Saves rotated 180 degrees and in greyscale. Why?

[mrPilloft]

Hi! Have been searching hi/lo and can't find the answer to this one. If I take screenshot of a horse (!), in SC it ends up saved rotated 180 degrees and in greyscale. In the editor it's still in color. If I save another version of it, it's still rotated/greyscale. I've tried the 'Post-Capture Options' > 'Grey outside Active Window' both on and off. No difference. Where are these settings set and how to turn them off?

[mrPilloft]

Found another unsolved post regarding this: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=47645.0

[mouser]

That's normal.. US export law of 1929 requires all horse screenshots to be stored rotated 180 degrees and saved in grayscale.
[the exception is miniature horses and mule-horse halfbreeds, which may be stored as any angle < 90 but must be saved in 32-bit full color]

[mouser]

Just kidding of course. Can you give me a screenshot of your Image File Format options tab?  I'm curious if the problem might be related to the compression level or color depth setting..

And a question -- did you take the original screenshot using Screenshot Captor (from a web page for example), OR is the original image from a camera and you are just editing it in Screenshot Captor.

Also, I see you're using an older version of screenshot captor -- can you upgrade your version of Screenshot Captor, and see if the problem remains when you re-save.. If so,

[mrPilloft]

Sorry. While you were typing, I solved the problem by shifting back to saving in PNG format. I will however try to recreate the issue. I'm by the way using Win10 and portable version of SC.

To your questions:
1) "Did you take the original screenshot using Screenshot Captor..?" The screenshot of the brown horse is taken by SC... of a Chrome browser window that's behind SC. The screenshot of SC and Chrome was taken with Win10's Snip & Sketch tool (Shift+Win+S)

2) Upgrade! Will do... Thx

[mouser]

I'd really like to figure out what might be causing the problem -- there's no reason you shouldn't be able to save in jpg..

[mrPilloft]

I reverted to JPG and with the settings you see, it saves as jpg, rotated, B/W. Cute and of course aligned with US '29 export law 


Upgrade next...

[mouser]

how strange..

and if you double click on the image in the thumbnail to make it open in an external image browser, is it rotated or right-side-up?

[mrPilloft]

I started with two pictures in this test:
1) A colour JPG of the horse: horse.jpg and...
2) The B/W, upside down one: horseUpDown.jpg
3) Then I loaded each in SC and saved a new version of each: horse_ver001.jpg and horseUpDown_ver001.jpg
4) To the left you see how they look in Explorer (same in other viewers).


Anything I didn't cover? Want the pictures to inspect?
(did this still using Win10 and v4.31.2)

The strange thing is that ALL HORSES are shown the correct way in SC. In other viewers they are shown as you see them in the Explorer window.

[mrPilloft]

Just upgraded to v4.36.2 and with the same settings (JPG), it works! Color, 0 degrees rotation (copied the old ScreenshotCaptor.ini) 

[mouser]

Image files can have a rotation variable set in them telling the viewing program how to rotate the image (think taking a photo with a cell phone and the cell phone may be rotated -- that info is stored with the photo).

The thumbnail and windows explorer, may not know how to rotate the image to correct for this variable in the image (though SC at least the new version does).

So it seems like the rotation variable is being set for that image.. but I don't understand why..  Do you ever bring photos into sc to edit them? It's possible that sc is loading a photo with a rotation flag set and then is not clearing it when saving new images.. and so the flag is continuing to be set on new captures.. I should be able to write a quick fix to check that..  And I can maybe show on status bar when an image is loaded that has non-standard rotation flag set..

[mouser]

Ok so the new version is fixing it.. that's great.. There is new code in the new version to properly handle images that come in rotated (for example taking with camera rotated), but it sounds like the fix also solved this.

[mrPilloft]

I'm aware of those EXIF tags. And no, haven't loaded pictures I've taken myself. Just screenshots.
(https://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/exif-orientation.html)