On 7/27/06, William Skaggs wrote:

I think that if there is already an existing rectangle in an image, then you can still do what you did previously: enter a number for the width, a number for the height, and click the "fix aspect" checkbox. This will not work if there is no already-existing rectangle, but I don't see any great difficulty in making it work. Would that be an adequate solution for you, or does your workflow require something different?

Being not Karl, but someone who uses and abuses the crop tool on daily basis I would say that proportion presets are a must for photographers. Karine and you have it in your TODO lists anyway, I believe.

Alexandre

On Thursday 27 July 2006 15:42, William Skaggs wrote:

Hi Karl,

Part of the reason you haven't seen much response is that I have been on vacation for the past three weeks -- Karine and I have done the bulk of the coding for the new rect=-select tool. I'm not sure I have completely caught up with what you have done, but here are my thoughts at the moment on the aspect ratio question.

I think that if there is already an existing rectangle in an image, then you can still do what you did previously: enter a number for the width, a number for the height, and click the "fix aspect" checkbox.

I tried and IIRC (I'm on a different machine right now) this didn't work, you had to drag the sides until you reached the apropiate aspect ratio as the value isn't updated on entering/changing the size values manually.

This will not work if there is no already-existing rectangle, but I don't see any great difficulty in making it work. Would that be an adequate solution for you, or does your workflow require something different?

It's would probably allow for my workflow, but I think there needs to be some basic change so that it's more straight forward and easier to understand. I can understand that 1.5 is equal to an aspect of 3:2 and 0.6666 equates roughly to 2:3 but please try to explain that to the average user. I'll be on #gimp later (8/9pm local time in Germany) , my nick is charlyw...

On Thursday 27 July 2006 17:20, William Skaggs wrote:

I would have to understand the need better before I could write code for it. Is there a specific set of predefined aspect ratios that would suffice? If so, what are they? Or is it essential for the user to be able to add new ratios to the list?

The list of needed aspect ratios can easily grow as you have the normal print formats in different parts of the world, in europe we currently have 3:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:3, DIN paper sizes, 5:4 (monitor aspect), 16:9, 2.39:1 (IIRC, that would be wide screen DVD format if you were to create your own menus that could well come up). And that's just from the top of my head, I might have missed quite a lot that are important to other people.

So my proposal would be to split up the aspect ratio into two float fields that allow entering a free form aspect just as such, an aspect x : y. If you would keep a history of the last 10 entered aspect ratios to be selected through a combobox that would be icing on the cake and make the whole selection superb...

If you like I'll draw a picture of what I have in mind.

regards Karl Günter

On 7/27/06, William Skaggs wrote:

I would have to understand the need better before I could write code for it. Is there a specific set of predefined aspect ratios that would suffice? If so, what are they? Or is it essential for the user to be able to add new ratios to the list?

Karl was faster than me to answer the question :)

What I'd like to add is that there are probably too many choices to fit one combobox. Thus I would go for

1. Preferences dialog to define a set of most often used ratios and create new custom ones - somewhat similar to existing units dialog.

2. A set of a combobox to pick a preset from and two spinboxes to define custom ratio, if "Custom" combobox item was chosen.

I can easily add it to bugtracker as a full proposal with mockups. Just tell me to do so.

Alexandre

On Thursday 27 July 2006 17:32, Karl Günter Wünsch wrote:

have 3:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:3, DIN paper sizes, 5:4 (monitor aspect), 16:9,

A nice feature could be to automatically switch from x:y to y:x. This could be done by detecting the first move and assigning the largest value of the ratio to that direction.

For example, if user choose 3:2 ratio, and then first move cursor horizontally during drag, the ratio will be 3:2. If user first move cursor vertically, then ratio will be 2:3.

Another way could be to use a key modifier, like Shift or Alt.

On 7/27/06, Frédéric wrote:

A nice feature could be to automatically switch from x:y to y:x. This could
be done by detecting the first move and assigning the largest value of the ratio to that direction.

For example, if user choose 3:2 ratio, and then first move cursor horizontally during drag, the ratio will be 3:2. If user first move cursor vertically, then ratio will be 2:3.

What a cool idea. I never thought of that. I sometimes don't know if an image would look better in portrait or landscape - this would make it very flexible to try both (one after the other). I also work through a batch of photos at 2:3 aspect ratio that I then need to crop down to 3.5:5 aspect ratio for my prints. This idea would make it very easy to set my aspect ratio, then invert it on the fly. I've taken the liberty of adding your suggestion to bug 156858 (
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156858) (which dups 169064, 153941, 337663, 338948 I think)