15 lines
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| 15 lines | Guillermo Espertino (Gez) | 25 Jan 02:35 |
| 15 lines | Liam R E Quin | 25 Jan 04:55 |
| 15 lines | scl | 25 Jan 10:30 |
| 15 lines | Alexandre Prokoudine | 25 Jan 12:42 |
| 15 lines | scl | 25 Jan 15:02 |
| 15 lines | Alexandre Prokoudine | 25 Jan 15:09 |
| 15 lines | Liam R E Quin | 25 Jan 17:07 |
| 15 lines | Daniel Hornung | 25 Jan 19:54 |
| 15 lines | Guillermo Espertino (Gez) | 25 Jan 21:27 |
| 15 lines | Liam R E Quin | 26 Jan 01:00 |
15 lines
Hi,
I find the default of 15 lines for the grid in transform tools quite
annoying most of the times. When you're transforming small things the
grid really gets in the way.
I think a more conservative setting, say 3 or 5 would be more a flexible
default.
What do you think?
Gez
15 lines
On Thu, 2013-01-24 at 23:35 -0300, Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:
I think a more conservative setting, say 3 or 5 would be more a flexible default.
Yes, probably; I have the default set to 135 lines, which is still not very many when you have a 10,000-pixel-wide image.
Liam
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
15 lines
I'd say, it depends on the images the particular user usually works with. While a screen or web designer might work with small images the most time, a photographer or scientist works with much bigger images. Different users have different needs and a default value - may it be 3, 4 or 15 lines - is always insufficient for anybody.
To come a bit closer to your needs: the guides can also be set to 'Rule of thirds', 'Rule of fifths' or 'Golden sections'. Beside having less lines they provide established artistic guidelines for image composition. Did you also notice the little 'Save' button on the bottom of the Transform tools' dialogs? (If not, click the little low triangle in the upper right corner of the dock, then 'Show Button Bar'). Then in the Guides list-box select 'Number of lines', enter 3 and press the Save button. In the next pop-up dialog enter for instance 'Rotate, 3 lines guides'. This will save the Transform tools setting as a preset. The next time you can load your preset by clicking the Load button in the Button Bar.
Kind regards,
Sven
15 lines
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 2:30 PM, scl wrote:
To come a bit closer to your needs: the guides can also be set to 'Rule of thirds', 'Rule of fifths' or 'Golden sections'. Beside having less lines they provide established artistic guidelines for image composition. Did you also notice the little 'Save' button on the bottom of the Transform tools' dialogs? (If not, click the little low triangle in the upper right corner of the dock, then 'Show Button Bar'). Then in the Guides list-box select 'Number of lines', enter 3 and press the Save button. In the next pop-up dialog enter for instance 'Rotate, 3 lines guides'. This will save the Transform tools setting as a preset. The next time you can load your preset by clicking the Load button in the Button Bar.
Choosing a preset is not much (if any) faster than hovering the combobox and scrolling the mouse wheel. And both do not exactly provide a nice user experience.
I mean, c'mon, as far as I can tell, the only reason we even have this by default is the corrective mode of the rotation tool which is as far from being discoverable as it can get. I can't remember anyone saying "Oh, figured out how to fix horizon all by myself, and it's the corrective mode".
But if I could count on my fingers every time a user said "WTF, how do I make horizon horizontal without using a combination of measure tool, my brain for remembering the angle, and the rotation tool?", I'd be on display in a museum of natural history.
So I would suggest to revisit straightening horizon use case and limiting the amount of lines in transformation tools to a minimum. Personally I would even switch them off by default or go for the "Center" as defaults, but that's me.
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org
15 lines
On 25.01.13 at 1:42 PM Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
So I would suggest to revisit straightening horizon use case and
I agree. Straightening the horizon is a very often and thus important use case.
limiting the amount of lines in transformation tools to a minimum.
I don't think that would solve the problem. To rotate the image precisely, you need a line along or very close to the horizon and the chance for having such a line increases with the amount of lines. However, as I said, no matter of the concrete default value there will always be some people who prefer another default.
The easiest straightening solution I know of is the Straighten tool in Photoshop Elements or the Straighten option in the Crop tool of Photoshop CS6: Drag a line along the horizon and you're done. IMHO only autorotating the image by edge detection algorithms can be simpler.
As it seems we're not the first ones with such ideas: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526719
Kind regards,
Sven
15 lines
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 7:02 PM, scl wrote:
limiting the amount of lines in transformation tools to a minimum.
I don't think that would solve the problem. To rotate the image precisely....
There are tons of use cases when you don't need to rotate precisely, and the grid gets in the way.
The easiest straightening solution I know of is the Straighten tool in Photoshop Elements or the Straighten option in the Crop tool of Photoshop CS6: Drag a line along the horizon and you're done.
This is how several open source tools work (e.g. darktable and Rawstudio).
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org
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On Fri, 2013-01-25 at 19:09 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
I don't think that would solve the problem. To rotate the image precisely....
There are tons of use cases when you don't need to rotate precisely, and the grid gets in the way.
You can turn off the grid for those... (for me they are the rare cases)
The easiest straightening solution I know of is the Straighten tool in Photoshop Elements or the Straighten option in the Crop tool of Photoshop CS6: Drag a line along the horizon and you're done.
This is how several open source tools work (e.g. darktable and Rawstudio).
GIMP is *MASSIVELY* better in the case where you're straightening things based on a mixture of horizontal and vertical elements in the picture and not just playing with snapshots of the beach
An alternative might be to allow the placement of angled guides and have a "rotate image to make this guide vertical/horizontal" option.
For me, one reason I wanted the enhancement (included in gimp 2.8) to the undo history to say, rotate by 4.15 degrees, is that if that's too much I can undo and try again with 4.07 degrees. I do that a lot and used to write down the numbers each time I used "rotate".
(A "flatten image after rotate" or, "layer to imagesize afterwards" would save time too)
Liam
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
15 lines
On Friday, 25. January 2013 11:30:40 scl wrote:
I'd say, it depends on the images the particular user usually works with. While a screen or web designer might work with small images the most time, a photographer or scientist works with much bigger images. Different users have different needs and a default value - may it be 3, 4 or 15 lines - is always insufficient for anybody.
Suggestion to fit with both web designers and old book scanners:
What if not the number of lines were fixed but the distance between lines in screen units (physical distance or fixed amount of pixels)? I could nearly always live with a line every 10 or 20 pixels, and would find it very convenient if the distance was about the same no matter what my zoom level is.
Cheers,
Daniel
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15 lines
El 25/01/13 16:54, Daniel Hornung escribi:
On Friday, 25. January 2013 11:30:40 scl wrote:
I'd say, it depends on the images the particular user usually works with. While a screen or web designer might work with small images the most time, a photographer or scientist works with much bigger images. Different users have different needs and a default value - may it be 3, 4 or 15 lines - is always insufficient for anybody.
Suggestion to fit with both web designers and old book scanners:
What if not the number of lines were fixed but the distance between lines in screen units (physical distance or fixed amount of pixels)? I could nearly always live with a line every 10 or 20 pixels, and would find it very convenient if the distance was about the same no matter what my zoom level is.
Even though it may sound reasonable, the problem there is that you get a grid that doesn't divide your image in even parts (when the size of your image isn't an exact multiple of your grid module) I don't think it would work.
Just to clarify: I'm not against the grids or the corrective mode. I actually use them a lot (I guess that for straightening there are better options, but por perspective correction the grid and corrective mode are very useful.
My problem with the default grid is that it gets in the middle more often than it helps. Maybe it's just me, but although 15 lines (or more) is ok for complete, large images, it's usually excessive for small/mid size selections in a zoomed out document. When you have a document with seveal layers smaller than the canvas size, the grid gets in the middle and it's really annoying. I know I can change it, I guess I could save a new default for me, but asking if that default is suitable for the majority of the userbase seems a reasonable question.
I know that transforming large images is one of the several valid use cases of GIMP, the question is if it's more frequent than transforming individual, small elements of a layered composite.
It's just matter of defaults and how useful they are.
Oh, and btw. What about having different grid settings for normal and corrective mode respectively? I don't mind the 15 lines grid for corrective mode, but I find it almost useless and interfering for the normal mode.
Gez.
15 lines
On Fri, 2013-01-25 at 20:54 +0100, Daniel Hornung wrote:
What if not the number of lines were fixed but the distance between lines in screen units (physical distance or fixed amount of pixels)? I could nearly always live with a line every 10 or 20 pixels, and would find it very convenient if the distance was about the same no matter what my zoom level is.
Usually I start with the whole image on the screen, identify several vertical and horizontal elements in the picture, get the grid roughly lined up on one of them, zoom in (usually to 50%) and get it lined up more accurately, zoom out to check, zoom back in and adjust if needed, then check the other picture elements, note the angle, then press Rotate. Then flatten the image so that the diagonal transparency at the edges doesn't throw my eyes off, and see if it looks OK. If not, undo the flatten image, undo the rotate, repeat with a slightly different angle.
So I really want to be able to zoom and pan and have the lines in the reverse/corrective-mode rotate preview move with the canvas.
For a large image, I can only fit a tiny portion of the canvas on the screen, and the lines aren't usually straight, so it's a question of panning around a lot to see.
This sounds like a lot of work, but then, the images on www.fromoldbooks.org are generally higher quality than most other sites have available :-) (or so I like to think).
It *would* be nice to be able to drag the grid around, or to use guides I could place on the canvas, though. It's often difficult or impossible to get a line on the grid to match up exactly with an image feature without having so many lines that when you zoom back out you can't see the image!
Liam
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
