apr 4 2007, 06:56 PM)

Hi Guys,

This is a litte of the subject but:

I have an 8 bit png file that I'm loading onto a picture control. I want to use one of the 256 color pickers (that I can create easy enough thanks to your posts), to draw on the image. My problem is when I read the file using the labview VIs and look at the color map it only contains the colors in the image file and not all those on the color picker, so what can I do? If say I want to draw with red and it does not exist in the files colormap I can't just add it to the color map as there is no room left (256 color limit), I can not replace one of the colors in the colormap because it may be required else where in the image. Am I missing something? I have tried using the labview standard 8 bit colour map for the image instead of that read from the file info and guess what, the image goes all the wrong colors! Anyone know what I shouild be doing?

-Martin

This is a standard problem when dealing with paletted bitmaps. The easiest solution is to translate the paletted bitmap into a non-paletted one (24bits for instance), do the edits you want to do and then if you want to go back to a paletted one use a color reduction algorithme. Doing this all in LabVIEW is quite a lot of work and number crunching and I would recommend to use applications that where actually created to do just this sort of thing. Adobe Photoshop is one of them, Paintshop Pro can certainly do it too, and if you want to go for free Gimp is an incredible package. But expect to learn a few things an get acquinted with each of those applications in order to do any meaningful thing with them.

But trying to do it in LabVIEW is certainly an even much more labour intense task.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Mark Balla]

QUOTE(martin@aerodynamics @ Jan 26 2007, 05:08 AM)

Customized Color Box....

http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=4779

(will be implemented into my Icon editor soon...

Actually the transparency is made by "overlaying" all 3 Icons (not just BW) ("256" Colors, 16 Colors, and BW)...

So if on the border of the overlayed Icon is white, then will this part showed as transparent....

In the default LabVIEW ICON Editor, it is not possible to make a complete transparent Vi.

But if you set the ICON programatically, you can make invisible Vi's...

(the invisible Vi's ar only shown in the Vi- Hirarchie, so you can wind up somebody )

Martin

Can you post the vi or control you used to generate this picture. I am also working on updating the color picker on my icon editor.