Something for every MTMer...
XnView, a remarkable and completely free graphics viewer, converter and editor with many abilities and options. No matter what software you may already have, no matter your skill level, you would do well to get this utility. It is completely free (and available for many operating systems), it contains no spyware or any such things. It installs to it's own folder, saves all settings in it's own "ini" and doesn't touch the registry unless you request it to, which means it is a well behaved, totally self contained and completely safe program. In short, this is exactly the kind of software that software should be! It's been in development for years and has reached an amazing stage at this point in time.
It views the screenshots (<a href=http://forum.mtm2.com/viewtopic.php?t=1824 target=raw>detailed here</a>) that MTM2 itself writes to disk in <a href=http://mtm2.com/~trackville/gold.htm target=gold>Gold mode</a>. There is no need for an external program to take MTM screenshots, but if you prefer XnView can capture screens too, with options that rival those of Paint Shop Pro, and it saves the files on the fly in any format you like.
While not as full featured as something like Paint Shop Pro, it also allows you to edit images in many different ways, crop and resize, change color depth, combine them, apply effects filters, add text, etc. It's all very easy and quite effective for MTM usage, for screenshots, track menu images and more.
It reads more than 400 graphics formats and saves in about 40, with plenty of format specific saving options for jpg, gif, png, tga, etc. It has a nice thumbnail based file browser, and you can easily set your desktop wallpaper or run slide shows. The program even views animated GIFs, deals with movie and audio formats, and allows for batch conversion of files, among other things.
If you have <a href=http://cownap.com/~traxx/ target=txraw>TxRaw</a> set up it will launch all 8-bit raw files with it from the file browser, which means you can simply paste them back into XnView if you want to work with them, then paste the resulting image into Traxx to create usable RAWs and ACTs. You can even edit palettes of 256 color images with XnView.
Setting up XnView to read RAW screenshots made by MTM2
Click the XnView "Tools" menu then scroll down and click "Options"
In the options menu double-click "Read", then click the sub-option "RAW".
Use the following values for the RAW reading options (everything but the width and height are defaults):
Width: 640
Height: 480
Starting offset: 0
Channel Order: Interleaved
Channel Type: RGB
Click "OK" to return to the program. Browse to your MTM folder and you will see thumbnails of your RAW screenshots, double click to open them fullscreen, then do whatever you like with them, such as save them as JPG for use on the web.
Download the program at the official website:
http://www.xnview.com or
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enxnview.html
The download page:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview ... win32.html
If you're on a slow connection or wish to use less drive space I recommend getting the "standard version" in ZIP form, then you can simply unzip it to it's final folder and run it from there. If you look at the program options (in the tools menu) you can add shortcuts, send-to links and change file type associations from there as you like. Later, if you like, you can download the add-on plug-ins and place them in the plug-ins folder, to enable usage of even more file types.
