nXtRender Image Editor
The nXtRender Image Editor is a powerful stand-alone utility which can edit native image files (.nXtImage) produced by any of the nXtRender platforms. These native files retain all of the information gathered during rendering. Launch the Editor from the Start menu's nXtRender folder.
Using the Editor, you can:
- Adjust the tone operator settings
- Change the intensity of any lighting channel
- Add special, image-based, effects such as Haze or Depth Blur
- Save a tone-mapped image in a popular format such as .jpg or .png
- Save the luminance information to an HDR format
- View and save additional masked channels (alpha, distance, material) for use in advanced compositing
- Save a Piranesi(c) file format (*.epx) which can be used to create non photo-realistic rendering
- Save the Lighting Settings used to generate this rendering. These Lighting Settings can then be used to generate more renderings.
After saving your rendering results as an .nXtImage, use the File->Open... menu to load the image into the editor.
As you move your cursor over the image, the status bar displays the following information about each pixel:
- The pixel coordinate, measured from the lower left corner
- The resulting color and alpha in RGBA format of the pixel after tone-mapping
- The actual luminance value stored in each pixel as RGB and single channel Y. This is the direct result of the lighting calculation. If accurate lighting information was used to produce the rendering, these values will have units of candelas/m^2.
- The distance of each pixel from the viewer in meters. Negative values indicate a background pixel.
- The name of the material used to render the pixel.
nXtImage files contain three additional channels which can be used as masks for advanced compositing in most bitmap editors. These channels carry alpha (transparency), distance, and material information for each pixel, encoded in a gray-scale image. Each channel can be viewed and saved to a .png file.
Use the View pulldown to view each mask channel. Use the File->Save Mask option to save a mask channel to a .png image.
Additional notes:
- The Alpha channel can be included with a tone-mapped image by selecting a file format w/ Alpha when saving a tone-mapped image.
- Distance and Materials channels are not anti-aliased and may show some hard-edged artifacts. Adding a small amount of Gaussian blur to a mask before using it may help soften these edges.
- The Materials channel will only uniquely encode 255 different materials. If your drawing contains more materials than that, some mask colors will repeat.