The PixelTools Palette

The PixelTools palette provides eight tools for working on bitmap objects in the drawing.

Crop Tool
This tool lets you crop bitmap and PDF objects in the drawing.

Click and drag in the crop handles in the corners or on the sides of the bitmap.

The cropping is non-destructive.

Click and drag in the round handles to rotate the bitmap.

You may click on the Crop button in the middle to permanently crop the bitmap.

If the bitmap is rotated, you may click in the yellow button to straighten the bitmap and permanently crop it.

If the bitmap is rotated and small enough for Core Image, you may click on the green button to straighten and permanently crop it.

Bitmap Camera Tool
This tool lets you duplicate portions of a bitmap object in the drawing.

Erase Outside Tool
This tool lets you erase a portion of a bitmap that falls outside any closed shape such as a rectangle, ellipse, polygon, Bezier, etc.

Eraser Tool
This tool lets you erase bitmaps. It's intended for cleaning up scanned images.

In the dialog you have a choice for a round or square eraser shape, whether the tool should erase (N) or paint with white.

You can set the brush size by typing the size in pixels, by using the stepper, or by moving the mouse over the sample image and using two-finger gesture scrolling up and down, or with the scroll wheel of the mouse. You may use the Mouse Shaker to switch between the round and square brush. This mouse shaker feature is global for all of WildTools, thus you can set it on or off from many places, but there is only one global setting.

This tool uses Apple's Core Image for smaller images and Quartz for larger images. Core Image uses all the computing power of the computer including all of the CPUs and GPUs on board. It is the first use of parallel processing in PowerCADD, and it is unbelievably fast. However it also has a size limit, and we are uncertain where those limits are exactly. As a temporary measure, you can change the maximum Core Image Pixel size in this dialog.

To use the tool:

Move the cursor over a bitmap in the drawing.

The bitmap will hilite with either your normal hilite color (shown in green above) if Core Image is going to be used, or yellow if Quartz is going to be used. The hilite rectangle will extend beyond the image by the size of the Eraser tool brush, so you may erase along the edge of a bitmap.

To change the size of the brush, press the Option key and drag the on-screen slider up and down.

Click and drag on the bitmap to erase or paint to white. When you have erased a portion of the image, you can see through the image to the hilite color.

Bitmap Knife Tool
This tool lets you cut a bitmap with three modes: constrained, unconstrained or freehand.

It is always best to use the constrained mode as it cuts the bitmap with Quartz by copying two rectangular areas. It never increases the bit depth of the image, which is important in keeping the drawing size down. It can be used with bitmaps of any size, and it is the more reliable and safe way to cut a bitmap.

Core Image Filter Tool
This tool provides a number of ways to edit a bitmap in the drawing.

Core Image filters are unbelievably fast, and they use all of the computing power in your computer.

You have a large number of choices of filters.

For each filter you have sliders to adjust the settings, and you can reset each by clicking on the reset buttons to the right of the sliders.

You may click on the Options button to set the Core Image limit size, just as with the Bitmap Eraser tool.

To use the tool:

Move the cursor over a bitmap in the drawing. The bitmaps must be below the Core Image limit size.

If the bitmap qualifies, they you will see a preview of the effect on the bitmap, and you have a pad of sliders which you can use to change the settings of the tool, however no change will be made to the bitmap until you click on it with the tool's distinctive Core Image cursor.

To get a better look at the preview, you may press the Option key to hide the gray pad.

You can also reset the sliders over the bitmap by pulling the slider thumbs down or up.

The DPI and Grayscale options may be used on bitmaps of any size as these are not Core Image filters.