I.E. 'hidden image' maker

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If you are using Internet Explorer (any version able to load this page Smiling

, just select the above image (or go to "Edit => Select All", or press Ctrl-A). You may see a watermark with white letters forming a word "TEST". This only happens in IE, due to the specific way it masks the selected images to show their selected state. Firefox, for example, simply tints the image with bluish color. There are lots of jokes one can make using this simple principle. For example, all images on your homepage may have some "subliminal" messages. Adobe PhotoShop is perfectly suitable to make such 'Hidden Images' by hand; in fact, my inspiration was a tutorial made by Matt Kment to do this. But if you are too lazy and/or do not have PhotoShop installed (UN*X users, for example), you can use this small program I wrote in Perl to automate the "steganographic" process. I wrote it using ImageMagick^TM library (so it's required to successfully run the program). It is a command line program, but it is simple enough to use, and it has an advantage to be integrable into your own scripts/programs (you can even setup your server to embed your company logo into all graphics of your site, but this will overload the server's CPU and RAM too quickly). I called my program "Internet Explorer Mask'O'Matic". Take a look at it's startup screen:

Internet Explorer Mask'O'Matic v1.0 by Stas 
Grab yours at http://sysdlabs.hypermart.net/ 

Inspirated by some mad stuff by Lem0nHead
Based on Photoshop 'Hidden Image' Guide (http://www.atomicwienerdog.com/ot/)
made by Matt Kment & suggested to me by xfalmp


ERROR: please give us --visible


 * Usage: MaskOMatic.pl 
 * Options (note that you can use syntaxes like --vis= --hid -out -p):
 --visible filename of image normally seen (required)
 --hidden filename of image seen when selected in IE (required)
 --output filename to write out, format is selected automatically
 using suffix provided (required)
 --percentage float value between 0 & 100; how much of hidden appears
 (optional, defaults to 50%)
 --quality JPEG/MIFF/PNG compression level (optional, DON'T USE!)
 --contrast flag, internal contrast reduction (optional)
 --test filename to dump preview of selected image (optional)

 * Notes:
 # Visible & hidden images doesn't need to have same size, when size
 doesn't matches then hidden image is rescaled using Lanczos filter
 # A huge set of image formats is supported (JPG, GIF, PNG for example)
 but I strongly advice you to write output in loseless format *only*
 (BMP, PNG, TGA) and *then* fine-tune contrast/brightness & save
 compressed in your favourite image editor (like GIMP)

 * Example:
 MaskOMatic.pl --vis bush.jpg --hid death.jpg --out sublim.bmp

Only 3 options are obligatory: --visible, --hidden & --output. You can abbreviate them as -v, -h & -o, respectively. "Visible" is an image that user sees by default. "Hidden" is what user sees when he/she selects the image. And "output" is the resulting image you can embed into your pages. It is also possible to use the "--test" option to preview the selected state of the output image without starting Internet Explorer. If it looks bad, you may play around with "--percentage" option, which specifies the 'weight' of the hidden image. The higher is this value, the greater is the hidden image visibility. If that's not enough to hide your image well (some things are pretty difficult to hide!), you can try to tune the output image with "--contrast" option, but I suggest you to use some GUI program to do that as you get the visual feedback instantly. I also suggest you to always save your output in the non-compressed lossless format (like BMP, TGA, TIFF), and then fine-tune the compression in some program specialized in it (GIMP has a nice compressor with visual feedback).