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> Usability Enhancements, little things to make PMView even more efficient
Tannin
post Jun 23 2006, 07:24 PM
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Hi all. Most of us probably already know how efficient and time-effective PMView is. In my view, it's simply the best there is. But it could be even better. Here are some small changes that could make it even faster and easier to use PMView for productive work. In no particular order:

1: Cropping.
1a: Users often need to crop to a particular exact size. Currently to do this a tedious series of steps is required: (a) select an approximate area; (b) toggle view/show/selection info; © scroll the selection counters up and down - always getting the direction wrong at first because they are rather non-intuitive - or type in the required numbers to get the size you need (even in you move the selection to the extreme top left to save the mental addition required to calculate which coordinate will produce the desired final image size, you still have to remember to subtract 1 because the selection starts at 0 - i.e., type in 1024 and 768 and you get an image that is 1025 x 769!)

In short, where resizing to a particular image dimension in PMView is fast and easy, cropping to a particular dimension is tedious, error-prone, and slow. How difficult would it be to add a more efficient cropping method? There are probably about 6 good ways to do this, but here is one: add a crop-to-size item to the transform menu. (Is it really a transform? Technically, maybe not, but if it sits right below the "size" entry on the transform menu and works exactly the same way as transform/size, it would be easy for users to find it and learn how to use it.

The sequence would work like this: use the menus to select "transform/crop to size", then select the desired size (e.g., 800 x 600). This tells PMView to create a selection rectangle of that size and place it anywhere (top left is as good as any - PMView has no way of knowing yet where you want the selection made, only how big to make it). Use the mouse to position the selection rectangle as desired, then crop in the normal way.

(But why would a user want to do this instead of cropping to a rough size and then transforming to the exact size? Two good reasons: first, sometimes the aspect ratio of the image is important (especially when the image is one of several equal-size images on a single page layout). Second, where the size difference between the source image (or desired area of the source image) and the target image is small, resizing introduces unacceptable loss of image quality - you can resize from 2000px to 800px and with a little sharpening get an excelllent result, but if your source image is (e.g.) 930px, resizing it to 800px impacts on the final quality in a very visable way.)

1b: An option to grey-out the non-selected area (the part you are going to throw away when you crop the image) so that it is easier to see what the cropped image will look like - i.e., similar to the way Photoshop does it. This should be an option as there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Perhaps the best way to do this would be add a "grey-out/don't grey-out toggle" to the bottom of the right mouse pop-up menu whenever you have an area selected. But even if it were only switchable from the main view/preferences menu, the ability to grey out the area you are going to crop away, and thus see what your cropped image will look like would be an excellent addition.
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