bergdesign blog

Really useful Mac software

What is this "Klevr Furniture" you ask?

How does Klevr Furniture have anything to do with software? Read More...

Starting off 2015

2015 is a year for change... Read More...

Riffle 1.0 released

Riffle is an app we wrote for our own use because we couldn’t find anything like it. It’s a super-fast image viewer that can dig deep into a folder hierarchy, showing you every image found in all of its subfolders. It can dig into packages and bundles, so you can use it to find resources within other apps and frameworks. You can choose to only preview images or to use QuickLook to preview files of any type. Plus, it has a myriad of options for customizing the viewer and its behaviors.

Riffle helps you reveal the original files in the Finder, either by using the window title bar drop-down menu or a file path bar within the window. You can double-click on an image to open the original in its native viewer or editor, or you can drag the image from the viewer to copy the original file to your drag destination.

Riffle leverages the speed of SSDs by loading and viewing images without generating previews and caching them to disk. In the event that you have some large images or complex PDFs that take time to render, you can set an option in Riffle to cache image previews in memory to make browsing faster.

Also, Riffle can generate PDF catalogs of your images (like a contact sheet). You can set the number of images per page and the resolution of the images so that you can keep the catalog files nice and small, perfect for sharing or future reference. And it’s only $5, so go download it and give it a try.

HueShifter 1.2.3 released

We’ve updated HueShifter a few times since the 1.2 release, fixing a few minor bugs and getting our paint brush code working well in the new mask layer. We have some requests that we’ll start working on now, adding some colorization features and enhancing the masking a bit more with the ability to paint where you want colors shifted rather than only painting where you don’t want colors shifted.

HueShifter 1.1 released

This is the first update to our newest app, HueShifter. It’s also the first release submitted to the Mac App Store. This update makes some internal improvements and adds a few new features, including…

We’ve added three additional color spaces so that you can use Luv or Lab as the perceptually uniform working space when working with photographs, or you can use HCL, HSB/HSV or HSL as the perceptually non-uniform working space if you’re transposing colors in graphics and non-photographic images. Or, you can just ignore this tip and just use whichever one gets the job done best - it’s your choice.

We’ve changed the lightness slider to a new ten-segment slider that functions a bit like a curves control. You can move each individual thumb and the neighboring ones will scale proportionately, or you can lock thumbs and move only specific ones. The lightnesses still scale according to the saturation of the underlying pixels, so please read the manual about this before you complain that things don’t change like you expect. We’re totally open to feedback on the way this works, but we’re also bound by what we can accomplish in the pixel math, so let us know how it currently works for you and we’ll improve things as needed.

We’ve also added multi-page TIFF as the default file format so that the resulting image can be placed into other applications’ documents yet still be re-opened and re-shifted in HueShifter. Other file formats have been moved to File > Export. The reason we have to use the TIFF format is that some home-brewed native file format wouldn’t be viewable in another application because it would be an unsupported image format. But TIFF is viewable in nearly every other graphics application and TIFF files can have numerous embedded images, so we write the color-shifted image into the first TIFF "layer" and the original image into a lower layer. Currently, you’ll have to drag the TIFF file back onto HueShifter to edit it because we don’t make HueShifter the default application for TIFF files, nor do we set the file’s owner to be HueShifter. We will likely make the file owner change in a future update, but it’s a bit of a hack to the way it works in OS X so we’re hesitant to use it. You can do it manually by right-clicking on the file in the Finder and choosing Get Info, the setting HueShifter as the application to open it.

We’ve also changed the interface a bit by adding a tab bar above the color-shifted image to switch between its color pixels and image masks, and to move the spectrogram and swatch buttons over to the source image. The circular sliders are bigger now, and you can drag the divider next to the controls to give yourself more resolution in the horizontal sliders.