FixPix Documentation

FixPix Quick Help

As per the above great quote, this documentation was written in the hope that no one will need to read it, however until perfection is achieved it is provided here:

Note 👉

To dismiss this help window (or any other window shown in the FixPix application) just click the mouse anywhere in the shaded area around it or press the Esc key on your keyboard (yeah, that definitely needed explaining...)

Welcome to the FixPix image-processing application. This will serve as a quick getting started guide.

After Launch

When you launch FixPix, you'll see a loading animation for a few seconds (could take a bit longer the first time FixPix is launched). After loading is complete, you'll be able to browse your disk for images to process. For example, your first screen could look something like this:

Navigating

Click the folder icons ( ) to navigate to a specific folder.
To move up to a higher level directory, click the folder with the up arrow ()
For fast navigation to a higher level directory, click on the target directory in the breadcrumbs path that shows where you are currently at. So for the breadcrumbs path in the above example (), clicking on the 'data' part will navigate to the C:\data diredctory.
To move to a different disk drive, click the button corresponding to the disk drive you want to navigate to. In the above example, clicking the button will navigate to the D: drive.
👉 Note that FixPix will remember the directory you are in for each different drive on your disk.

File Ordering

You can change the order in which files appear as follows:

Clicking the button will sort the files by alphabetical order of their name. Continued clicks will toggle between ascending and descending alphabetical ordering
Clicking the button will sort the files by their creation date. Continued clicks will toggle between ascending and descending date ordering

File Selection

To perform actions on files, they first need to be selected. Additional action buttons will be available in the toolbar after selecting one or more files to process.

A file is selected simply by clicking on it
To clear a file from the selection list simply click on it again.

Below is an example of 3 files that were selected by clicking on them (notice that additional buttons are now avilable to process the selected files):

Actions on selected files

To inspect all selected files click the button. This will open a dialog window from which you can zoom in and inspect every selected image.
To clear all selected files, click the button
To delete all selected files, click the button. This will open a dialog window to confirm deleting the files.

Note 👉

All dialog windows can be dismissed by clicking the darker area around the dialog window or by pressing the Esc key on the keyboard

Comparing Two Files

When exactly two files are selected, an additional image comparison button becomes available (

) as can be seen in the example below:

Clicking this comparison button opens the image comparison window where you can move a slider left and right to see the detailed differences between the images, as shown below:

You can also simulateously zoom in and out of both images using the mouse wheel as well as simultaneously pan both images by dragging them with the mouse pointer.

As always, you can close this window by clicking outside the dialog window or by pressing the keyboard Esc key

Note 👉

The image on the left of the comparison window will be the image that was clicked first when selecting the files to compare

Finally - The Cool Stuff: Processing Images!

Select one or more images that you'd like to process (by clicking on them)
Click the process button ( ) in the toolbar. The image processing window will appear with the list of functions you can perform on the files you have selected:

👉 Notes:
- An illustration of what each function in the list does to an image is shown by the two pictures at the bottom of the window.
- The currently selected function is the one with a yellow background. You can select any of the available functions by scrolling and clicking the requested function or by using the up and down keys on your keyboard.
- You can type a search term in the 'Search' field to quickly filter the list of functions according to your search term. This becomes more handy once you install additional features,
Click the button to start processing the images.

The image processing for the files you've selected will start and you will see the elapsed processing time for each image that is being processed:

Note 👉

Processing time for each image will depend on many factors, such as the type of process being selected and the size of the image, therefore the time it takes to process an image can vary between a few seconds to even a few minutes (especially when running heavy duty AI processing on a large image)

When the image processing is completed you'll be able to see the processed image:

Even Cooler Stuff: Processing Images with AI!

Admittedly, the initial set of image processing functions that are bundled with FixPix are quite boring (other than perhaps Random Binary Dithering) and are available in any simple image processing sofware. What makes FixPix different is it's ability to import additional plugins, each of which can contain one ore more sophisticated image processing features (such as those that utilize deep neural networks).

The additional FixPix plugins with the more sophisticated features are readily available for installation from within FixPix. The reason they are not pre-installed is that they make use of large deep neural network models and would make the FixPix application size to large for a typical installation. Making them separately downloadable also gives you freedom to choose which feature you wish to install.

Installing FixPix Plugins

To see the list of additionaly available FixPix plugins (i.e, those with the cooler features...) first open the features window as previously described (by selecting a file to process and clicking the icon in the toolbar.

Check the 'Show uninstalled features' box as shown below:

A list of available FixPix plugins (2nd column) and their image processing features (3rd column) will appear in addition to the already installed features.

You can browse the list of uninstalled plugins in the same way that you'd navigate the installed plugins. When a feature of an uninstalled plugin is selected (in the example above, the "Fast Colorize" feature of the "Colorful Image Colorization" plugin), an

button will appear which will enable you to install the plugin with all the function it includes to your set of installed plugins (in this example "Colorful Image Colorization" has only one feature).

Note 👉

You don't need to install a FixPix plugin to see the effect of its functions on an image - browsing through the available functions of plugins that are not yet installed will also illustrate what their effect does to sample images displayed below the list

Select the Fixpix plugin you wish to install by clicking (or navigating with the up down arrows of the keyboard) on any function it includes. Once you've selected the FixPix plugin you wish to install (in this case the "Colorful Image Colorization" plugin), click the button to start installing it. You will then see an indication that your plugin is being downloaded for installation:

Most of the FixPix plugins are large so the time to download will vary depending on your network speed.
After the plugin is downloaded, it might need to install some additional dependencies. If so, the process of additional installations will be shown at the top right of the features window (example show below):
After the Fixpix plugin installation has completed, you can test any feature you've downloaded the plugin for by selecting it from the set of new plugin features and clicking the button.

This concludes the quick introduction to the FixPix image processing application. If you have any questions or suggestions please send them to info@fixpix.net. All emails are read and personally responded to.