Table of Contents |
| File Editing - Image Editor

Overview Image Editor Sound Editor Text Editor Property Editor

Please read the overview for information about the common features of iFuntastic's editors.
The beauty of the iPhone (and iPod touch) does not only stem from its ease of use, but also from the many (thousands, actually!) graphics that make up its user interface. It is great fun to mess with these graphics, and the Image Editor allows you to do that.
Most graphics files are stored in a strange variant of the PNG format - iFuntastic converts them for you and writes them back in a more standard PNG format, which - luckily - works just as well. The Image Editor can read PNG, GIF, TIFF and JPEG files (and can get an image out of many Photoshop (.psd) files, too.)
The most straightforward way to change a graphic on the iPhone is to navigate to it in the File Browser, edit it in the Image Editor and then write it back to the iPhone. In order to see the changes you usually have to restart the SpringBoard, which you can do with the Activate Changes on Device button.
A collection of customized graphics (and sounds and more,) is called a theme, and a much more elegant and powerful way to customize the look of the iPhone is with an application called WinterBoard. You should install it if you haven't done so. You can of course directly modify the files of a theme in the image (and other) editors, but you can also select a graphic and tell iFuntastic to add or update the corresponding file in a WinterBoard theme.
Source
Whenever you set the source image, in addition to the actions described in the overview, two things happen:

- the image is entered as the content of the Main layer
- its dimensions become the dimensions of the Crop layer, that is, the size of the saved image (to avoid this part, set the image for the main layer directly, not the editor's source image)

Layers
iFuntastic is not Photoshop - but it's trying real hard :-)
When you first open the Image Editor, it displays a list of three layers:

- the Main layer, an image layer, contains the main image (and optionally a string of text)
- the Master layer allows you to make some color adjustments to the final image; it also allows you to move all the other layers underneath the crop layer as a whole
- the Crop layer determines the size and area to save as the final image; when the crop layer is active, you can move and resize that area. A popup menu on the right side of the crop layer in the layer list lets you choose from some standard image sizes.

You can add additional layers (and perform various other functions) from the Layer Operations menu:

- Image layers contain images. You can select them by clicking on the 'choose content' button of the layer, or you can drag an image onto the layer in the list. Drag an image into the image area to add a new image layer.
- Text layers contain text. The 'choose content' button will let you enter text of your choice
- Color layers contain a single color
- Gradient layers contain two colors and represent an area that blends between the two

Layers can also be used as masks. You can rearrange their order by dragging in the layer list. Individual layers can be turned on or off with a click on the 'eye' button in the layer list. Internally, all the layers are images that are composited or combined one by one into the final image. The ordering and/or 'coverage' (opacity) of each layer determines how much it contributes.
Active Layer and Layer Selection
The active layer (there can be only one) is hilited in blue. Its attributes are displayed and can be changed in the layer controls below the layer list. To operate on multiple layers you can select them by control clicking (right clicking, if you have a two button mouse) or command clicking in the layer list. Selected layers are hilited in green and can be moved together in the image area. You can also delete one or more layers only when they are selected.
Layer Groups
You can group layers by assigning a common group number to them. Layers with identical group numbers are combined and drawn first; think of them as a single image. With this trick you can have masks that do not 'punch through' the image all the way to the background, but mask out only the images in the same group.
Layer Controls
Each layer displays its own set of controls below the layer list when it is the active layer. With the controls you can manipulate the appearance of the layer in the image to achieve quite sophisticated effects.
You can set the width and height of color and gradient layers directly. The size of an image layer is given by the dimensions of its image. In a text layer you can set the font size as well as the width - the width controls at which point a line of text is wrapped around to the next line.

Transformation You can set the overall size of a layer with the scale slider. The aspect ratio allows for unproportional scaling: width and height are scaled differently. You can rotate and flip a layer, and you can distort it horizontally or vertically with the shear sliders. To mirror an image (for instance to make a reflection,) rotate it 180 degrees and flip it. You may also want to decrease its opacity and adjust its aspect ratio to give the illusion of perspective.
Opacity The opacity slider controls the 'see through' or coverage of the layer. This can also be termed transparency or, to be technical, the alpha channel. It's a value associated with each RGB pixel that specifies how much that pixel should cover what's underneath it. This makes masking, blending and 'holes' in images possible.
Color A click on a color patch in the layer controls or a palette icon in the layer list brings up the OS X color picker. Colors can be represented in many different ways - rather than using RGB, iFuntastic uses the HSV representation for colors: the Hue slider determines which color to use, the Saturation slider determines how much of the color to use, and the Lightness (or Value) slider determines how white the color is Use the Gray checkbox to convert an image to grayscale. Colorize lets you change the color of the whole image with the hue slider.
Masking The masking functions let you use an image as a mask. Using an image as a mask determines the 'see through' of the layers underneath. The Mask converts the image into a mask; it works best with grayscale images. Black areas will become transparent, white areas will cut out lower layers and gray will become an in-between value. Invert inverts this behavior. Hard forces the grayscale values to make up their mind: black or white. Pick some of the provided images in the 'OverlaysAndMasks' folder on disk to experiment with this functionality. Screen lets you choose a color in an image which will become transparent. Option-click on the image in the edit area to choose the color from the image, or click on the color patch control to set it with the color picker. Use this function to cut out images that have a uniformly colored background. (The weatherman on your TV usually stands in front of a blue or green screen - software then replaces that color with a weathermap.)

Control- (or Right-) click on a layer control to change its value with an input dialog.
Double-click on a control to reset it to its default value.
Use 'Reset Controls' in the Layer Operations menu to reset all controls in the active layer.
Destination
Camera Roll and System Wallpaper will add the image with a thumbnail into the respective folders on the phone. You can then set them as Wallpaper on the phone or view them in the Photo viewer.
Format
Usually the file format for images on the phone is fixed. In case of the Wallpaper on the lock screen, you can save a PNG file (which can have transparency) as a file with extension .jpg. For images that won't be used by the phone, you can choose from PNG, JPEG or TIFF file formats. Note that transparency is only supported for the PNG format.
Use Content from Main Layer
The content (text or image) is always taken from the main layer.
Settings
You can save and load settings with the Settings popup menu. Settings can act as templates; when you load a Setting, its 'recipe' is applied to the main image. To avoid unpleasantness for different sized images, 'Fit to Crop' and 'Reset' are applied to the main image. To bypass this behavior, add an extra image layer to the setting, and set its 'Use Content from Main Layer' flag and hide the main image. This way you can preserve custom offsets and transformations of the image.
To avoid confusion, don't think of a Setting as something you drop an image into - instead, think of starting with an image and applying a Setting to it.
Linked Layers
You can make duplicates of text and image layers that are linked to the 'original' layer. This means they take the content (text or image) from the original layer. This comes in handy, for example, when you make text with a drop shadow - if you change the text in the original layer, then the shadow will use the new text as well.
Merge Layers
Click in the drag zone to drag out a snapshot of the current composition and drop it back into the edit section - this will add a snapshot of the current edits as a new image layer; however, you won't be able to modify the individual pieces any longer.