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Hi,

I have Been taking the sdk for a spin. The Exposure tonemap example compiles & works perfectly and I've been able to replace the tonemapping code in MExpTmo::onTonemap with other code that works in Picturenaut. Cool!

Question 1:
I've been running into problems in getting a dll file of my own to work with picturenaut. I started out by modifying the MExpTmo project, class & filenames & project properties to generate a different dll file.

However, it simply doesn't show up in Picturenaut Tonemapper's list. To trace what's happening, I added a bunch of printfs that show the function names in the plugin-class functions & captured what it wrote to STDOUT by re-directing to a text file

Here's the output i got in the sequence of functions as my DLL file loaded up in Picturenaut-

Code:

in getPlugInName
Trying to initPlugin
in constructor of tmofactory
Looks ok- tmofactory built
In getTonemapFactoryHandle
In getTonemapClassName
In getTonemapClassName
 

So the dll seems to seems to run ok till it encoutners getTonemapClassName

Now - looking @ the example MExpTmo code - here's this function returns as the tonemap class name "pn::PNExpTMO".  I couldn't find this function name referred to anywhere else in the code :-(

so what is the function & what should go in here in a customized tonemap dll? My guess is this is where i'm getting stuck.

Here's the full function -
Code:

pn_pcchar
MExpTmoPlugIn::getTonemapClassName() const {
  return pn_text("pn::PNExpTmo");
} // MExpTmoPlugIn::getPlugInName
 

Question 2:
In the plugin code, I found a static global tonemapping plugin object called expTmoPlugIn getting created that doesn't seem to be referred to anywhere else in the code.
Could you tell me what role does this object play & could it be related in any way to not being able to load a different dll? Here's the code...
Code:

static MExpTmoPlugIn expTmoPlugIn;
 

Question 3:
In the poster, it's mentioned that "unless specified" picturenaut serves imagebuffers in tiles to enable multithreaded operation. Is there a way to turn this off & get the full image at a go?

Potential addition to Documentation
While compiling my dll, i found that the MExpTmo by default has the exported functions at these ordinals while mine didn't for some reason.

Specifying it in the def file like this seemed to solve the problem of having the functions at the right ordinals.
Code:

  getPlugInHandles @1
  getPlugInClass @3
  getPlugInVersion @2
 

Tonemap dialog feature request:
It would be great to have a way for a tonemap plugin to specify default settings for things like "Automatic lum", "Automatic contrast" and "Gamma" that work best for the plugin. This would give a good "initial" picture to the user who could change it as he wants. I've seen this affect the "initial" picture from some of the existing plugins as well

Regards
Srinath

Only Marc can give you the answer, but if you use the forum's code tag it will not smilify anything. That's the # symbol in the posting toolbar.

Hi,

Have figured out the answer to question 3 - on how to serve the full image as a go to the tonemapper rather than as Tiles.

Essentially we need to over-ride the SetupActionPipeline function in the Tonemapper class and make it specify the dimensions of the whole image as size of the tile.

Here's the code in case anyone needs it -
Code:

bool MExpTmo::setupActionPipeline(pn::PNActionPipeline &actionPipeline,
int imageIndex,
pn::PPNImageBuffer pInputImage,
pn::PPNImageBuffer pOutputImage,
void *pUserParam,
pn_pcchar pGroupName,
pn::PFNACTION finalAction) {
int options = pOutputImage ? pn::AEO_DEFAULT :pn::AEO_PROVIDE_OUTPUT_BUFFER;
  pn::PNImageBufferList images;

  images.resize(pOutputImage ? 2 : 1);
  images[0] = *pInputImage;
  if (pOutputImage) {
    images[1] = *pOutputImage;
  } // if

  pnt::_PNSIZE pTileSize;
 
  pTileSize.cx = pInputImage->getWidth();
  pTileSize.cy = pInputImage->getHeight();

  actionPipeline.addDrawingAction(images, finalAction,
                                  pUserParam, pGroupName,
                                  options,0,0,&pTileSize);
  return true;
} // PNTonemap::setupActionPipeline
 

Wonder if there's a way to do this on the fly - ie a slider in the tonemap dialog that can vary tile size & overlap in realtime

cheers
srinath

Hi srinathh,

thank you for using the Picturenaut SDK.

I'll try to answer all your questions.

1. The class name, for example 'PNExpTMO', is a unique name for a tonemap plug-in. If you build your own plug-in, you must specify a different name. Thats all.

I'll explain later in the SDK documentation the backgrounds.

2. Look in the file 'pnplugin.cpp' and the the 171 of the CTOR. All plug-ins are derived from 'PNPlugIn'. The CTOR connects 'this' to a list of plug-in instances. A plug-in list is local for one DLL. You can also see that it is possible to create multiple plug-ins for one DLL.

3. Yes, you can do it in this way
But remember that the multi-core support is practically turned off when the whole image is given as a tile. In addition, support for large images is also disabled. Unless you have a 64-bit version of Picturenaut. But the 64-bit version is not yet there.

I hope I could help a little.

Marc