PSP: How can Straighten Tool improve?

[Nev]

Hey everyone,

How would you like to see Straighten Tool improve for PSP? Ideas of any scale are welcomed.

Best,
Nev from PSP Team

[LeviFiction]

Let us draw the straighten line instead of just moving two nodes. Then let us move the nodes with fine-grain options. So we can make a quick drawing of the angle we want, and then if we want to make it more precise give us better control with angle, node 1 position and node 2 position number boxes.

It would be interesting if you could use magic fill to fill in the blank areas after a straighten routine, but only on small angle differences. But that might be a bit much.

[JoeB]

It would be interesting if you could use magic fill to fill in the blank areas after a straighten routine, but only on small angle differences. But that might be a bit much.

I like that idea, but given that sometimes the result would be pretty good and other times not so good it might be an idea if there was an option with Straighten on the Tool Options bar where you could select whether or not to apply Magic Fill automatically when straightening. Then you could try once using the option and, if not a good result, Undo, deselect the option and just do the straighten.

[hartpaul]

I prefer the straighten tool as it is. Having to draw the line as in Photoshop may be advantageous in some rare occasions, but if doing processing of a lot of images and having to correct a horizon line in most then PSP is best.
Only possible improvement would be auto detection of a straight line and having the straighten line align with that whether near horizontal or near vertical. But would also want this feature to be able to be turned on or off.

[LeviFiction]

I think my biggest thing with the straighten tool as it is, and why I recommended the drawing option is that if I'm zoomed in, the line is always a certain percentage of the whole image. So I have to zoom out to move the line, or manually scroll to each point and move those manually.

Allowing us to draw the line doesn't mean that the current auto-creation of a line has to stop. Just let us overwrite the current line with drawing the same way we can with the crop tool.

[Joelle]

I have no problem with the Straighten Tool, it works fine as it is.

Joëlle

[hartpaul]

I think my biggest thing with the straighten tool as it is, and why I recommended the drawing option is that if I'm zoomed in, the line is always a certain percentage of the whole image. So I have to zoom out to move the line, or manually scroll to each point and move those manually.

Allowing us to draw the line doesn't mean that the current auto-creation of a line has to stop. Just let us overwrite the current line with drawing the same way we can with the crop tool.

This problem also exists with the Object Remover tool that if zoomed in made your selection of the object to be removed and you choose the source mode square you have to zoom out to resize and place that. It would be good if the straighten tool and the Object Remover tool were aware of the amount of zoom and the cursor location and were sized and placed appropriate to those.

[Rick_R]

Let the user set the line color.

I work mainly with either scans of yearbook pages or of old documents, especially census forms and forms with a lot of lines to fill in data such as Petitions for Naturalization. Almost all of those are black and white. Particularly with census records, where the page may be 20 inches wide, it's a huge pain trying to spot the thin black tool line against a background loaded with horizontal lines. It would be a huge help to be able to set it to bright red or some other very obvious color.

Even with yearbook pictures, straightening those often involves lining up the line along the bottom or top of a black-and-white photo. There too it would be a lot easier with a high-contrast color.

[Rick_R]

A "half-straighten" option.

Often--especially with older scanned documents, or photos of a page with multiple images for example--vertical and horizontal lines are not quite perpendicular. So you do the horizontal adjustment and now the vertical is obviously off. You correct the vertical and now the horizontal is obviously off. (I'm assuming that, for whatever reason, Perspective Correction is not a good option.)

If the only choice is full horizontal or full vertical, usually "not quite horizontal" is much more noticeable.

But often a good compromise is to set the horizontal tool, look at the adjustment angle, and do a free rotate on half the amount. So, for example, you set the horizontal line and it shows the angle is 0.2 degrees. So you do a free rotate of 0.1 degrees as a compromise.

It wouldn't take much programming to calculate half the adjustment angle automatically and offer that as an additional clickable option.

[JoeB]

@Rick_R,
I'm not sure why you think/assume that Perspective Correction is not a good option for the situation you describe. Could you clarify?

[Rick_R]

Three points (?)

This might be getting too far off from "straighten", but how about three points, or possible even four, rather than just two ends?

Often, things that have been photographed such as pages in a book don't come out perfectly straight even though the original line in the document or page would be visibly straight if it were pressed flat and viewed straight on. I'm thinking put the two tool ends at the ends of the line and a third point or even a fourth elsewhere along the line, then the tool straightens the whole set. It seems like this would be similar to slight application of the warp mesh, but automated.

And realistically, I think the extra points would have to be no more than about 1 degree, maybe less. If the line is more distorted than that, it would need manual correction. Also, the "middle" points would have to be at least a certain distance from the ends and from each other. You wouldn't want an eight inch line with the left middle node 1/2 inch from the left end and a full degree up from the left end and the right middle node 1/4 inch from that and a full degree below the left end, giving almost a horizontal Z.

[LeviFiction]

I'm wondering why you would ned to do a half angle with the free rotation instead of just entering the half angle in the straighten tool. Does the straighten tool also fail at half the original angle? If Corel doesn't implement it you could do something similar script-wise. All it requires is that you accept the initial angle and if it's not what you want, run the half-angle script which undoes the straighten, grabs the last used angle, and then performs a straighten on half that angle. I really don't know why I keep trying to turn everything into a script.

[Rick_R]

@Rick_R,
I'm not sure why you think/assume that Perspective Correction is not a good option for the situation you describe. Could you clarify?

For one thing, I'm thinking that some people who aren't particularly familiar with PSP or photo retouching might not think of that. For a lot of people, when they think of Perspective Correction they think of photos with very obvious perspective issues, such as a very narrow European street with old multi-story buildings on each side, frequently looking uphill.

Also, in my case I basically run into problems with scans of hospital bills from a particular hospital. (I'm a lawyer for various hospitals and we routinely deal with hospital bills.) When it comes to legal documents, straightening a copy is one thing, but doing more "drastic" adjustments (even though very minor ...) can get into questionable areas of "it's not an exact duplicate of the original".

[JoeB]

I really don't know why I keep trying to turn everything into a script.

Because they're efficient? And, in many case in my experience, for automating many of the tasks that people do often they are often easy to record with some relatively simple modifications made afterward for specific needs. I'm a great believer in scripting in PSP, given we can't expect every little thing we want done efficiently to be added to the program. That's why scripting is available I believe.

And I'm not even that good at it! :-O

[Rick_R]

I'm wondering why you would need to do a half angle with the free rotation instead of just entering the half angle in the straighten tool. Does the straighten tool also fail at half the original angle? If Corel doesn't implement it you could do something similar script-wise. All it requires is that you accept the initial angle and if it's not what you want, run the half-angle script which undoes the straighten, grabs the last used angle, and then performs a straighten on half that angle. I really don't know why I keep trying to turn everything into a script.

Actually, I never tried entering a number in the angle setting. I thought that was just a readout, not something that can be manually changed.

It's not something I run into a lot, and it would be a lot easier to just click the existing check mark, decide, "No, too much.", press Ctrl-z and then click a half-straighten button instead of either calculating it or running a script.

Regarding the half angle, that's just based on my experience. I have found that usually in the "not quite vertical, not quite horizontal" situation one-half tends to be the best. If it's still too noticeable, then it requires something like Perspective Correction.

But then again, one problem I have is that I've worked with so many scans of documents and yearbook pages that I'll look at an image and say, "That's not quite horizontal ..." and when I run the Straighten tool it's off by less than one-tenth of a degree ...