Crop tool behaviour

[Paul Matthijsse]

Hello, me again. In my opinion, the crop tool works a bit strange (inherited from RawTherapee).

I open a photo, activate the crop tool, click on Select and try to draw a rectangle or square with the mouse - without result. Instead I must move a barely visible line around the photo to make my crop. The solution is to hit the Ctrl key while dragging a crop with the mouse. A tooltip on the Select button to tell me this would be fine.

Once I have my crop, I go to Details, Sharpening. I open a preview window at 100%, then I try to move the red square to a place of interest. But I can’t, dragging the mouse moves the crop over the photo (so I “destroyed” my crop). When I hold the Ctrl key, the cursor icon changes to the crop tool (!) and now I can move the red square. This is not correct imo.

Solution to move the red square: hold the Shift key and drag the square. A tooltip somewhere would be welcome. When holding the Shift key, the mouse cursor should change to the little hand.

Another point. The selected crop stays highlighted in other tools (most of the time, not always), including the un-highlighted part of the photo outside the crop. It would be preferrable when I can continue editing with the cropped part only (to avoid distraction by the rest of the photo).

Last point. I make a crop. When I disable the Crop tool, the crop values jump back to default (no crop). This way it is impossible to compare a cropped photo with the uncropped one (yes, snapshots of course!), but my point is that disabling the Crop tool must not reset the crop values to 0/default (there’s no need for that, isn’t it?).

Regards, Paul.

[Danny Heijl]

I just type “h” (or click the the arrow selector, “handgereedschap”) once the selection is to my liking and the selection is applied immediately as soon as you move the mouse

[Paul Matthijsse]

That works indeed. I see now that the hand icon does show the shortcuts in a tooltip. Point is I never use that icon, I always crop via the Crop tool in the Transform tab, and there I was a bit lost. So the solution is that I must read the manual! On the other hand, why do I need to read a manual to make just a simple crop..?

My last point in the message above is still a point.

[Danny Heijl]

Perhaps an “apply selection” button in the toolwindow would be handy.

[Gaaned92]

when satisfied with crop, I right click in the image to apply crop.

The click on crop/select or crop selection to modify crop.

[Paul Matthijsse]

Hello Gaaned, yes that works as well, thanks.

[Danny Heijl]

The solution that Alberto implemented in 1.41 solves it very neatly!

[Paul Matthijsse]

Agreed, it works more intuitive now.