PixiePlus Users Guide: Section 2.1


Getting Started With The Pixie Image Editor

In addition to the browser, Pixie also features built-in, lightweight image editor for doing basic editing to your photos and images. It has both color adjustment and over 30 effects you can apply either to entire images or to selected regions of an image.

Editing an Image

To edit an image right-click on one in the browser and select the "Edit Image..." menu entry. Once the editor component is loaded you can open new images either by using the "Edit Image..." menu entry again from the browser or by using the "File" menu from the editor. If you need a new window, simply use the "New Window" button. This will create another editor window with whatever file your currently editing.

Editor Layout



The Pixie editor.

The image editor is pretty straightforward. You have a toolbar with several built-in effects on top, the image your editing in the middle, and a statusbar on the bottom. The statusbar has 4 items: the zoom level, the current cursor position, a modification indicator, and status text.

Zooming In and Out

Pixie can zoom up to 16x by increments of 2. This means you can zoom 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x, 10x, 12x, 14x, or 16x. To change the zoom level simply use the Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons. It is important to note that this is very different from changing the image size. Zooming doesn't change an image's size at all, it just changes how it looks in the editor. To change the size of the image itself see the next section.

Using the Mouse

You mainly use the mouse for making selections on the image. Using the left mouse button you can select a region of the image to apply effects to. The cursor position indicator will change to display the region's upper-left position and size and any effect you select will only be applied to the region, not the entire image. Double-clicking on the image will reset the selection.

You also can use the middle mouse button to display the color at the current cursor position in both decimal and hexdecimal (web format).


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