The Song Fight Bulletin Board

It's been a while since I've posted on the SF board. I actually lost my password for a while...

I gave myself a new computer for my birthday, and I was unable to transfer over my (blackbearded) copy of Photoshop, so that's one of the big reason behind my lack of cover art submissions. I miss doing them. I kind of want to buy a copy of PS4... but $300 is kind of a big price tag for something I'd be using only recreationally...

Unfortunately, ever mac user friend I know who has a copy actually leeched it emself from somebody else! Woe!

I have half of this week off, so I'll be doing some laundry... I'm also going through Livejournal and trying to add tags to all of my old entries. It's kind of tedious.

So.... hi, everybody! *waves*

Check out GimpShop. http://www.gimpshop.com/

It is based upon the Free Open Source GIMP program http://www.gimp.org/ however it tries to aim for the same user-interface as Photoshop. Apparently Photoshop filters even run on it.

It may be enough of a comfortable environment for you to do your thing.

I've never used it personally, (as I normally use the normal Gimp interface) but it may fit your bill.

That Teletubby is doing a great job of Hypno-Toading me!

If only a free paint application would match Photoshop's "Duplicate" functionality, I could migrate. Photoshop lets me select an area, hold down two keys, and have a selected copy of that area that I can move around at will. By using my arrow keys, I can move it one pixel at a time, essentially "snowplowing" the area around my screen.

This is SO great for doing UI design. You can move boxes and buttons around just by selecting them and arrowing around as you like. Only Photoshop does this. I'm getting used to using Paint.Net, but it doesn't have that functionality and a couple other things are less-than-easy to accomplish, so it can't be a permanent solution.

Luckily, the "LE" version of Photoshop does do what I want, and I have that at home. But y'know... it's such a tiny feature... I wish there was a Paint.Net macro that could do it. Seems like it should be possible.

JB

Gimp has something like that, I believe.

jb wrote:If only a free paint application would match Photoshop's "Duplicate" functionality, I could migrate. Photoshop lets me select an area, hold down two keys, and have a selected copy of that area that I can move around at will. By using my arrow keys, I can move it one pixel at a time, essentially "snowplowing" the area around my screen.

In the Gimp I can select a region, hit Control-C (to copy), Control-V (to paste), then use the arrow keys to move around the copy on a per-pixel basis.

This is what you're talking about, right?

Perhaps you, too, should check out GimpShop to see if your natural finger memory just does the right thing.

-- Steven

Naw, see, Photoshop's version wipes out the original copy as you move around. It's like a little snowplow. I select a "Submit" button for example-- but not just the button. I select the button plus a little white space on the trailing side. Then using Duplicate, I can arrow the button around and it will wipe out whatever's in the way.

In the CTRL-C/CTRL-V method, I have to copy the bit to a new layer, move it where I want it, and then erase the original version. There's a lot of cleanup involved that makes it more tedious than it should be.

Eh, it's not worth trying to explain further. If you saw it in action you'd be pretty glad to know this trick. It's really handy IF you find yourself designing user interfaces and web pages/forms a lot.

If you would reveal the two keys that you press, some of us WOULD know the trick, and would be able to give you some additional feedback on how to duplicate the process in other software.

I always saw layers as the best way to do any of this, since you simply turn them on and off to reveal only those elements you want. No erasing necessary (destructive editing is so '80s) and you always have previous versions/buttons/etc. preserved on their original layers. Comes in handy when the client says, after the fourth revision, "oh, now that I see these I liked the first one after all."

But you obviously have a specific work flow that serves your purpose well.

mrbeany wrote:Check out GimpShop. http://www.gimpshop.com/

It is based upon the Free Open Source GIMP program http://www.gimp.org/ however it tries to aim for the same user-interface as Photoshop. Apparently Photoshop filters even run on it.

It may be enough of a comfortable environment for you to do your thing.

I've never used it personally, (as I normally use the normal Gimp interface) but it may fit your bill.

Thanks! I'll give it a shot once its download links work again ;( SO gimp can open .psd files I have saved?

Gemini6Ice wrote:Thanks! I'll give it a shot once its download links work again ;( SO gimp can open .psd files I have saved?

To a certain degree it can, but don't get your hopes up. Gimp doesn't support most of the dynamic layer stuff in Photoshop (dynamic layer-based effects etc.).

roymond wrote:I always saw layers as the best way to do any of this, since you simply turn them on and off to reveal only those elements you want. No erasing necessary (destructive editing is so '80s) and you always have previous versions/buttons/etc. preserved on their original layers. Comes in handy when the client says, after the fourth revision, "oh, now that I see these I liked the first one after all."

But you obviously have a specific work flow that serves your purpose well.

Yeah, layers are good. No dispute. But with a UI you work with a lot of white space. You can just grab and move reeeeeally fast, like moving pieces of paper around with your hands. Layers aren't so easy, for me at least. I find it difficult to manage all the layers and name them and duplicate them.

I did a lot of work UI architecture work in Illustrator, for example, where every piece was an object. Very similar to layers of course. But selection and object/layer management was a giant pain and my project files were e-frikkin'-normous.

This method removes all that management, except for those few areas you absolutely need. It makes the files smaller, down to like, less than a meg in many cases since I'm just manipulating a flat image, or a few layers. Also there is no selection chore, having to get transparent objects, or objects with no whitespace around them, or that are correctly anti-aliased to fit on a background.

As for variations on the interface, I've never found it to be as efficient, showing and hiding layers of carefully positioned objects, as just creating complete layers that contain the entire variation themselves. Now, having templates full of little pieces that I can slice and dice and drop into a screen, that's useful.

It definitely depends on your workflow, yes. But I can sit with somebody at my desk and move stuff around in five minutes and show them a concept I'm talking about a lot easier with this simple method than I could if I made layers and such.

It's fast and dirty, and works with ANY version of Photoshop, even back to 6.0.

Spud, I believe the keys are CTRL and ALT. Select something, hold them down and your pointer will turn into a little triangle. Then use the arrow keys and your selection will move. Add SHIFT and you can move things five pixels at a time. Hold the keys down, grab the selection with your mouse, and you can move the duplicate elsewhere. Wherever you let up with the mouse button, a duplicate will settle. You can grab the selection again and move it. This is an easy way to wipe away swaths with a background color.

This technique lets me rearrange whole screens using just like, three keys and the mouse. Moving an object just a pixel in one direction becomes a task of two seconds.

JB

You can also ALT drag (with CNTRL held down if you don't want to leave the tool that you're in)... who'd've thought JB was a destructive editor? I live in the tool shortcuts, makes life so much quicker and so less 'clicker'. IIRC, you can change the nudge & SHIFT nudge amounts in prefs.

Update: Ps4 obtained!

jb wrote: This method removes all that management, except for those few areas you absolutely need. It makes the files smaller, down to like, less than a meg in many cases since I'm just manipulating a flat image, or a few layers. Also there is no selection chore, having to get transparent objects, or objects with no whitespace around them, or that are correctly anti-aliased to fit on a background.

As for variations on the interface, I've never found it to be as efficient, showing and hiding layers of carefully positioned objects, as just creating complete layers that contain the entire variation themselves. Now, having templates full of little pieces that I can slice and dice and drop into a screen, that's useful.

I've never done any interface work, but in the projects I have done using the Gimp, I have at times used methodologies involving flattening layers in to a single "complete" version of a segment of the image. It does make managing things much easier. I've had layers like "Part A" , "Part B", and "Version 1", "Version 2", where different combinations of "parts" (with various manual tweaks) go in to the different "versions".

I understand your workflow. Having every variation of every minor thing does do little but create layer clutter.

jb wrote: It's fast and dirty, and works with ANY version of Photoshop, even back to 6.0.

Spud, I believe the keys are CTRL and ALT. Select something, hold them down and your pointer will turn into a little triangle. Then use the arrow keys and your selection will move. Add SHIFT and you can move things five pixels at a time. Hold the keys down, grab the selection with your mouse, and you can move the duplicate elsewhere. Wherever you let up with the mouse button, a duplicate will settle. You can grab the selection again and move it. This is an easy way to wipe away swaths with a background color.

This technique lets me rearrange whole screens using just like, three keys and the mouse. Moving an object just a pixel in one direction becomes a task of two seconds.

JB

Truthfully, this seems like such an old/core PS feature that if GimpShop doesn't have it you should file a bug and they should fix it.

It doesn't sound particularly hard to implement. It may even be possible to do using a script or plugin. I've only once written a Gimp script, but once I got it done that particular task became an order of magnitude faster to do.

I downloaded GimpShop just to see if it has this feature and it does not. It behaves similarly, but only allows you to make one copy, and then you have to re-select.

In Gimp(Shop) you can select whatever you want to move, hit Ctrl+Shift+L (float selection) and then move the object around using the arrow keys (or the mouse). The place where it used to be gets transparent (or filled with the background color if the layer has no alpha channel). It doesn't wipe out other stuff when you move it, though; I don't know if that's fine with you. Finally press Ctrl+H (or click somewhere outside the selected region) to anchor the selection back in, or create a new layer to move the selected area to it.
(Tested in version 2.2 which is pretty old these days)