image viewer improvements

[zardoz]

Hi

after working with 3ds max and vray at work, I think lw's image viewer could have a few changes that could be helpful while we render with F9

One would be to keep in memory the last render (with an option to deactivate it).

Another would be a render history (I know we have one or two third party plugins for this).

Then the Limited Render...in vray frame buffer we can have the last render and keep rendering limited regions and these limited regions stay over the last render, this way we can keep changing the image by fixing the areas that need to be fixed and in the end we have the final complete render. In lw we can render limited regions but in the end to have the final render we have to render the whole thing again.

another good thing would be sliding handles to compare two renders. In the history list we could choose two renders and have horizontal/vertical sliding handes to compare the two. These handles would be next to the render and not a slider like we have now that you have to open the image control panel to access it.

for now this would be nice.

thanks

[evenflcw]

Mind if I join in?

I agree with all requests. This is long overdue. The current Image Viewer is in many respects a toy, not a professional tool!

Your two last request I would summarize as a request to integrate the Image Controls into the main panel, implementing selection and blending/overlaying multiple images, and rearranging images in the image list. Yes please!

And taking another note from Image Controls. Ditch the popup for listing images and just use a listbox. Popups are workable for short static lists, not long dynamic lists. Popups are slow to use, give poor overview and does not allow multiselection nor rearranging, which could be useful in a number of cases.

I wouldn't mind having the MetaData panel integrated aswell. Or better, make the image listbox a spreadsheet of sorts were we can choose what values we are interested in to make it easier to compare values. Flipping back and forth to compare rendertimes gets old fast.

[dwburman]

I'll add a bit in here as well...

I'd like the ability to add image filters to the rendered output like we can in the Image Editor with loaded images.

[Skonk]

Miss-read sorry.

[Pavlov]

+1

[xchrisx]

Personally I dont mind using the PageUp and PageDown keys to switch between images rather than using a pulldown, or if we had a slider. But I agree with the other ideas.