Sampo Niskanen wrote:

Hi,

In previous versions of Gimp, the crop tool had the option to resize the canvas, but not to crop the layers. This functionality has been removed in recent versions (or at least I can't find it). This totally disrupted my regular workflow with all photos.

Hi!

What do you think about making the layers not be cropped if Allow Growing is checked? Making the canvas larger generally does not affect layer sizes when that option is checked, so not affecting the layer sizes when making the canvas smaller with the option checked kind of makes sense. Long term we should get rid the need for a user to manually manage the size of a layer, that can an should be handled internally.

I have attached a patch for trunk that introduces the proposed behaviour. Even if it is a small change this is a feature change so we should not commit this to the GIMP 2.6 branch.

AFAIK none of the modifier keys are currently used by the crop tool, so could this feature be reinstated to the tool? I recall that a shift-click was used to shrink the canvas instead of performing regular cropping.

Modifier keys are used when adjusting the shape of the crop rectangle, but currently not when doing the actual crop. If would prefer if we can avoid to introduce additional modifier keys.

BR, Martin

On Sunday 21 December 2008 13:45:37 Martin Nordholts wrote:

What do you think about making the layers not be cropped if Allow Growing is checked? Making the canvas larger generally does not affect layer sizes when that option is checked, so not affecting the layer sizes when making the canvas smaller with the option checked kind of makes sense.

while logic makes sense, i think the option should be renamed if this is done. It is very unintuitive. I would never think of checking an option "Allow Growing" to prevent layers getting cropped. From photo cutting POV it is a good feature to have tho, missed it many a time in my photo editing. Perhaps it should be called "Cut/grow canvas only"?

Best, Alexia

Alexia Death wrote:

On Sunday 21 December 2008 13:45:37 Martin Nordholts wrote:

What do you think about making the layers not be cropped if Allow Growing is checked? Making the canvas larger generally does not affect layer sizes when that option is checked, so not affecting the layer sizes when making the canvas smaller with the option checked kind of makes sense.

while logic makes sense, i think the option should be renamed if this is done. It is very unintuitive. I would never think of checking an option "Allow Growing" to prevent layers getting cropped.

The Allow Growing option was actually a quick hack to be able to release GIMP 2.4, we never really wanted that checkbox in the first place. When we discussed this back then we rather wanted the crop rectangle to merely snap against the canvas edges but other than that not being constrained.

Perhaps a better approach is to only crop the layers if 'Current layer only' option is checked and then remove that option too when auto-managed layer sizes is in place.

- Martin

Sampo Niskanen wrote:

In previous versions of Gimp, the crop tool had the option to resize the
canvas, but not to crop the layers. This functionality has been removed
in recent versions (or at least I can't find it). This totally disrupted
my regular workflow with all photos.

Though the highlighting feature in the crop tool gives a better view on
the result, it never was exactly to my liking the first time. Therefore I
always only shrank the canvas, and then used the move tool and canvas resizing to fine-tune the positioning, and finally flattened the image.

so the core of the discussion is your personal workaround for the highlighting feature in GIMP 2.2.

Can I invite you to work with "Highlight: off" in GIMP 2.4, for a month to get the hang of it, and report back how it is going?

--ps

founder + principal interaction architect man + machine interface works

http://mmiworks.net/blog : on interaction architecture

Sampo Niskanen wrote:

On Sun, 21 Dec 2008, peter sikking wrote:

so the core of the discussion is your personal workaround for the highlighting feature in GIMP 2.2.

Can I invite you to work with "Highlight: off" in GIMP 2.4, for a month
to get the hang of it, and report back how it is going?

Excuse me? I'm not sure what you are referring to.

oh, sorry, wrong (latest-stable) version number.

I was trying to find out if the new (since 2.4) crop with its improved handles would work for you. if not, why not? (now a question of the past)

The point is that it is impossible to perform a non-destructive crop in
Gimp 2.6 (other than using Canvas Size as a workaround, which is extremely
non-visual). I often do additional editing after the preliminary crop,
and want to be able to fine-tune the positioning afterwards. This should
be made possible.

now we are getting closer to the requirements you have. for which the canvas border is an unfortunate workaround.

When I had to think of a proper solution for this problem in general, I would have to understand where the needs of many, many users for a non-destructive crop are. And figure out what non-destructive crop really means. Oxymoron, or saving a certain rectangular selection?

right now using a rect-select (move rect instead of the content), copy visible and paste-as-new-image look to be a better work around.

Thank you Martin for the quick patch. I re-built the Ubuntu packages with
the patch and it works great! However, I agree with others that the option name should be changed or some other option used for this.

can I strongly suggest not to apply this patch in svn?

this is now a complex issue, with non-destructive crop, resizing of layers/canvas, normal crop all in the mix. no time for a quick hack.

--ps

founder + principal interaction architect man + machine interface works

http://mmiworks.net/blog : on interaction architecture

On Sun, 2008-12-21 at 16:55 +0100, peter sikking wrote: [...]

When I had to think of a proper solution for this problem in general, I would have to understand where the needs of many, many users for a non-destructive crop are. And figure out what non-destructive crop really means. Oxymoron, or saving a certain rectangular selection?

I think really it's an interactive/visual Resize Canvas and maybe better not conflated with crop. The new adjustable rectangles are a huge improvement and are becoming pervasive, so in that sense I can see how the user interface could be the same as the crop tool, or for that matter as rectangle selection, but canvas size and print rectangle in the digital world aren't really the same as cropping.

Liam

peter sikking wrote:

Sampo Niskanen wrote

Thank you Martin for the quick patch. I re-built the Ubuntu packages with
the patch and it works great! However, I agree with others that the option name should be changed or some other option used for this.

can I strongly suggest not to apply this patch in svn?

this is now a complex issue, with non-destructive crop, resizing of layers/canvas, normal crop all in the mix. no time for a quick hack.

I agree that the quick patch that made layers not be cropped if Allow growing was checked was a bad idea and I will not apply it.

But what about making layers not be cropped by default and only crop them if Current layer only is checked in the crop tool options? That's also a one-line patch and is compatible with our future plans to make layer sizes automanaged and GIMP generally more non-destructive. Currently I don't see any use case that would severely break because of this change, so unless someone objects I will commit this change in a couple of days.

- Martin

Hi,

On Thu, 2008-12-25 at 13:49 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:

But what about making layers not be cropped by default and only crop them if Current layer only is checked in the crop tool options? That's also a one-line patch and is compatible with our future plans to make layer sizes automanaged and GIMP generally more non-destructive.

This change would be quite problematic. An image with the layers cropped to the image boundaries is in some ways different to an image where the layers extend the image boundaries. It takes up more memory and processing it uses more CPU cycles. Your proposed change makes it difficult to trim an image in order to save memory and processing time for the following image processing steps. Of course it's a nice side-effect that you can tweak the crop rectangle later if you kept all layers at their full size. But as long as GIMP applies all processing to the full layers, even if only a small rectangle of them is shown, this is problematic.

The proposed change will also cause problems with file plug-ins. Many save plug-ins that only deal with single layer images don't look at the layer offsets and image size. They will save the full drawable, which is probably not what the user expects after having cropped the image.

Sven

On Thursday 25 December 2008 19:04:27 Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

On Thu, 2008-12-25 at 13:49 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:

But what about making layers not be cropped by default and only crop them if Current layer only is checked in the crop tool options? That's also a one-line patch and is compatible with our future plans to make layer sizes automanaged and GIMP generally more non-destructive.

This change would be quite problematic.

I agree. I still think that making the allow growing option to leave layers alone and renaming it "Cut/Grow canvas only" is best best solution. Its conceptually clear. You will be only operating on the canvas.

--Alexia

Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

On Thu, 2008-12-25 at 13:49 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote

But what about making layers not be cropped by default and only crop them if Current layer only is checked in the crop tool options? That's also a one-line patch and is compatible with our future plans to make layer sizes automanaged and GIMP generally more non-destructive.

This change would be quite problematic. An image with the layers cropped to the image boundaries is in some ways different to an image where the layers extend the image boundaries. It takes up more memory and processing it uses more CPU cycles. Your proposed change makes it difficult to trim an image in order to save memory and processing time for the following image processing steps. Of course it's a nice side-effect that you can tweak the crop rectangle later if you kept all layers at their full size. But as long as GIMP applies all processing to the full layers, even if only a small rectangle of them is shown, this is problematic.

The proposed change will also cause problems with file plug-ins. Many save plug-ins that only deal with single layer images don't look at the layer offsets and image size. They will save the full drawable, which is probably not what the user expects after having cropped the image.

Hi

That is a good argument against making the proposed change and a couple of points were made that I didn't think about. I will not go ahead with my proposed change at this point.

- Martin

On Mon, 2008-12-29 at 08:47 +0200, Sampo Niskanen wrote:

[...]

I hardly ever wish to grow the image with the crop tool,

I do that fairly often, and although a separate graphical way to change the image size would be just as good for me, I do sometimes grow a single layer that way.

while I nearly always want the crop to be non-destructive.

And here I'm the other way round. I admit I didn't know there was ever a non-destructive one, though. But one reason I crop the image is to save memory. And on a 14,000 x 10,000 pixel rgb image, you can actually save quite a bit of memory if you are cropping down to (say) 5,000 x 7,000.

Select the crop range and click on it to crop, shift-click to perform a non-destructive crop.

or hit Enter to confirm, and control-enter or something??

It would need a status-bar message in order to be discoverable.

I do still sometimes curse if I have spent a minute or two setting up a cropping rectangle, and accidentally click instead of dragging, as this crops, and there's no undo... that is, undo doesn't restore the pending crop rectangle. So I have tried to train myself not to click...

Liam

Samp, I didn't look at the archive -- but the functionality you are seeking appears to be in the rectangle selection tool. Select a rectangle, move your cursor within the selected rectangle. If it's close to an edge, you can move the edge. If it's not, you can move the rectangle.

Actually, if this is what you want, I'm surprised you didn't already find it. If it's not, then I guess I don't know what you want.

Sampo Niskanen wrote:

Hi,

I'm leaving the Gimp list now as I'm not actively intrested in the internals of Gimp's development. I just hope that my suggestion from December of restoring the non-destructive crop functionality (which sparked quite some discussion) will not be forgotton - this is a simple feature that I have been missing for several Gimp releases now. Once I got used to working with the non-destructive crop, it is really painful trying to get by without it.

(Below is my original mail for context, the discussion can be found in the archives.)

Thanks overall for the amazing development of Gimp! I'm now off to continue on an open source project of my own...

Best regards, Sampo

On Sun, 21 Dec 2008, Sampo Niskanen wrote:

Hi,

In previous versions of Gimp, the crop tool had the option to resize the canvas, but not to crop the layers. This functionality has been removed in recent versions (or at least I can't find it). This totally disrupted my regular workflow with all photos.

Though the highlighting feature in the crop tool gives a better view on the result, it never was exactly to my liking the first time. Therefore I always only shrank the canvas, and then used the move tool and canvas resizing to fine-tune the positioning, and finally flattened the image.

With newer versions I have to use the crop tool to get an idea of the size, write down the dimensions, cancel the crop operation, manually change the canvas size and re-position the image - and then start the fine-tuning. This is extremely frustrating.

AFAIK none of the modifier keys are currently used by the crop tool, so could this feature be reinstated to the tool? I recall that a shift-click was used to shrink the canvas instead of performing regular cropping.

If this feature is available otherwise, please tell me.

Sincerely,

Sampo Niskanen (spniskan@cc.hut.fi) wrote:

The point is changing the canvas size, but leaving the layers uncropped. The current crop tool always crops the layers to the selected area, so you cannot fine-tune the position afterwards - previously there was the option of cropping only the canvas, and the layers still stretched beyond the canvas.

The current development branch has the menu entry "Image -> Fit Canvas to Selection", which - together with the rectangle select tool - does provide exactly this functionality.

I hope this helps, Simon

Hi,

On Sat, 2009-03-28 at 10:24 +0200, Sampo Niskanen wrote:

However, I'd say that this is quite an unintuitive way of performing cropping. If I want to crop an image, my attention goes to the features offered by the crop tool, not the selection tool.

That's the whole point. You don't want to crop the image, you want to enlarge it. That's exactly why we moved this functionality out of the Crop tool. A user who wants to enlarge the image is never going to look for this in the Crop tool. It simply does not belong there.

Therefore I'd still
consider the "non-destructive" crop feature at least a usability enhancement. At least personally I would assume that the crop tool of a professional tool like Gimp would offer this option as well. (Not sure whether PS has it.)

So you would also assume that you can use a scissor to lengthen your trousers? No, you wouldn't. So why do you assume that a crop tool would allow you to enlarge the image? Probably only because it used to do that in an earlier version. I admit that this is problematic. We could certainly need some more help with the user manual to cover such changes better. It would be nice if we had an updated user manual with each release that points out how certain work-flows changed. Then the GIMP user interface could continue to become more intuitive and easier to use for new users, without distracting long-time GIMP users. I am sure that the GIMP docs team would agree with me. But they could also need more help, just as we need more developers.

Sven

On Saturday 28 March 2009, Sven Neumann wrote:

That's the whole point. You don't want to crop the image, you want to enlarge it. That's exactly why we moved this functionality out of the Crop tool. A user who wants to enlarge the image is never going to look for this in the Crop tool. It simply does not belong there.

I don't think that was the point. The point was to only modify the canvas size without cropping all the layers. Currently the crop tool only allows to crop either
a) all layers plus the canvas
or
b) just one layer.

If I understand Sampo correctly, he would like to see c) crop only the canvas
which is what Image > Canvas size does already, but not in a very graphical way (or with Simon's workaround).

Daniel

Hi all,

Sven Neumann schrieb:

So why do you assume that a crop tool would allow you to enlarge the image?

with GIMP becoming a non-destructive editor at heart, i think it's natural to expect cropping to work non-destructively, too. Then it's more like selecting a frame for an (conceptually) infite-sized image. So the crop tool could be superseded by some "image size selection" tool in future.

I hope i'm right that GEGL already cares for the implied memory issues. If that's true, the only reason to discard the invisible layer information is to reduce file size (on demand).

greetings, peter

gimp-developer-bounces@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU wrote:

Therefore I'd still
consider the "non-destructive" crop feature at least a usability enhancement. At least personally I would assume that the crop tool of a professional tool like Gimp would offer this option as well. (Not sure whether PS has it.)

I couldn't swear by it, but I don't think it does.

I've had similar issues to you in Gimp regarding this issue. I've learnt to create a new layer above the image, fill it with with black and then apply a mask to it to reveal the image below. I'd quite like to have a way to be able to adjust the layer mask on canvas once it's been created. The nice thing about cropping with layers is that you can toggle their visibility, so you can check your old crop against your new one.

This still doesn't solve the problem of making the mask in the first place because neither the mask nor select tools currently conceal the area of the image being masked. The crop tool applies a semi-opaque mask to the cropped area, but this isn't really satisfactory. In this case, your method of using the canvas window still has no replacement. However, adjusting the opacity of the mask has been specified for both the selection and crop tools and I'm trying to learn the gimp code with the hope of implementing the feature...cos I need it. :p

I really only use the crop tool to remove unwanted data in order to speed up processing of the image from then on. This has proven to be an essential feature even for my (obsolete) 6.1Mpixel camera.

David M.

---AV & Spam Filtering by M+Guardian - Risk Free Email (TM)---