A Frame is one of the pictures you initially loaded into CombineZ. New Frames can also be created while processing. All frames can be viewed by pressing the Up and Down Arrow keys. You can go directly to the top Frame by pressing Control+Up and to the bottom by pressing Control+Down.
Frames can be divided into two types: Used and Unused. Unused Frames are marked by an '*' next to their name on the Title Line of the main window. All frames initially loaded are Used; Frames created later on are usually Unused. You can change the Used/Unused state of a Frame with the functions on the Choose Frames to Use submenu of the Stack menu. Most functions on the stack menu will not use frames flagged with an '*'. The following are exceptions: Fill Gaps and filtering the Depthmap, when there are Unused Frames between Used ones. This is because these functions can not cope with discontinuities, and the user may have purposefully painted pixels from Unused Frames onto the Picture.
Only Used Frames will be reloaded by Reload All Frames on the Undo menu. Unused Frames will not be reloaded by Reload all Frames. They can be reloaded individually.
To create a new Frame as a copy of an existing Frame, a copy of the Picture, or a copy of Out, you must first make the source Frame visible, then use New from Visible. The new frame will be Unused and placed at the top of the Stack. In a similar way you can Replace with Visible, but in this case the Used state is not changed. Copy Visible to Out is useful when exporting Rectangles because Out is included with them.
The following Frame menu functions are sometimes useful. Make Transparent makes black pixels transparent so that on Paste Active Over the original will show through the holes. You can Fix some pixels to stop them from changing if you wish. Make Monochrome does just that. Create Background creates a new Frame at the bottom of the Stack, it is of a uniform colour equal to the average of the Active Rectangle.
The functioning of the remaining functions should be obvious from their names.
An important use for Frames is as an input for many one and two Frame functions and Filter Active Frame. For instance if you wish to sharpen Out, first create a new Frame from it, then set up your Highpass Filter and filter this new frame. The result will be placed in Out overwriting the original but a copy will still be intact in the new Frame.