PCX , standing for PiCture eXchange , is an image file format developed by the now-defunct ZSoft Corporation of Marietta, Georgia , United States . It was the native file format for PC Paintbrush and became one of the first widely accepted DOS imaging standards, although it has since been succeeded by more sophisticated image formats, such as BMP , JPEG , and PNG . PCX files commonly store palette-indexed images ranging from 2 or 4 colors to 16 and 256 colors, although the format has been extended to record true-color (24-bit) images as well.
19-555: PCX was designed during the early development of PC display hardware and most of the formats it supported are no longer used. The table below shows a list of the most commonly used PCX formats. Contemporary image editing programs may not read PCX files that match older hardware. PCX is supported by common image processing software including ACDSee , FastStone , GIMP , ImageMagick , IrfanView , LView , Netpbm , PaintShop Pro , Photoshop , Visio , PMview , XnView and GraphicConverter . In version 2.1.4 FFmpeg could encode and decode
38-405: A 16 color palette. When 256-color VGA hardware became available there was not enough space for the palette in a PCX file; even the 54 unused bytes after the header would not be enough. The solution chosen was to put the palette at the end of the file, along with a marker byte to confirm its existence. If a PCX file has a 256-color palette, it is found 768 bytes from the end of the file. In this case
57-416: A database. ACDSee's database can be backed up, and exported/imported as XML or binary . Each database and its associated thumbnails can also be loaded and saved as separate entities. The photo manager is available as a consumer version, and a pro version which provides additional features, and additional image editing capabilities. In 2012, ACDSee Free was released, without advanced features. ACDSee
76-496: A single pixel of a given palette index or color value, or an RLE pair representing a series of several pixels of a single value: Due to the use of the two most-significant bits as flags, pixel values from 192 to 255 (with their most-significant bit already set) must be stored in an RLE byte pair, even when they only occur one or two pixels in succession, whereas color indexes 0 to 191 can be stored directly or in RLE byte pairs (whichever
95-403: A width of 22 pixels, each row will be 4 bytes long, having 32 bits per row with 10 bits unused. PCX image data are compressed using run-length encoding (RLE), a simple lossless compression algorithm that collapses a series of three or more consecutive bytes with identical values into a two-byte pair. The two most-significant bits of a byte are used to determine whether the given data represent
114-818: Is application software for organising digital images . It is a kind of desktop organizer software application . Image organizer software focuses on handling large numbers of images. In contrast to an image viewer , an image organizer can edit image tags and can often upload files to on-line hosting pages. Enterprises may use Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions to manage larger and broader amounts of digital media. Some programs that come with desktop environments , such as gThumb (GNOME) and digiKam (KDE) were originally simple image viewers, and have evolved into image organizers. Many commercial image organizers offer both automatic and manual image organization features. A comparison of image viewers reveals that many free software packages are available that offer most of
133-439: Is more space-efficient); therefore, the actual compression ratio could be optimized with proper sorting of palette entries, though this is not feasible where the file must share its color palette with other images. For example, a palette could be optimized with the most commonly used colors occurring in palette positions 0 to 191 and the least common colors allocated to the remaining quarter of the palette. Another inefficiency with
152-422: Is pronounced the same as AC/DC . ACDSee was first released in 1994 as a 16-bit application for Windows 3.1 . In 1997 32-bit ACDsee 95 was released for Windows 95. 1999 saw the release of ACDSee 3.0. Version 5.0 was released in 2002, and 7.0 in 2005. Development of this line continues, with version 20.0 released in 2016. This early version of ACDSee is sometimes known as ACDSee Classic or ACDSee 32. ACDSee Pro
171-485: The PCX pixel formats rgb24, rgb8, bgr8, rgb4_byte, bgr4_byte, gray, pal8, and monob . There is a multi-page version of PCX, used by some computer fax and document management programs, with file extension .dcx . A DCX file consists of a header introducing a set of following PCX files. PCX files were designed for use on IBM-compatible PCs and always use little endian byte ordering. A PCX file has three main sections, in
190-579: The RLE algorithm is that it is possible to store chunks with a length of 0, which allows whitespace in the file. This allowed PCX files to be decompressed slightly faster on the processors it was originally intended for. The PCX compression algorithm requires very little processor power or memory to apply, a significant concern with computer systems when it was designed. Compression algorithms used by newer image formats are more efficient when compressing images such as photographs, and dithered or otherwise complex graphics. A PCX file has space in its header for
209-464: The following order The PCX file header contains an identifier byte (value 10), a version number, image dimensions, 16 palette colors, number color planes, bit depth of each plane, and a value for compression method. PCX version numbers range from 0 to 5, this originally denoted the version of the PC Paintbrush program used to create the PCX file. The header always has space for 16 colors though
SECTION 10
#1732787596966228-427: The image has multiple planes, these are stored by plane within row, such that all the red data for row 0 are followed by all the green data for row 0, then all the blue data, then alpha data. This pattern is repeated for each line as shown in the next table: When an image is less than 8 bits per pixel, each line is padded to the next even byte boundary. For example, if an image has 1 plane of 1-bit data (monochrome) with
247-658: The image quality of a picture is fast due to next/previous image caching, fast RAW image decoding and support for one-click toggling between 100% and fit screen zoom mode anywhere inside the image. Most of ACDSee's features can be accessed via keyboard . ACDSee displays a tree view of the file structure for navigation with thumbnail images of the selected folder , and a preview of a selected image. ACDSee started as an image organizer/viewer, but over time had image editing and RAW development (Pro version) capabilities added. The thumbnails generated by ACDSee are cached , so that they do not need to be regenerated, and stored on disk as
266-476: The most common image formats ( BMP , GIF , JPEG , PNG , TGA , TIFF , WBMP , PCX , PIC , WMF , EMF ); it lacks a thumbnail browser, and support for RAW and ICO formats. A reviewer at BetaNews found it "fast, configurable and easy to use". The version runs on Windows XP or newer. The product was discontinued in August 2013. Image organizer An image organizer or image management application
285-426: The number of colors used depends upon the bit depth of the image. The header is composed of 18 fields: All PCX files use the same compression scheme and the compression value is always 1. No other values have been defined and there are no uncompressed PCX files. One source claims that 0 (uncompressed) is allowed, but not much software supports it . PCX image data is stored in rows or scan lines in top-down order. If
304-454: The value in the byte preceding the palette should be 12 (0x0C). The palette is stored as a sequence of RGB triples; its usable length is defined by the number of colors in the image. Color values in a PCX palette always use 8 bits, regardless of the bit depth of the image. ACDSee ACDSee is an image organizer , viewer , and image editor program for Windows , macOS and iOS , developed by ACD Systems International Inc . ACDSee
323-507: Was originally distributed as a 16-bit application for Windows 3.0 and later supplanted by a 32-bit version for Windows 95 . ACDSee Pro 6 adds native 64-bit support. The newest versions of ACDSee incorporate modern Digital Asset Management tools like Face Detection & Facial Recognition (Ultimate 2019). ACDSee's main features are speed, lossless RAW image editing, image batch processing, editing metadata ( Exif and IPTC ), rating, keywords, and categories, and geotagging . Judging
342-533: Was originally led by Jon McEwan, and more recently by Nels Anvik, who oversaw ACDSee Pro 2.5 through to Pro 5. The original ACDSee software was created by David Hooper, who also added a number of features to ACDSee Pro, such as Lighting correction (formerly known as Shadows and Highlights) and Develop Mode (in version 2.0). ACDSee Pro is written in C++ , with the interface built using MFC . In August 2012, ACD Systems released ACDSee Free, which retains all viewing features for
361-399: Was released on 9 January 2006 aimed at professional photographers. ACD Systems decided to separate its core release, ACDSee Photo Manager, into two separate products; ACDSee Photo Manager, aimed at amateur photography enthusiasts, and ACDSee Pro which would target professionals by adding a new package of feature sets. ACDSee Pro's development team is based out of Victoria, British Columbia and
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