UI: Buttons for "Original", "Split", & "Filter" modes

Just a thought...

It might be nice to have buttons on the top toolbar for the various view modes.

Those being the current split/wipe view, and Filter result view, and one extra view that behaves like the FF2 "original" view. (I'll explain the FF2 mode in a moment.)

Additionally, it could be handy to have a checkbox for the "Actual" vs "Reduced" size preview modes. Or a drop menu, if you plan to have more than two preview sizes in future versions.


A little example UI image: (click to view full size)



FF2 "original" mode:
In FF2, when in the "original" view, no rendering took place. This was actually kind of handy.

More importantly though, when switching from "original" view to the filter result view, the result would render over the original image. This was nice because you could see how the result altered the image as it was rendering. The wipe mode in FF3 is awesome, but it doesn't quite replace that FF2 effect. In FF3, you can never actually see a result block get rendered over a section of the original image.

Granted in FF3 you can kind of recreate the effect. You could make a filter that just renders the original image, but if you have a big filter library, scrolling to the "Reset" filter every time you want to reset the view area to show the original image is not very practical.

The FF2 "original" effect seemed to be pretty handy even though in hind sight it's a bit difficult to articulate why. Then again, I may be the only one who found it useful. Perhaps it's just an odd sort of nostalgia.