I want to set my windows color scheme to negative colors. I tried to use Magnify tool which can be used to make negative colors scheme. But this program generates some lag. It is especially visible when moving mouse. I am now searching for new way to make negative color scheme. I think that the fastest way will be to remap graphics card color palette. It should not generate such lag like I'm now experiencing. Can someone give me a tip how can i do it programmatically (preferred c# but i don't think that it is be possible to do in higher level language)? Or maybe there is already some kind of tool to do that (I have Intel GMA HD)?
I have already tried NegativeScreen software (http://arcanesanctum.net/negativescreen) but it have even bigger lag.
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I am writing a small GUI library in OpenGL for fun and profit. When it comes to font handling, so far I require the client application to explicitly load all fonts and set them on the widgets. So far this is ok, I also have a means to set them once as a default for all widgets of a certain type.
Although this is feasible, I though, would it not be dandy to use the system's default font as a default instead. In the case of Windows this would be the fonts that are configured though the Color and Appearance dialog.
After warming up my rusted Win32 programming knowledge and souring the MSDN I can't find an awnser to this question. I can load a font by name and set it on any widget, but figuring out what font Win32 would use as a default eludes me.
So far the best I have found is the SystemParametersInfo function with SPI_GETNONCLIENTMETRICS. But these are just the settings for the "non client" area, such as window title bar and such.
DEFAULT_GUI_FONT is not your solution. The name certainly sounds good, and indeed it was the default GUI font at some point in history, but that font hasn't been used in years.
You already stumbled upon the correct solution: calling SystemParametersInfo with the SPI_GETNONCLIENTMETRICS option. This will fill in a NONCLIENTMETRICS structure with information about the standard system fonts.
The "standard UI font" in that structure is called lfMessageFont. It is the one used for text in message boxes, dialog boxes, and elsewhere in the client area of windows. It is the same one configurable in the "Appearance" properties.
I wrote out a very detailed answer about fonts in Windows applications a few years ago. That one kind of focuses on MFC, so I've chosen not to mark this question as a duplicate of that other one and compose a separate answer, but really all of the information you need is there.
For fun, I'll throw in that you can get the system colors by calling the GetSysColor function. Pass one of the COLOR_* values to indicate which color you want; you'll get back a COLORREF value (typedefed as a 32-bit unsigned integer into which are packed the red, green, and blue component values of the color). Use the GetRValue, GetGValue, and GetBValue macros to extract the individual components; I doubt OpenGL wants COLORREF values.
Other questions on SE address how to speed up nested UI control resizing, but- what if there aren't any controls?
As you drag the edge of a WPF window, even a main window with no content, black bars flicker briefly during the drag. This produces a crummy feel- one that I don't want to inflict on customers:
It does get slower and heavier with a full UI on top of it as well. This doesn't even get into how ugly it looks when resizing using the top or left edges. Windows Forms- even with the heaviest UI I've built- never looks this bad right off the bat.
What can be done to make WPF window resizing performance comparable to win forms?
(I have Windows 7 x64 and a triple monitor system on an AT Radeon HD 7470.)
You could update your graphic card and try it out again but that wont change anything. The reason is pretty simple. We all get to see this sometimes based how fast/slow our computer is. Sometimes it runs smooth because we do not have many visuals to draw. The reason is no proper background color is found in graphic card at that moment in redrawing process. Your drivers are fine, and its not just because you use Wpf. Other techniques use the same mechanism behind redrawing.
The first thing WPF will do is clear out the dirty region that is going to redraw. The purpose of dirty regions is to reduce the amount of pixels sent to the output merger stage of the GPU pipeline. Here is where we see the black color. Window itself at that point has no background color or its background color is set to transparent and so to us the GPU draws the black background. Things run async in wpf which is good so.
To fix this you could set a fix color such as "White" to the Window. Then the WPF system will clean out the dirty region but fill it automatically with white color instead of black. This usually helps.
Match the window color or the color of top most layer. Dont let GPU use black and you should do fine. Btw Wpf is faster than WinForm so dont worry.
The look is crummy indeed, especially when using the top or left border.
Which exact problem your screen shot is showing depends on how long your app is taking to render as well as a couple of background related settings that you might be able to tweak to get better resize. Plus part of the ugly resize is specific to Aero.
While I can't address the specific crazy slowness of WPF redraw, I can at least give some insight on why you see black, where that is coming from, and whether you can change to a less annoying fill-in color.
It turns out there are multiple different sources of the black and the bad resize behavior from different Windows versions that combine together. Please see this Q&A which explains what is going on and provides advice for what to do (again, not specific to making WPF faster but just seeing what you can do given the speed you have):
How to smooth ugly jitter/flicker/jumping when resizing windows, especially dragging left/top border (Win 7-10; bg, bitblt and DWM)?
I'm developing a WPF app but I've noticed that at certain font sizes the text doesn't render as nicely as the samples you see in Control Panel -> Fonts. I'm using large Segoe UI fonts (FontSize="36"), and the effect is more noticeable on the upright lines, e.g. a letter "U" might be slightly thicker on one side than the other.
).
The font quality improves at certain font sizes, e.g. FontSize="48" (which I believe is the equivalent of 36pt), but using a limited number of font sizes isn't always practical.
I can improve the font quality by applying the following properties to the TextBlock:-
TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Display" TextOptions.TextRenderingMode="ClearType"
Given the improvement in quality I'm curious to know why WPF doesn't do this for all text, or is it down to performance? I was thinking of creating a global style to apply this to all controls, or will this cause a problem?
(I tried uploading a screenshot but SO must store images at a low quality, and you couldn't really make out the font problem).
Here is the blog post that the WPF Text team wrote about this feature.
Note for the TextFormattingMode:
Ideal Ideal text metrics are the metrics which have been used to
format text since the introduction of WPF. These metrics result in
glyphs’ shapes maintaining high fidelity with their outlines from the
font file. The glyphs’ final placement is not taken into account when
creating glyph bitmaps or positioning the glyphs relative to each
other.
Display In this new formatting mode, WPF uses GDI
compatible text metrics. This ensures that every glyph has a width of
multiple whole pixels and is positioned on whole pixels. The use of
GDI compatible text metrics also means that glyph sizes and line
breaking is similar to GDI based frameworks. That said, glyph sizes
are not the only input into the line breaking algorithm used by WPF.
Even though we use the same metrics as GDI, our line breaking will not
be exactly the same.
Since these properties are new in .NET 4.0, they kept the original WPF algorithm as default, which is Ideal mode.
For the TextRenderingMode
Auto This mode will use ClearType unless system settings have been
set to specifically disable ClearType on the machine.
Aliased No antialiasing will be used to draw text.
Grayscale Grayscale antialiasing will be used to draw
text.
ClearType ClearType antialising will be used to draw text.
Since Auto is default, you will generally get ClearType rendering.
Now, because these are attached properties, and they inherit, you can just set them at the root Window. No need to create a bunch of Styles.
I have noticed small performance issues when dealing with large amounts of data (upwards of 10,000 items) when ClearType is turned on. Changing TextFormattingMode to Display has no visible performance impact.
This said, in all of my WPF apps I use global styles to improve text rendering, unless the performance impact is large enough to make the UI feel sticky.
I have a sequence of images taken from a camera. The images consists of hand and surroundings. I need to remove everything except the hand.
I am new to Image processing. Would anyone help me in regard with the above Question. I am comfortable using C and Matlab.
A really simple approach if you have a stationary background and a moving hand (and quite a few images!) is simply to take the average of the set of images away from each image. If nothing else, it's a gentle introduction to Matlab.
The name of the problem you are trying to solve is "Image Segmentation". The Wikipedia page here: wiki is a good start.
If lighting consistency isn't a problem for you, I'd suggest starting with simple RGB thresholding and see how far that gets you before trying anything more complicated.
Have a look at OpenCV, a FOSS library for computer vision applications. Specifically, see the Video Surveillance module. For a walk through of background subtraction in MATLAB, see this EETimes article.
Can you specify what kind of images you have. Is the background moving or static? For a static background it is a bit straightforward. You simply need to subtract the incoming image from the background image. You can use some morphological operations to make it look better. They all depend on the quality of images that you have. If you have moving background I would suggest you go for color based segmentation. Convert the image to YCbCr then threshold appropriately. I know there are some papers available on it(However I dont have time to locate them). I suggest reading them first. Here is one link which might help you. Read the skin segmentation part.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee368/Project_03/Project/reports/ee368group08.pdf
background subtraction is simple to implement (estimate background as average of all frames, then subtract each frame from background and threshold resulting absolute difference) but unfortunately only works well if 1. camera has manual gain and exposure 2. lighting conditions do not change 3.background is stationary. 4. the background is visible for much longer than the foreground.
given your description i assume these are not the case - so what you can use - as already pointed out - is colour as a means of segmenting foreground from background. as it's a hand you are trying to isolate best bet is to learn the hand colour. opencv provides some means of doing this. if you want to do this yourself you just get the colour of some of the hand pixels (you would need to specify this manually for at least one frame) and convert them to HUE (which encapsulates the colour in a brightness independen way. skin colour has a very constant hue) and then make a HUE histogram. compare this to the rest of the pixels and then decided if the hue is simmilar enough.
I have developed a 1024 *780 resolution screen in Windows Forms, but some say that it does not fit properly at higher resolutions. Is there any way to handle this?
Is there a way to make Windows Forms applications look the same at ALL resolutions?
My recommendation is not so much to "make it look the same" on all screens, but rather to design the GUI so it scales up and down more gracefully. Layout managers, docking, and anchors are your friends in Winforms. The TableLayoutPanel is quite useful for this sort of thing. Splitters also help...
Finally, this is one of those problems that WPF sets out to solve. WPF makes extensive use of layout managers. It feels much more like Java or GTK than Winforms or even VB (old school VB).
This is the sort of thing that makes you say "there's got to be a better way."
My solution for this one time was to declare a global ScalingFactor variable that was tied to the current screen resolution. Then, the sizes of every visual element were multiplied by that factor.
So, if I designed my form for resolution A, and resolution B is 1.2x larger, the width of window A will be with * 1.2, the fonts will be fontSize * 1.2, the textbox dimensions will be dimensions * 1.2.
Not fun.
There may be 3rd party tools that you can buy and will perform this scaling.
One other thing to check before you run down any of these roads is whether it is actually the screen resolution or the dpi settings that are causing it to look bad. Usually a higher resolution will only make it look smaller, but an atypical dpi, such as when the user selects "large fonts" will wreak havoc.
You can use anchor property of item, and autoScaleMode property of form set it equals 'None'.