peter sikking wrote: > can you tell me what you mean with "manual work needs to be done"? > that can help us with our work. > Well the most common case is simply selecting a slither of an area to be tiled as a background image. Sometimes you have to hide a foreground layer before making the selection such as filler text or an image. You will also want to pick a colour with the pipette tool that will be used as the background colour of the element. Most of the background images I deal with are gradients, so the colour I want to use is either the darkest or lightest colour of that gradient. Otherwise you often need to select the right combination of layers. I've already mentioned foreground layers that might need to be hidden. Other times they might need to be isolated. In Photoshop the issue is further complicated by the use of adjustment layers. Transparent gifs or pngs will need to be isolated altogether. Sometimes a background image will be larger than the dimensions of the containing element so the final thing you'd want to do is toggle a layer mask to get the whole image. This is the routine I tend to follow when using PS 9: 1) Toggle visibility of layers and masks until I can make a selection of the area I need to save. 2) Select area with marquee tool. Can be very annoying when zoomed in because selection always overshoots when I scroll. PS does not share Gimp's sensitivity when zoomed in. 3) Copy visible. Gimp should probably have a short cut key bound to this operation as it is always required. 4) Open new canvas. PS automatically populates the canvas dimensions with those of the paste buffer so this operation isn't as cumbersome as it would be in Gimp, but really it wouldn't be required at all if PS allowed you to edit an image during the next stage. The only editing I ever need to do here is convert background to transparency. 5) Save for web. Compare compressed images against original. Adjust for best compromise of size and quality then save. With a "save *selection* for web" feature, steps 3) and 4) could probably be omitted altogether for most of the time. Step 5) is often made cumbersome by the fact that the default save destination is the last directory used by the application. Life would be easier if a web images directory could be set in preferences (maybe it can and I don't know about it!). It's getting late so I'll leave it there. I think I may follow this email up with a more fundamental description of what a designer is trying to achieve when marking up a concept, if you think it would be useful. Let me know if there are other things you want to know. I'd be interested to follow your progress as you design this feature. Regards, Davidm --- Scanned by M+ Guardian Messaging Firewall --- _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
