Flatten image: Does this do anything useful for you?

This is the place for questions on using Impict, Help & Manual's integrated screenshot editor and enhancer.

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wpostma
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Joined: Wed Feb 03, 2010 3:16 pm

Flatten image: Does this do anything useful for you?

Unread post by wpostma »

The Flatten Objects menu item, in the objects menu, is confusing me.

Either it does not do what it says it does, or I completely misunderstand the feature.

Or rather, it is not intuitive how to make it do what it says it is there to do.

I have a capture of a region of the screen, I need to white out certain aspects so that only a certain non-rectangular region of the screen is there.

So I draw a white square over an area you want to blank out. However those little white square objects are in my way, so I want to flatten the image, hopefully making a flat bitmap to work with further. But flatten objects either it does not flatten it (get rid of the white rectangle object) or when it gets rid of it, it makes my rectangles transparent, and this undoes the whole reason why I drew the white rectangles in the first place.

Along with the lack of a true crop feature, Impict is driving me nuts today. I used to use Corel Draw but it crashes on me. I use the Paintbrush program in Windows7 now a fair bit. If only Impict had a little love given to it, I can see how it would become a killer program.

I have an idea; If the dudes who wrote it don't have time to work on it, how about open sourcing it and letting the Delphi community (if it's written in Delphi) work on it?

Warren


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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Warren,

"Flatten Objects" has a number of options in the dialog and it's designed for a number of different use cases, not all of which involve flattening the object into the background.

You need to understand that the background is also a separate bitmap object, so if you want to flatten your objects into the background you need to select both the object and the background with Shift+Click. Similarly, if you want to combine multiple objects you need to select them first with Shift+Click.

If you look up "Flatten Objects" in the index of the Impict help you will find a detailed description of all the options.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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