Plugins can tell what color mode they support, possibly making conversions. One single plugin binary may contain many different effects. This allows easy support for a plugin which would interface other plugins standards. Each effect can be configured individually with its own private user interface. Plugins can apply their effect on the bitmap itself, which can save a lot of memory and CPU time if the effect is done only on a limited part of the image.
Optimisation is done to use as few bitmaps as possible.
An overlay will be used if your video card supports a mode which the last plugins allows for overlays. This makes that an overlay will be used if possible, but only if the plugin specifically specifies that it allows that feature. Mosaic This plugin creates a mosaic of images coming from the different channels as they are scanned. Drawer Very simple plugin which uses BView drawing APIs to draw in the bitmap. It simply draws a simple text over the bitmap.