Advanced settings are accessed by opening the drawer attached to the main Plaster window. Click on the round button to the right of the image area. This button will open and close the drawer. If the drawer is closed, the Advanced Settings are completely ignored. If you hide them away, you never have to worry about them. With the exception of the Outgoing scale size setting, all advanced settings are ignored when the drawer is closed.
Note that an image's initial dimensions are displayed in the drawer. When looking at a preview, the resultant square dimension is also displayed if differnet from the initial.
They may not look it, but all folder icons are square. By default Plaster performs all of the advanced settings on the initial source image. If your image is rectangular, it will keep that look when plastered. If you wish to initially square your image so that the icon has a larger visible area, you can do so with the initial squaring operation button. The initial squaring operation button is only enabled when the initial image is not already square. The following values are possible:
- None
- This is the don't do anything option.
- Transparent Fill
- The image is squared to its largest dimension with the added space being transparent. The change made by this operation is best viewed by setting a visible border.
- Crop Top-Left
- The image is squared by cropping to its smallest dimension. If the image is wider than it is tall, the left of the image will be preserved. If the image is taller than it is wide, the top of the image will be preserved.
- Crop Center
- The image is squared by cropping to its smallest dimension. The center of the the image will be preserved.
- Crop Bottom-Right
- The image is squared by cropping to its smallest dimension. If the image is wider than it is tall, the right of the image will be preserved. If the image is taller than it is wide, the bottom of the image will be preserved.
Remember that Plaster always produces squared images. If no initial squaring function is performed, the image will effectively be square by transparent fill after performing any other advanced functionality.
When Plaster creates an icon, it attempts to use as much of the icon area as possible. If the icon plastered onto a folder looks too large relative to other icons, you can elect to leave a transparent border around the image. This effectively causes the image to shrink. You choose the size of the transparent border as a percentage of the initial image in the range of 0 to 50. You can also specify the value as a number of pixels by entering a negative number. Note that the transparent border is applied outside the working image.
You can have Plaster draw a visible border around the icon. The visible border size is a percentage of the initial image in the range of 0 to 50. You can also specify the value as a number of pixels by entering a negative number. Note that the visible border is applied outside the working image.
If your original image contained transparency, your icon may look weird when drawing a visible border. This is because the border is drawn around the entire image, regardless of transparency. Filling the background will probably make the icon look better. Check the Fill colour option and choose a fill colour.
Plaster can also round the corners of the image. The x and y radius values are calculated based on a percentage. The value entered can be in the range of 0 to 50. A value of 0 means no rounding and 50 will effectively make a square image round. A value of 12 is a good value if you simply want slightly rounded corners. You can use the disclosure button to the right of the field to choose from a list of built in values.
You can elect to have an image converted to greyscale. Note that this manipulation is done last. This means that the colours applied to the visible border and fill will be converted to grayscale.
Plaster can also place your icon on top of a standard Mac folder icon. Change the value of No Folder to Light Folder or Dark Folder.
When dragging an image out of Plaster, you may elect to have images proportionally scaled down if they are greater than a certain pixel size. Some of the above advanced settings, enlarge the image canvas. This is irrelevant when plastering a folder as the system handles scaling if required. 0 implies do not scale. You specify the value in the Outgoing scale size field.
The best way to become familiar with these settings is to play with them while viewing a preview.
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