RSS/Atom feed Twitter
Site is read-only, email is disabled

Transform tools usability problem

This discussion is connected to the gimp-developer-list.gnome.org mailing list which is provided by the GIMP developers and not related to gimpusers.com.

This is a read-only list on gimpusers.com so this discussion thread is read-only, too.

5 of 5 messages available
Toggle history

Please log in to manage your subscriptions.

Transform tools usability problem Przemyslaw Golab 18 Jul 13:34
  Transform tools usability problem Alexandre Prokoudine 18 Jul 14:09
   Transform tools usability problem Przemyslaw Golab 18 Jul 20:30
  Transform tools usability problem Gez 19 Jul 03:47
   Transform tools usability problem Gez 21 Jul 01:44
Przemyslaw Golab
2014-07-18 13:34:08 UTC (over 9 years ago)

Transform tools usability problem

Hello :)

I would like to expose one very annoying work-flow problem with transform tools.

When you edit your region with transform tools the previous state of pixels is displayed at the same time with newly transformed ones. It often gets in a way of my transforms, it makes hard to evaluate if new transformation is correct because old one covers region that I would like to, for example, see exposed.

Image to visualise one of my problems with current behaviour: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31390469/Image%20Bin/Selection_227.png

I want to change size of a tree testing many possible sizes and stretches but original pixels clutter my view, so it's hard for me to evaluate if I like new look or not.

I'm not sure if displaying not transformed pixels is useful at all I personally can't find use case for it, but if someone would like to keep this behaviour I would propose to make it option in tool settings dialogue. With display of original pixels turned OFF by default.

PS I have this problem often, for now I found hackish workaround by transforming my region and turning off layer display, so only preview is visible. But if I want to apply my new transform I have to turn on layer again, or it will fail and my transforms are lost, which happens.

Alexandre Prokoudine
2014-07-18 14:09:25 UTC (over 9 years ago)

Transform tools usability problem

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 5:34 PM, Przemyslaw Golab wrote:

Hello :)

I would like to expose one very annoying work-flow problem with transform tools.

When you edit your region with transform tools the previous state of pixels is displayed at the same time with newly transformed ones. It often gets in a way of my transforms, it makes hard to evaluate if new transformation is correct because old one covers region that I would like to, for example, see exposed.

Yep, it's been discussed before. Someone just needs to sit down and actually fix it. I know you are not a programmer, so not asking you for a patch :)

Alex

Przemyslaw Golab
2014-07-18 20:30:28 UTC (over 9 years ago)

Transform tools usability problem

Hi and thanks for reply Alex.

Eh I missed that discussion. :) I would love to supply patch for it but yeah I'm really crappy at programming.

2014-07-18 16:09 GMT+02:00 Alexandre Prokoudine :

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 5:34 PM, Przemyslaw Golab wrote:

Hello :)

I would like to expose one very annoying work-flow problem with transform tools.

When you edit your region with transform tools the previous state of pixels is displayed at the same time with newly transformed ones. It often gets in a way of my transforms, it makes hard to evaluate if new transformation is correct because old one covers region that I would like to, for example, see exposed.

Yep, it's been discussed before. Someone just needs to sit down and actually fix it. I know you are not a programmer, so not asking you for a patch :)

Alex
_______________________________________________ gimp-developer-list mailing list
List address: gimp-developer-list@gnome.org List membership: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer-list List archives: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list

Gez
2014-07-19 03:47:45 UTC (over 9 years ago)

Transform tools usability problem

El vie, 18-07-2014 a las 15:34 +0200, Przemyslaw Golab escribió:

Hello :)

I would like to expose one very annoying work-flow problem with transform tools.

When you edit your region with transform tools the previous state of pixels is displayed at the same time with newly transformed ones. It often gets in a way of my transforms, it makes hard to evaluate if new transformation is correct because old one covers region that I would like to, for example, see exposed.

I feel you...
As Alexandre said, it was discussed before. I even raised again the issue a couple of days ago on the IRC channel because at some point the ability to turn off the layer visibility while using the transform tool was lost (It's back).
This has been one of my pet-peeves with GIMP when using the transform tools since I started using it, and although sometimes it comes handy to have a reference of the original layer when transforming, most of the times it gets in the middle, covering the references you need to perform the transform in context (due to the nature of bitmap editing, it's more common to import large layers and scale them down than importing small layers and scale them up, so the large layer covering the composite is a really common scenario when editing).

When I raised this issue on the IRC channel the last time, pippin told me that in a future all the preview hacks of transform tools eventually will go away.
That's great, but meanwhile it would be nice if the current hacks are tweaked a little to avoid this annoying problem. I'm not asking for a full-fledged solution, just turning off the visibility of the layer when the transform overlay is drawn and turning it back on when the transform is commited would suffice.

Gez.

Gez
2014-07-21 01:44:39 UTC (over 9 years ago)

Transform tools usability problem

El sáb, 19-07-2014 a las 00:47 -0300, Gez escribió:

I even raised again the issue a couple of days ago on the IRC channel because at some point the ability to turn off the layer visibility while using the transform tool was lost (It's back).

...It's not back.
I just noticed that if the layer visibility is turned off after invoking the transform tool, the transformation can't be commited (applying the transform results in the unmodified layer). I'm not sure why this has changed, but it's a step backwards. Now the workaround of turning off the layer visibility can only be used if the layer is turned on again before commiting the transform, otherwise nothing happens.
And visibility of the layer can only be turned off after the transform tool is invoked, if the layer is not visible the transform tool does nothing (this is a reasonable behavior, a layer with the visibility turned off shouldn't be affected).

I'm not saying that the new behavior doesn't make sense in the big picture, but until there's a method for temporarily hiding the original layer when it's transformed the changes introduced prevent users from using the only possible workaround when the original gets in the middle.

Gez.