Presentations can be used to show the height field in another way than as a false color map of the heights. Several presentation methods are implemented, including shading, gradient filters and edge detectors. It is also possible to superimpose an arbitrary data field over another one as the presentation.

When you use data with a superimposed presentation in data processing functions or tools the results are always computed from the original data – presentations are only a visualization mode. As presentations can be computationaly intensive to calculate, they are not automatically updated when the underlying data change.

Figure 3.7.  Visualization of masks and presentations. If the user looks from above they can be imagined as stacked as in the picture.

Masks are used for special areal selections (e.g. grains, defects or factes with certain orientation). Masks can have any shape and within the data window they can be visualized by a color overlayed over the data. The mask color and opacity can be changed in the right-click context menu of the data window. Mask are created by various modules and it is also possible to manually modify them with Mask Editor tool which can invert, grow, and shrink masks and draw or undraw various shapes on the mask. A few basic mask operations are also available in Data Process → Mask menu.

Several functions require a mask and they then operate on the mask and/or the data it marks, e.g. interpolation of data under mask or grain statistics. Some statistical functions for masked areas can be found under “grain” functions as these functions are typically used for grains, however, you can use them for masks of any origin. Other functions allow to limit the area they operate on with masks, e.g. the statistical quantities tool or plane leveling.

Both masks and presentations can be removed from the data by functions in the right-click menu of the data window, or with keyboard shortcuts.

Figure 3.8.  Data in default false color representation (left), with superimposed mask (centre) and with shading presentation (right).