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Image Composer was designed for experimentation. You can apply effects easily, view the results, and then modify or undo those effects to achieve the result you seek. You enjoy the following advantages when you work with Image Composer:

• Industry-standard file formats.

You can use Image Composer to work with a wide variety of popular file formats, including TIFF (.tif), CompuServe GIF (.gif), Portable Network Graphics (.png), Targa (.tga), JPEG (.jpg), Adobe Photoshop (.psd), and more. For scanned images, Image Composer supports the TWAIN interface.

• Simplified interface.

In addition to standard menus and toolbars, Image Composer functions are divided into groups and placed on tool palettes. For example, all paint tools are grouped on the Paint palette.

• Popular plug-in sets.

Image Composer includes the Impressionist plug-in with dozens of effects and filters, and supports the use of popular plug-ins that adhere to the Adobe Photoshop Plug-In Interface standard.

• Hundreds of sample images.

Browse the images in the Sample Sprites Catalog by clicking Sample Sprites Catalog on the Help menu and insert them into your composition. These images include scenes of nature, animals, plants, textures, buttons, and more.

• Wizards for creating buttons and for saving files

Creating buttons takes just a few mouse clicks with the Button Wizard. Choose from a variety of shapes, colors, and textures. Save compositions for Web sites by using the Save for the Web wizard.

What is a sprite?

A sprite is an image object with shape and transparency. A composition includes every sprite that you have created or modified, regardless of whether you can see it on workspace.

Each time you insert an existing image into a composition, regardless of its source, that image automatically becomes a sprite. When you create a new image with Microsoft Image Composer, that new image is created as a sprite. You can move sprites anywhere in a composition and arrange them as you choose.

When you click a sprite, you see that it is surrounded by a bounding box. The bounding box provides reference points for various effects and tools. The following figure shows a sprite and its bounding box. The sprite contains shape, the ball, and transparency, the area between the ball and the bounding box. In this figure, the eight ball itself is set for 100% opacity (completely opaque); the clear area outside the ball extending to the bounding box is set for 0% opacity (completely transparent).

The bounding box has handles in each corner and on each line. Use these handles to resize a sprite, rotate it, and more.

As you use a tool or apply an effect, its action is applied to the sprite, or sprites, you currently have selected. The bounding box handles indicate which group of tools is currently selected. The following figure shows examples of different bounding boxes, as they relate to a specific tool or effect.

Crop/Extend bounding box, Paint bounding box, and Color Tuning bounding box

Sprites can be completely independent, combined in temporary selection sets, or combined in permanent groups. You can apply various tools, effects, and filters to either single sprites or temporary selection sets of sprites but not to groups.

The position of a sprite in a composition is determined by where you place it on the workspace and when you added that sprite to the composition. Each new sprite is positioned on a stack of sprites. As each new sprite becomes part of a composition, it is placed on top of the stack.

Ordering sprites

A composition has three dimensions: height, width, and depth. The depth is represented by the stack, also referred to as the z-order. When a new sprite is added to a composition, whether by inserting an existing image or by creating a new image, that sprite is placed on top of the stack.

You can move sprites anywhere in the workspace. As you do so, they remain in their order in the stack until you specifically change the order.

The placement of sprites in the composition space does not necessarily reflect their order in the stack. Two sprites can be next to each other in a composition and yet be at opposite ends of the stack. The following figure shows the relationship of sprites in a stack. The numbers in the sprites show their position in the stack.

The toolbox and tool palettes

By using tools in the toolbox, you can create your own style, or emulate an historic style. For example, you can use the paint tools to emulate the bright colors and strong brush strokes of a nineteenth century master like Cezanne, or create a monochrome wash drawing in the suiboku-ga style of the fourteenth century sumi-e master Sesshu Toyo.

Tool palettes are out of view until you activate them by clicking a tool on the toolbox or by selecting a tool from the Tools menu. To hide or display a tool palette, press F2, or click Toggle Palette View on the View menu. You can dock a tool palette by using the Dock Tool Palette command on the View menu to return a tool palette to the lower left corner of the workspace. You undock a tool palette by moving it. You also can move a tool palette anywhere in Image Composer and its position is retained until you move it.

In Image Composer, tools palettes are organized by related tasks. For example, the Effects tool palette contains dozens of tools for sketching, painting, and more. You activate a tool palette by clicking a tool on the toolbox. The following list describes each tool palette.

• The Arrange tool palette contains tools to arrange, resize, rotate, flip, and change the order of sprites in the stack. Tools to crop or extend the bounding box of a sprite are also included, as are three interactive warp tools.

• The Cutout tool palette contains tools to create masks, shadows, and any other cutouts in a variety of shapes. In addition, you can use the Select Color Region tool to create a new sprite of a single color from an existing sprite or to extract the texture of a sprite.

• The Text tool palette contains tools to create text sprites using the set of scaleable fonts that are installed on your computer.
• The Shapes tool palette contains tools to create new sprites in geometric shapes or in freeform shapes you create with the Curve or Polygon tool.
• The Paint tool palette contains tools to apply various paint effects, such as spraying a color with an airbrush or painting a color with a brush you choose from dozens of sizes and shapes.
• The Effects tool palette contains tools to add effects to sprites, including arts and crafts, color enhancement, outlines, photographic, and other effects.
• The Texture Transfer tool palette contains tools to transfer the content of pixels in one sprite to another.
• The Color Tuning tool palette contains tools for making adjustments to the contrast, brightness, hue, and saturation of colors, and for making adjustments to highlights and shadows, and dynamic range.
• The Color Picker dialog box provides access to true color palettes and to custom reduced-color palettes. You activate the Color Picker by clicking the Color Swatch. You also can right-click to activate a more compact color picker. In addition, you can drag a color from the main color swatch to color swatches on the tool palettes, such as those for shadow color and edge color in the Outlines category on the Effects palette, or from the color chips on the tool palettes to the main Color Swatch.