Rotating crop area

[OldNick]

I want to crop an image. I use the crop tool and all the options I can see in the drop down give me landscape-shaped results. So I figure I will rotate the crop area using the rotate grab-handle at the centre of the crop area...and it rotates the image!

Wha...? If grab the move grabber it moves the crop region. If I resize, it resizes the crop region...but the rotate grabber rotates the image? What's more it does that, then AFAICS there is no fix. The rotation of the image does not revert if I undo the crop.

Can anyone tell me what the logic is? Or is this just a bug?

Thanks for any help

Nick

[TimW]

Try holding down the Shift key while rotating.

[OldNick]

Thanks for the reply, but it still does the same thing and I am left with no option but to free-rotate while cropping to get the image back right, or closing without saving and re-opening.

The image rotation is not recognised as an action. It cannot be undone and if I close before cropping, I am not asked to save.

Nick

[JoeB]

Thanks for the reply, but it still does the same thing and I am left with no option but to free-rotate while cropping to get the image back right, or closing without saving and re-opening.

The image rotation is not recognised as an action. It cannot be undone and if I close before cropping, I am not asked to save.

Nick

Actually, it can be undone. But I - and many, many others - agree that the Crop tool is a PITA since this change to in in PSP2018. It was introduced as a "feature" even though nobody asked for it, so now rotates the image instead of the rectangle and leaves a border of empty space around it to try to accommodate the rotation.

If you do a rotate with the handle and then a crop and want to Undo it, first you have to click the Undo button. Then you have to hit the Clear option for the Crop tool. This second step will clear the crop rectangle and return the original, unrotated image.

In previous versions, if you rotated the rectangle and then cropped the image, if you hit the Undo button the image immediately returned to its uncropped original, but the crop rectangle remained rotated. You could then either hit the Clear button, which would clear the rectangle from the image, or rotate the handle of the crop rectangle a little bit more or less if that was the tweak you needed. In doing so, rotating the handle a bit more to the left continued rotating the rectangle left, and vice versa. It's intuitive.

In PSP 2018, rotating the handle rotates the image but the rectangle stays horizontally and vertically squared. After cropping then hitting Undo, the image returns to its original size BUT it remains rotated and the crop rectangle remains squared on the image. If you hit Clear then the image will be restored to its original position and the crop rectangle disappears. If you want to just tweak the crop a bit more left or right then you instead move the handle a bit more left or right. But it's still only the image that moves, and the crop rectangle stays where it was. There is nothing intuitive about that at all.

The expectation of real life users is that you should move the rectangle to the position in the image that represents the crop you want, and then crop to the rectangle. That's the way it also works if you use the Selection tool and rotate it by Edit>Selection - i.e., the rectangle attached to the selection rotates. And that's how it should be. It is completely unintuitive to invoke a tool with a rectangle like the Crop tool and expect it to remain stationary when you rotate its handle to which the rectangle is attached. If you want to rotate an image - rather than the rectangle - in PSP using a rectangle then it's the Pick tool that a user expects to do that - and it does that very well.

It's like some programmer at Corel with way too much time on his/her hands woke up from an Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass daydream and simply thought that reversing the rational way a tool works in all graphic editors would actually be a truly rational approach to add as a "feature" to PSP. You'd have to be a bit mad to think that it's rational to expect that rotating a handle attached to a rectangle would rotate the object behind the handle and rectangle rather than the rectangle itself. Sheesh!

[dwalby2]

Interesting "feature", it doesn't seem to recognize the rotation as ever happening. If you click to close the image it doesn't even prompt you to ask about saving the changes, so it never really happened, no wonder it can't be undone.

BTW, if I understand what you were originally trying to do, you wanted to crop in portrait orientation instead of landscape, is that right? When you select the crop tool, there are a series of icons just below the crop rectangle area. The one just to the left of the pulldown where you select the crop dimensions, that looks like a thick "L", click on that and your crop rectangle rotates 90 degrees.

[OldNick]

Hey yeah man. I saw that afterward, (and I am not dissing you for trying to help)....but it may be that ....no ...I would rotate the image _then_ crop....if I was sensible

But Heck, the grab bit is a serious "grabage" pile of junk.

Again, some coder has either had too much time or too much attitude.

Forking Hay