VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 17 2007 - 12:22:25 CST

Mario,
  The Windows BMP format created by Tachyon is a standard 24-bit color
bitmap file, nothing unusual. I'm not sure why GIMP fails to recognize
it, but I wrote that code years ago and have been using it with many other
image processing tools without trouble. A quick read through the code
and the Wikipedia BMP format page didn't turn anything up as being
suspicious, most likely the GIMP image loaders don't understand all of
the possible variations of the Windows BMP format:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_bitmap

Tachyon can emit images in several other formats if you prefer to work
with Targa, PPM, PNG and JPEG (when compiled in), etc. The newest version
of Tachyon also supports 48-bit color Photoshop PSD files, and 48-bit
color PPM files. If you have a particular variation of the Windows BMP
format you'd like to use with Tachyon, or another image format that's
more convenient to work with, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
In the case of Windows BMP, you'll need to tell me which combination
of bit depth and encoding you're after, since there are probably at least
5 or 10 different combinations of parameters one could use.

  John

On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 06:34:46PM +0100, Mario Valle wrote:
>
> On Windows GIMP refuses to load the BMP images created with Tachion
> rendering from VMD 1.8.5 .
> Also plain ImageMagick "convert" creates only grayscale images from them.
> The problem is that Tachion produces images of type PseudoClass
>
> $ identify plot.dat.bmp
> plot.dat.bmp BMP 504x478 PseudoClass 256c 706kb
>
> To have usable images you have to convert them this way:
> $ convert plot.dat.bmp -type TrueColor plot.dat.png
>
> Well, it is not a big problem, I want just share my workaround. But is
> it something simple to fix?
> Ciao!
> mario
>
> --
> Ing. Mario Valle
> Visualization Group |
> http://www.cscs.ch/~mvalle
> Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) | Tel: +41 (91) 610.82.60
> v. Cantonale Galleria 2, 6928 Manno, Switzerland | Fax: +41 (91) 610.82.82 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078