Color Resolution - using this dialog you can change the color "depth" of the active image. For some applications you may want to reduce the color depth or increase it to allow the inclusion of additional color information or make certain special effects operations look better. Possible values are from 1 (monochrome, a depth of either black or white) up to 32 bit, which contains every possible color plus a plane for transparency.

You can effect how an image that is reduced to a level below "optimum" is dithered (which means colors "close to the original" are approximated by certain pixel changes). There are several possible dithering options from which you can choose here, and the final result will vary significantly based on the original image, its original color depth, and patterns within it.

Black and White - converts the current image to a black and white image. You can enter a black level between 0 and 100. A value of 0 means a white image, a value of 100 means a black image. You can drag the slider back and forth instead of manually entering a value if you prefer. This way you also get a preview of your changes in real-time.

The change to your image is reflected in the preview window provided on the dialog.

Halftone - applies a halftone screen (similar to shooting a screen for monochromatic printing) to the active image. You can change the angle of the screen (how it is applied across the image) by moving the slider control or entering a value into the angle box.

You may have to experiment with the screen angle to get the desired results, and every image accepts half-toning differently based on its complexity and type of content. Images with very fine line content, light colored text, or plenty of diagonal lines often do not halftone well.

Gray Scale - converts the image to grayscale, which is akin to a "black and white" photograph. The image's chromatic data is converted to values of gray. You may want to do this, for example, to print a color image on a laser printer that supports grayscale printing.

HyperSnap-DX 5's conversion may provide better results than the printer driver's engine when sending color images to a grayscale laser. This varies by printer driver an other issues.

Color Correction - adjusts the colors of the whole image or selected, using the following 5 controls: brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and gamma correction.

Invert Black and White - this function reverses the "polarity" of black and white content in the image. If your image doesn't contain black or white components (for example it's solid colors with neither black or white) this function will have no effect.

Invert Colors - you can turn positive images (such as scans of photographs) into reversal color, and you can turn negative images (such as scans of camera negatives) into positive images by toggling their state here.

Substitute Colors - This dialog lets you pick colors and then replacement values to use to overwrite the original values. The dialog is easy to use, and if you need to replace colors in an image, you can be up and running in just a few moments. You Add a color to replace, then using the Old color boxes on the bottom left, enter a value—or use the color picker—to choose the color you want changed. Then using the New Color boxes, enter manually (or use the picker) select a color to use to overwrite the old color.

Swapping can get colorful.

The power of this feature is easy to miss at first glance. But think about it for a moment and you'll see just how powerful it can be. It can turn a positive black and white image capture into a negative, can "remove" solid color areas from an image almost like a "matte" program, and do any number of things. The "programmatic" nature of the function (being able to set up multiple colors to swap or replace) makes it a very resourceful tool almost without bounds. Things that took you a half hour before (such as dropping out a background) can now happen automatically.

You can substitute one or many colors during this operation. For example, you could change all white pixels (values 255 255 255) to black pixels (000,000,000), and all pure red pixels (255,000,000) to pure blue pixels (000,000,255). "Program" in as many changes as you need by clicking the Add button every time you need a new function.

In addition to changing, you can swap colors by choosing Swap, below the color value boxes, instead of the default Replace. This is like "passing the butter" on the table and giving the "bread" in exchange.

If you're doing a group of captures and want, for example, to have the process you specify here applied to all images, check Automatically apply to all captured images. This is a slick way to have a purple background (for example) cleared away on a collection of desktop captures destined for publication (for example). You can have your purple desktop turned to white (or black) after capture and during the subsequent saving.

Unique Colors - although an image may be defined as a 256 (8 bit) or 16 million (24 bit) color, it may actually only have a limited number of the available colors in use. To view that value here, activate this function.

Guide to color dipping:

If you're about to change the color resolution (also called color "bit depth" of an image, sometimes previewing the unique colors in use may provide a key as to how far down in total color count you can go before the image degrades beyond use. For example: a 256 color image with only 30 colors in actual use can probably be dropped to 16 colors without terrible degradation—but a drop below that would not be desirable and would produce a scratchy-looking dot-filled mess in most cases.