1) The Hotspoted Image WILL HAVE TO be stored as a BMP .. Why
- JPG's loose compresion wreeks havoc on the LSB's, causing a loss of hotspot info ..
- GIF's Indexed color map. Too stay within the max colors the encoder will merge most of the close colors, again causing a loss of LSB's.
- Most other image compresion formats also loose LSB data..
2) In the case of stretched images the image will still need to be loaded twice.
- First. To the streched/Squeezed picturebox.
- Second. To a hidden image sixed picturbox
Because of the unpredictable effect of the stretch code on pixel color's there's a good chance of LSB data loss ...
looking at simple Color averaging .. if we half the image size, and use the avarage of a 2 * 2 pixel block to select the color (looking at only one byte) and our cube has Color codes : 43,45,47,49 ... (LSB set for hotspot) however our new single pixel will have an averaged color code of 46 :eek: (LSB NOT SET) changing our hotspot value.
3) Applying Multiple masks to a single image requires a new full image for each set.
Consider the point of an image with multiple levels of focus. Like the one used in my example, if we looking at the foreground, we hotspot only items in the foreground, and ignore the background.. However we could draw up a second mask for it, ignoring the foreground and hot spot each of the seperate fish in the background.
Using a Seperate mask allows multiple masks to be applied to a single image.