After you've scanned or digitized an image, you may have to do additional processing to prepare it for use in your product. This is where image processing software and paint tools come in.
There is often a fine line of distinction between digitizing software, image enhancement software, and paint software. Some products have all three capabilities built in, while others specialize in one capability or another.
At its simplest level, digitizing software controls the scanner or digitizer you are using to capture an image. It may allow you to set the image size, select the portion of the image to digitize, specify the resolution and number of colors, and select the format in which to save the image file. Most of the high-end digitizing software also includes image enhancement and painting features.
You can probably get by just fine using simple scanning software and the MDK's BitEdit and PalEdit tools if you don't need to do extensive editing to enhance your images.
Image enhancement software is designed to convert images to different formats, spatial resolutions, and color resolutions; to modify saturation, hue, tint, contrast, and brightness; to sharpen or blur edges; to modify palette assignments; and to flip, rotate, crop, and resize. Think of the image enhancement software as a digital photo-retouching product. You normally use it to make global changes to an entire image, such as blurring the background, changing all blues to greens, and so on.
One function that you will probably use on every image you scan or digitize is color reduction. When you scan or digitize a natural image at high color resolution, you capture millions of colors. Most of these colors, however, are simply subtle shades of a relatively few colors.
If you want to display the image on a computer screen that supports only 16 or 256 colors, then you will have to merge or delete most of the captured colors. Scanning and image enhancement software provide a variety of ways to do this algorithmically and manually.
BitEdit and PalEdit from the Multimedia Development Kit provide simple edit functions for images and image palettes. See the MDK's Data Preparation Tools User's Guide for descriptions of these tools.
Paint software is used to actually edit the contents of an image. Paint software is sometimes used in the scanning process to add special effects to an image or to work on color gradations and hues at a pixel level.
Use paint software to make minor changes to images. You can cut, copy, and paste segments of the image, or use tools such as a paintbrush or airbrush to add elements to the image.
The images used in your multimedia application can come from a variety of sources and computer platforms. Although your application may be designed to import any graphic format, it will run most efficiently if it imports graphics in Windows DIB format. The MDK's BitEdit and Convert utilities let you convert from a number of the most common graphic formats to DIB and back.
The following table shows the different formats supported by BitEdit and Convert.
| Format | Extension | Capability |
| Apple Macintosh PICT | .PIC | Read, Write |
| AutoCAD Import | .PLT | Read |
| CompuServe GIF | .GIF | Read |
| Computer Graphics Metafile | .CGM | Read |
| Encapsulated PostScript | .EPS | Read |
| HP Graphic Language | .HGL | Read |
| Lotus 1-2-3 Graphics | .PIC | Read |
| Micrografx Designer/Draw | .DRW | Read |
| Microsoft RIFF DIB | .RDI | Read, Write |
| Microsoft RLE DIB | .DIB | Read, Write |
| Microsoft RLE RIFF DIB | .RDI | Read, Write |
| Microsoft Windows BMP | .BMP | Read |
| Microsoft Windows DIB | .DIB | Read, Write |
| Microsoft Windows Metafile | .WMF | Read |
| PC Paintbrush | .PCX | Read, Write |
| Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) | .TIF | Read |
| Truevision TGA | .TGA | Read, Write |
If your images are stored in other formats, you may need to use a two-step approach, first converting them to one of these standard formats and then to the final format.