Speed and Framework

I've been working on implementing nice navigation, and so far it looks very good IMHO. Fluid scaling and panning has been put in so far. Easy and intuitive navigation is essential, so that'll be a major part of this application beside speed and high image quality.

Last night, I got simple bilinear Bayer interpolation done in hardware. Now the full-size RAW loads in about a second. I also got basic Exposure and Whitebalance compensation made, so now I'm getting to some of the more interesting feature. Compiling in Release mode is a problem though, since the VC+ 2003 compiler b0rks on the high quality Bayer software interpolation, when Global Optimizations are turned on. Thanks MS!

But mainly I've been doing framework for the application, to ease implementation of the upcoming features. There are still a few hacks in the current design, but it's all shaping up quite nicely.

I'm still considering how many renderpasses to do. Basicly the dilemma is between complex shaders or many offscreen textures. I think graphic card memory limitation will probably determine how many renditions will have to be made, since a 3000x2000 pixel FP16 texture is about 16 megs. Subtract the initial (uploaded) texture and the (double buffered) screen display, and there isn't that many textures that can be done on a 128meg card. Rotation and perspective correction will most likely require a render-to-texture when they are to be implemented, but let's worry about that when it needs to be implemented. So far it just seems sensible to be quite conservative about texture usage.

As a final note, I registered the project at SourceForge, since I'd like to have a CVS repository and somewhere for testers to return feedback when that time arrives.