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Background / Ignore Color pickup in Decrease Color Depth dialog

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    Requested Background / Ignore Color pickup in Decrease Color Depth dialog

    Hello,

    This is my first post here, so first of all - big 'hello' to everyone else!

    I've been using IrfanView for years and noticed that it lacks a small but useful feature.

    When you are decreasing colour depth in an image there is often a situation that there are large areas of one colour (i.e. background) which colour you would like to left untouched, while there are many colours (like overlays, shadows, anti-aliasing of small elements) where colour change / decrease wouldn't be noticeable.

    I especially found it when decreasing colours of drawings like sketch, chart or algorithm block. Decreasing such image colour depth in IV seems always to be touching background (making it snowy, creamy or sth. but not pure white as it was in original image) while other colours are left untouched. Such image is then nearly completely useless, when pasting it to word processor, as it hasn't got white background any more, very important as pasting it to a white text page.

    For example when I open an image having screen-shot of chart generated with using anti-aliasing to background on chart trends I have thousands of very similar colours (anti-aliasing itself to a few main colours responsible for drawing chart trends). If I decrease colour depth of such image to 256 colours IrfanView's algorithm seems always to modify background.

    It can also be observed when you paste a screen-shot of web-browser window or tab with a large areas of white (or other solid colour) used for page background. When decreasing colour depth, nearly most times background is changed to creamy, snowy which produces results not always acceptable. If locked - some minor colours (like those from tab or tool-bar) could be changed while background would remain unchanged. See attached example.

    Therefore, in my opinion, it would be useful to add a new checkbox named for example "Pick background / ignore colour before decrease" and when checked, it would then display colour picker window and force selected colour to not to be modified by colour depth decrease algorithm. Just exactly as it is done now with selecting background / transparent colour when saving some kind of files (i.e. supporting transparency). The very same methodology and dialogue window could be used in proposed feature.

    Best Regards,
    Tomasz Trejderowski
    Attached Files
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