I just upgraded my system a bit last night and wanted to grab the new version of Gimp. I’m now using version 2.4.0-rc3 and so far I am really pleased, the number one thing that stood out for me initially was the new cropping system.
The Gimp image cropping interface may not be that exciting for most people (likely an understatement), but for someone like me who uses it everyday it’s pretty important to not suck.
More direct manipulation
The first thing you’ll notice in the new cropping interface is that the old two corners can resize and two corners can move system is gone. Previous Gimp versions allowed the bottom right and top left corners of the crop sizer to adjust the vertical and horiztonal sizes while the top right and bottom left corners could only move the crop area around. I’m pretty certain I got the orientation of those corners correct without even looking back because it was such a quirk to using the system that you had to know it.
Instead of the extremely small corner resizers and movers on opposing sides you now have much larger corner resizers on all four corners. These resize elements appear when you hover over the crop area. Moving the crop area can be done from anywhere in the middle by clicking and dragging the mouse, indicated by the familiar move mouse icon.
Also a totally new element is resizing from sides, not just corners! Are you bored yet? Amazingly I’m not! So I don’t have to worry about resizing both the vertical and horizontal edges at the same time. Usually I start a crop zoomed out a bit sizing it coarsely with the corners sizers and when things get down to the finer pixel level I’ll zoom in to get the crop just right, this is when you don’t want to have to worry about changing the vertical or horiztonal edge by accident while trying to get the correct adjacent edge.
Less dialogs
The other part that’s really great is that there’s no dialog for the crop tool. It was always murphy’s law for my gimp usage that whenever I was cropping something the dialog would enjoy popping up directly over the area I needed to see in order to finish the crop. Standard procedure meant that you’d stop cropping the image, try to move the dialog away from the image window and continue. I would usually move the dialog almost off the screen so it wasn’t in the way, which was a bonus when I was done because I’d have to try to find the dialog again in order to hit the crop button. Now I just hit enter, there’s a hint at the bottom of the Gimp window.
Improvements
The only thing lacking from the new system was a more obvious way to let me know how to make the crop happen. I had to look around a little bit to find the “Click or press enter to crop” message at the bottom. I’m not sure of what the more obvious way is, but with some experimenting I think you could find a way to place something unobtrusively on the image window that says what to do. I’m sure it’s been tried.
I’ve yet to explore much more, but I’m sure there are lots of other nice new things. Now if only the layering system would get an upgrade…
You got my attention! How did you get those controls? The only way I know how to crop in Gimp (using the 2.4 in Gutsy or any previous version) is to make a rectangular selection and then doing Image → Crop to Selection.
You might need to check the release candidate version, mine is RC3. But I use the Crop tool, from Tools -> Transform -> Crop or (Shift-C).
Hmm.. I think it’s a massive improvement. I’d perhaps not use boxes in the corners though — it’s rather strange looking. Presumably that’s the dragable area — but if all edges were dragable then and the mouse pointer changed to show which the dragable direction/axis then it would seem that those boxes aren’t needed. If you really needed something I’d design a transparent icon with dragable ridges rather than boxes.
Sounds like a very good update (and yes, I use it often enough to really care as well). One thing though – the dialog is completely gone? I use the ability to set a specific crop size in pixels quite often, and I certainly hope I still can enter exact size and position somehow.
My favorite part of the improved crop tool is the possibility to use some guides (rule of thirds, golden sections). I find the rule of thirds useful for composition.
The dialog is completely gone, but you can still enter the crop size directly in the Crop tool options. Currently only in pixels but we are working on enabling input of real-world units again. Hopefully this will be ready in time for 2.4.0.
You were wondering about “a more obvious way to let me know how to make the crop happen”. My suggestion was to add a temporary Crop button in the status bar, in the same place as the Cancel button that appears when you run a filter (try any filter that runs for more than two seconds and you will see immediately what I mean). The same could be done for the transform tools: Rotate, Shear, etc. We haven’t implemented that for GIMP 2.4, but maybe we can find a good solution during the next development cycle leading to 2.6.
Thanks, Sven. The ability to crop a series of images identically (same size and position) is something I use surprisingly frequently. Looking forward a lot to the upcoming release!