Some ideas I have for 3.0

[Rick Brewster]

I have a few ideas of cool things to add to 3.0, tell me what you think. I'm a big fan of "what you see is what you get ... while you're drawing it" which has driven me to not use things like "rubber bands" in the UI when drawing shapes or selections. Compare to Photoshop and you'll see what I mean. I'm also starting to jump in to "let's show you what you'll get ... before you draw it or commit to it."

Also, we're getting more powerful computers with more RAM and more cores ... why not take advantage of it in ways that actually increase productivity? Heck, when Windows 95 came out, the first release of Word after that took advantage of the multithreading to do spellcheck in the background as you were typing. Great stuff.

1) Gradient tool

I talked to my friend Andy and told him this idea and he loved it. He said, "You know what I spend half my day doing in Photoshop? Gradient tool: click, drag, undo. Click, drag, undo. Repeat. Until I get it right."

My idea here is to have a similar interface to Photoshop whereby you click and drag to draw a line that defines the endpoints of the color gradient gradient. However, instead of waiting until you let go of the mouse to draw the gradient, I'll draw it as you're moving the mouse. I think this will be a very attractive feature to people and will give us a nose-in-the-air point towards other graphics programs

2) Magic wand "preview" highlighting.

Right now in order to see what area will be selected when you click with the magic wand, you have to click. Then wait. And if you don't like it, you have to undo, adjust the tolerance or location, and then repeat.

Bleck.

So here's what I'm thinking: Take advantage of multithreading and whenever you move the mouse I will start calculating, in the background, what the highlighted area would be. Then I will shade it in without you having to click. Then you could adjust tolerance (I think a keyboard shortcut is in order) and just watch as the selection area changes. Then once you're happy, you click or press enter or something.

And same for the paintbucket I guess.

[BoltBait]

2) I was thinking of almost the same thing the other day only I was thinking of clicking the magic wand on your drawing, then adjusting the tollerance as you watch the selection adjust on the fly as you slide the tollerance bar. If you implemented it this way, it might be helpful to have a "-" to the left of the bar to single step down and a "+" to the right of the bar to single step up.

BTW, I have noticed that in my drawings/pictures I only use 4 different tollerence settings: 0, 31, 45, and 100.

[Illnab1024]

Funny...I generally approximate about those settings, but as an avid user of the magic wand, I tend to do it point my point, adding to the selection until it looks right..

Also, this would save me loads of time, especially in large images where it takes ages to put the selected pixels in the memory and such...

[13_15_4_14_1_18]

I think both would be awesome!

[aatwo]

Those sound great.

With the gradient effect I think a realtime view of what it will look like would be great. But what if clicking on the canvas once created a start nub, and then clicking again created a second nub and then the gradient was drawn between these two nubs. Then you could give the user the ability to move both these nubs until they get the gradient just right (since it would still be shown in realtime). This would allow people to really tweak and play with the gradient they are drawing.

[trickman]

Awesome Ideas! WISIWYG!

[Crazy Man Dan]

I think aatwo's idea for the gradient is interesting. After all, what if you start it in the wrong place?

One thing I do like about The GIMP is realtime moving of selections as you're drawing them. If you start the selection in the wrong place, just press [Alt] and move it in it's current state, then release [Alt] and continue dragging the selection.

If a behavior similar to this were implemented for things like your (Rick) idea for the gradient tool, then one could move the origin in that way as well.

[Rick Brewster]

Dan, you can do this in Paint.NET too. While dragging with the left mouse button, if you want to move the selection, hold down the right button as well and drag.

[Crazy Man Dan]

Gah!!! Why didn't I know that!?

All this time, it's as if I've been crippled, and now I'm healed.

Thanks for that!

[Rick Brewster]

Well hey it's documented in the help file, in Keyboard & Mouse Commands ... not that anybody reads that bloody potato

[Crazy Man Dan]

Yeah.. I guess I'm guilty of that too... Perhaps if I'd done the Basics tutorial, I would have found it...

Anyway, to keep this on topic:

This all sounds good, but how would one cope with older systems? I don't have the cash to continually update my system. I do have a 2.2G 64-Bit AMD Turion, but that's the best processor I've ever had in a system (and this system is a laptop...).

Right now PDN doesn't lag too much, only when adding to and subtracting from selections. I know you don't want an options menu, so would PDN do some system checking and turn on the Advanced features only if it thought the system could handle it?

[BoltBait]

Crazy Man Dan, if it were implemented as I suggested (in the 2nd post) it wouldn't add any lag at all to your system. The only extra processing would be when you click on the tollerance bar to adjust the tollerance so that the selection could be recalculated at that time.

[Rick Brewster]

The magic wand stuff would be rendered in a background thread, you'd just get a lower framerate, so to speak. The goal would be to have the foreground still completely responsive and take priority over the background stuff. Once you click it'll kill off the background computation and do the 'real' computation. The biggest concern here will be memory usage. But ... honestly, at some point, you just have to require more when adding legitimate functionality.

[BoltBait]

1) Gradient tool

I talked to my friend Andy and told him this idea and he loved it. He said, "You know what I spend half my day doing in Photoshop? Gradient tool: click, drag, undo. Click, drag, undo. Repeat. Until I get it right."

My idea here is to have a similar interface to Photoshop whereby you click and drag to draw a line that defines the endpoints of the color gradient gradient. However, instead of waiting until you let go of the mouse to draw the gradient, I'll draw it as you're moving the mouse. I think this will be a very attractive feature to people and will give us a nose-in-the-air point towards other graphics programs

Rick, once you have this done, you could easily use this to create a Transparency Tool that does basically the same thing but it fades from fully opaque to fully transparent modifying only the alpha channel. This is one of my favorite tools in CorelDraw/PhotoPaint.

[Rick Brewster]

Basically you mean Gradient tool but with a configurable channel mask.

I'd prefer to implement layer masks, honestly, even if it means relatively crippled functionality in the interim (layer masks will not make it for 3.0).

[Gekko]

oh, I like # 2.

I use the magic wand a lot, and so it would be a very useful feature.

#1 is also good. i haven't used Photo shop a lot, but the gradient feature has not been implemented well there. The way you have it sounds MUCH better.

[Nidonocu]

My first post. :o

Great ideas for both these tools! I'd love to have a great gradient control like that, its one of the 'things I need to open up Photoshop for'.

Another feature request for the new thumbnail mdi feature, could you add some short-cut menus to each item with standard favourite options? eg:

Save, Save all, Close, Close All but this, etc.

Hope to see a prototype of the gradient feature in a future alpha soon!

[rhann]

Well hey it's documented in the help file, in Keyboard & Mouse Commands ... not that anybody reads that bloody potato

same goes for any other type of instructions, DVD Player, TV, ignore the instructions it'll work