GIMP 2.6.6 running on Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy" Linux.

Is this a bug?

Should I post this on the developer list instead?

Am I doing this incorrectly?

At a minimum, I think there is some GUI confusion... at least it is not logical to my way of thinking.

This is a little complicated, so please read through before jumping to assumptions. Thank you.

I need to make a new image that "looks" the same as an existing image. The reason for this is not important but I cannot use SaveAs because there is serious ICC profile corruption (it kills the plugin that attempts to assign sRGB profile) and I actually have to copy and paste the image into a new image to get a "clean" image. So, for whatever inane reason, I need to make a new image with the visual contents of the old image.

Procedure:

- Select all in old image

- Copy

- New Image (set to fill background with black). This method gives the new image the exact correct pixel size as the old image -- that's important. (I also want to fill background with black as my default because _sometimes_ I want to make the canvas larger and paste in multiple bits of other images.)

- Paste into the new image. This now results in a Background and a Floating Selection. It says "Floating Selection" it does *NOT* say "... Layer"

- At this point I want to flatten the image to a single layer with no selection. However....

1) Tool set to rectangular marque only acts as a Move tool.

2) Double clicking ON THE IMAGE has NO effect.

3) In the "New Image" process above, the window size created is the size of the image itself -- there is *NO* "outside the canvas" background visible. HOWEVER, if I now drag the window larger so that I do have "outside the canvas" background area and double click in the "outside the canvas" area, it DOES anchor the image whereas double clicking on the image itself does not have an effect.

* I think that is either a bug or a poorly implemented feature * * that the user is forced to drag the window larger, etc. *

4) ALTERNATIVELY, I can go to the menu and do "Layer, Anchor Layer". That works just fine.

*** BUT, PLEASE NOTE here it says "Layer". It says nothing about anchoring a "Floating Selection". There is an inconsistency in terminology. If I am working with a "Floating Selection" I would first think to look in the Select menu items for an action to take. Or perhaps the Image menu items (where Flatten Image is grayed out).

5) Furthermore, what I think I want to do is what I would call "Flatten" the image. In the docs...

http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-image-flatten.html

it discusses the "Image, Flatten Image" command. That is what I think I wanted to do all along. (And in PhotoShop 5.x, that is exactly the terminology for what one would do in this case -- but I know this is Gimp, not PS.)

*** HOWEVER in this scenario, "Flatten Image" is grayed out and unavailable.

I do not know if, under the hood, making a floating selection merge into the background by anchoring a layer is all the same thing as flatten image, or if they are different tasks.

But, at a minimum, there is a terminology problem

do something (?what?) with Floating Selection vs
Flatten Image
vs
Anchor Layer

To a newbie, this would be more than a little confusing.

I do not claim to know the "right" answer, but at a minimum:

1) The New Image, Paste, Anchor Floating Selection process should be much, much smoother without having to either drag the window larger or even have some way to have it automatically anchored.

!!! Perhaps in the New dialog (Advanced section), there could be a method to simply create the new image with the contents of the clipboard so that you don't have to either paste or anchor!!!!

2) Sort out the conflicting terminology and menu items / menu locations.

Feedback welcomed. Sorry for yammering on.

Jay

On 12/18/2009 01:03 PM, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 12:26 -0500, Jay Smith wrote:

Procedure:
- Select all in old image
- Copy
- Paste into the new image. This now results in a Background and a Floating Selection. It says "Floating Selection" it does *NOT* say "... Layer"

A "Floating Selection" is a selection that has been pasted into the image but not given a final disposition for integration with the image. You must either make it a new layer or apply it to the current layer/layer mask. Until you make that choice the floating selection is not a layer yet which is why you can't flatten the image.

A faster way of doing what you want (assuming I understood it correctly) and skipping the floating selection is to drag the layer from the old image into the toolbox. This will create a new image window with the same dimensions as the original with a single layer in it. You can then add a new layer that is black, drag it below the current layer in the Layers dialog and then flatten the image.

Michael,

Thank you very much for the procedure suggestion. Really Cool!! I will experiment with that. How would I have known that? Maybe I should RTFM? But.....

However, regarding your first paragraph, I understand what you are saying and do not argue with it. My point is that you are saying is NOT what the program says because in order to "flatten" it using the menu system (other than dragging the window larger and double clicking) I have to go to LAYER, ANCHOR LAYER.

See the terminology confusion?

Jay

On 12/18/2009 01:41 PM, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 13:15 -0500, Jay Smith wrote:

Thank you very much for the procedure suggestion. Really Cool!! I will experiment with that. How would I have known that? Maybe I should RTFM? But.....

Maybe the manual mentions this. Maybe not. That's the way of documentation (even with commercial apps). There are always tricks to doing things with software. You learn by doing. Experimentation is king. 'Course, asking on mailing lists and forums doesn't hurt.

However, regarding your first paragraph, I understand what you are saying and do not argue with it. My point is that you are saying is NOT what the program says because in order to "flatten" it using the menu system (other than dragging the window larger and double clicking) I have to go to LAYER, ANCHOR LAYER.

Actually, you can also use the Layers menu in the Layers dialog - right click on the floating selection (or any layer) to see it.

See the terminology confusion?

Sure. But I ignore it. They say "tomaeto", I say "tomahto". Doesn't change what you have to do to make it work. Don't get too hung up on terminology. Spoils the fun. ;-)

I suppose they could say "Anchor To Layer" instead. Feel free to suggest it to the developers or the documentation project. Or maybe the floating selection should be referred to as a floating layer instead. I often refer to the "image window" as the "canvas window" in my articles and books. I believe the term "image" is highly overused and a potential source of confusion too.

All you have to do is convince everyone to say the same thing every time the reference something. Good luck. :-)

Hi Michael,

I am left wondering if I have still failed to communicate the basic point I was trying to make.

I will give it one more short go, but at the risk of annoying Sven any further and wasting everybody's time, I should stop there.

However, I must *extremely strongly* disagree with you regarding use of terminology. It is all we have to communicate clearly about such things. To a new user, it is absolutely critical -- I know that this is a "professional level" program, etc., but even a highly skilled new user is bombarded with new & different terminology in Gimp compared to other programs they may have used and they are dealing with a user interface which may not be familiar. I have only been using high-level image editing programs for production work for 15 years but I struggled with Gimp for the first few months I used it -- a lot of that struggle was due to terminology and the "quirks" of the user interface. I remember, back in the day, when I was a newbie starting to use PhotoShop -- I felt no such sense of struggle; everything just flowed and seemed natural. Maybe that experience (and use of non-Gimp terminology, etc.) ruined me for Gimp -- BUT, I would guess that most Gimp new users are going to now come from other programs and they will not be image-program virgins.

I am pushing my company hard toward linux as desktop. (I know that Gimp is NOT a linux program, per se, but it is a leading application for linux users and its challenges in the linux desktop parallels some of the other linux desktop challenges due in part to the methods by which it is developed.) This push is a struggle because there are still large number of linux apps that are just (still!) not yet ready for the mainstream desktop. And these issues have everything to do with mundane and tedious-for-some-developers things like user interface and consistency of menu terminology, consistency of style in open file dialogs, etc., etc. Working on this stuff is probably neither fun nor sexy. However, IMHO, it is an extremely important step toward wider adaption of linux as desktop and toward ever-increasing success for Gimp.

a) *You* originally made the point out that a Floating Selection is a Floating Selection and is *not* really a Layer. I am much more in agreement with your more recent statement that perhaps there could be more consistency in calling it a selection vs a layer, etc. There are two, or maybe three, places in the menu that it could be. Layer, Anchor Layer was the least obvious *to me.*

b) *You* also originally made the point that until the Floating Selection is anchored, the image cannot be flattened. Here I disagree -- from a USER's rather limited point of view. The user does not much care what is under the hood, the user just wants the newly pasted in content flattened into the layer onto which it was pasted -- by whatever means or terminology it takes. Yet the menu system (whether top bar or right click) makes you anchor it first before you can flatten it -- BUT and this is a big point -- in this situation anchoring it DOES flatten it. I understand that there certainly could be many layers, so one probably does not want to flatten the entire image into a single layer. However, this is still quite awkward and does not seem to be as efficient as perhaps it could be.

c) Nobody has said anything about the other -- very important in my opinion -- aspect of all of this...

- Double clicking the image itself does not anchor the selection.

- In order to anchor the selection by double clicking, one must double click on the surrounding "outside the canvas" background, BUT when the image is created in the manner I described, one first has to drag the window larger (or somehow get some "outside the canvas" background visible, to get to such background on which to double click.

That just seems to make more work and then leads us into the conversation above.

I'm done now, unless I am invited to continue.

Jay