[Bf-committers] image-save + .blend save destroys work without warning!

[Sean Olson]

Popup warning are pretty controversial and you are probably not going to get
to see them in Blender in my opinion.  I think there are a couple of
solutions:

1. When you save in a manner that will lose data, a warning could display in
the header info bar.  I do think these warnings are not displayed quite long
enough currently.   Additionally, it would be nice if warnings linked to a
relevant docs page in the wiki.  Simply clicking on the warning would open a
browser and take you to the relevant page explaining the warning.

2. Perhaps a detailed tooltip is in order.  Not sure if this would really
work very well on the "save image" in the menu though.  Saving an image is
one of those things that people just expect to 'work' and don't feel they
need to read docs on.

-Sean

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Morten Mikkelsen <mikkelsen7 at gmail.com>wrote:

> I've found that most blender users incl. advanced ones generally don't know
> this about blender
> so I think it needs to be discussed. Let me first explain how this works.
>
> What happens is that when you save out an image to file and then
> subsequently save
> your .blend and then reload your .blend then the image buffer will be
> reloaded from
> the image you saved.
>
> As an example let's say you went through the hard work of hand painting a
> floating point image
> and then save out, in Blender, as png, tga or even tiff (which is setup to
> 8
> bits). If you then save the .blend file (and reload)
> then all your precision is lost and cannot be recovered. No warning is
> given
> and no options are presented
> when saving out an image.
>
> A similar example is alpha. Most of the image formats support alpha but for
> whatever reason Blender
> does not save alpha with all of them. If you pick such a format, save, then
> save the .blend
> and finally reload .blend then the alpha will be lost.
>
> I was hoping to have a discussion here on committers and hear what you all
> think is a good solution.
>
> I can personally understand why blender chooses to reload images from file
> since saving the image buffers with .blend file directly (to preserve them)
> is just asking for an explosion
> in file size. But in my opinion there should be a warning when there will
> be
> loss of data associated with a save (when its not just straight
> pass-through).
> Also I would prefer that when you do save out that you should be presented
> with options available for the chosen file format
> such as bit depths and number of channels or something.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Morten Mikkelsen
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>



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