I've just upgraded to the BC4 beta and am really happy with the changes there across the board. I have one issue in my workflow that the picture compare tool in all of the Beyond Compare products doesn't quite work for, and it would be really sweet if a tweak were possible.
I find myself frequently needing to diff large collections of PNG images that include an alpha channel. These images are obtained from framebuffer dumps and don't necessarily have the property that the alpha channel should be interpreted as opacity. BC4 currently displays images without full alpha (0xFF) as a blend between the RGB pixels in the image and a checkerboard image. This behavior means that the images displayed in the picture comparison tool don't look anything like you'd see on-screen. I can understand why people would want the current behavior, but it would be nice to have additional options here.
The controls I find useful in this area in other purpose-built tools I sometimes use are:
(1) A control to disable or ignore transparency entirely. This is the default in BC2. I think this is what BC4 would produce if the alpha channel were 0xFF in all pixels.
(2) A control to display the alpha channel as grayscale, which would let you see differences in the otherwise invisible alpha channel.
I currently use BC2 to manage these image collections, because the transparency in BC3/BC4 makes images possible to compare. However, BC2 lacks other useful features (like peeking at individual pixels - a great addition to BC4), and sometimes I have to switch to a different picture comparison tool to compare images and then switch back to BC2 to update my collection. It would be great if I could do everything I need in BC4, and the current version seems pretty close.
I find myself frequently needing to diff large collections of PNG images that include an alpha channel. These images are obtained from framebuffer dumps and don't necessarily have the property that the alpha channel should be interpreted as opacity. BC4 currently displays images without full alpha (0xFF) as a blend between the RGB pixels in the image and a checkerboard image. This behavior means that the images displayed in the picture comparison tool don't look anything like you'd see on-screen. I can understand why people would want the current behavior, but it would be nice to have additional options here.
The controls I find useful in this area in other purpose-built tools I sometimes use are:
(1) A control to disable or ignore transparency entirely. This is the default in BC2. I think this is what BC4 would produce if the alpha channel were 0xFF in all pixels.
(2) A control to display the alpha channel as grayscale, which would let you see differences in the otherwise invisible alpha channel.
I currently use BC2 to manage these image collections, because the transparency in BC3/BC4 makes images possible to compare. However, BC2 lacks other useful features (like peeking at individual pixels - a great addition to BC4), and sometimes I have to switch to a different picture comparison tool to compare images and then switch back to BC2 to update my collection. It would be great if I could do everything I need in BC4, and the current version seems pretty close.
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