Arles 7 released
Arles 7.0 has just been released. It features a new Image Effects window, new Image Text label options, such as drop shadows and outlines, full image transparency support and much more.
Image and Thumbnail Effects Windows
The main new feature is the Image Effects window. It is a powerful replacement for the old Border, Add Text and Add Image Logo windows. You can now add multiple texts and logos to your images. There is no limit to the amount of items you can add. The same image effects are also available for the thumbnails, which means you can add texts and logos to thumbnails too.
New Image Effects Window
Effects can be dragged and dropped in the correct order. Also new are the Grayscale and Sepia effects. The Text effect has gotten more powerful too with drop shadows and outlines, which help making your text stand out more from the image.
Movie and subfolder effects
As you probably know Arles can generate galleries with subfolders and movies. To make it easier for the visitors of your galleries to recognize if a thumbnail links to a subfolder or a movie, a new Movie and Subfolder effects option is added. With this custom effect you can give movie thumbnails another border or add a text label, like "MOVIE", to make the thumbnail stand out from the other thumbnails.
Two startup icons
Since long the Arles Image Web Page Creator has existed out of the two main parts: the Arles Web Page Creator window and the Arles Image Explorer. To make it easy to start either one of them quickly Arles 7 will have two Windows startup icons. One to start the Arles Image Explorer and one to start the Web Page Creator.
Two startup icons
Image transparency support
Arles now fully supports alpha channel transparency when editing and saving thumbnails and images. Effects like drop shadows, masks and image texts will all show the background behind it. The only thing you have to do is select PNG with transparency information as image output format in the Advanced Thumbnail Options window or Advanced Images Options window. Note, that Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox webbrowser are required to show galleries with transparency properly. Internet Explorer 6 contains a bug preventing transparent areas from showing up properly.
Below is an example screenshot showing how the blue water background shows up behind the Owl. The rotated text and its drop shadow - added by Arles - in the top left corner are also fully transparency aware.
For those who preferring real galleries over screenshots: Below are a few example galleries with transparency as created by Arles 7:
- Example gallery with transparent images with text (Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox required)
- Example gallery with transparent drop shadows (Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox required)
- Example gallery with transparent masks and sepia colored images (Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox required)
Other new stuff
Other new features include text-only index pages, page transition effects (fade, opening doors, checkerboard, etc.), quicker thumbnail loading, outlined text, drop shadows for texts, notification sounds after long operations and much more. A full list of changes is available in our forum.