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PS Rotation
Reading the forums here and generally playing around with PS CS2 and GIMP 2.6 I was wondering a bit about rotation.

GIMP has good rotation down to 0.01 degree steps. For layers anyway. I can't even find rotation for the whole canvas there.

This compared to PS rotation for layers with 0.1 degree steps but canvas rotation with 0.01 degree steps. At least it is when you use the measure tool to find a straight line and then go straight to rotate canvas -> arbitrary. With the value filled in and the direction. But this only really works when you have a sure-thing straight line on an image like a straight decoration that's on every page or a good edge of the page, though I much prefer decorations to edges.

Switching between applications for "easy" rotation is turning into a headache and I've been casually looking for PS plug-ins or something to get 0.01 accuracy for layers as well, no luck.
Anyone know of any? Or any other hints or tips on rotation...
I'd say use always Gimp for rotate/crop/merge images.
Gimp also has better crop tool than PS, and after you get used to Gimp, it's more faster than doing all process on PS.

I don't get why many people are sticking with only one tool. at least, I need PS, Gimp, SAI, Xnview.
Chrissues said:
but canvas rotation with 0.01 degree steps
But I found it's actually with 0.05 degree steps.. when you key-in a number smaller, it will do nothing..;_;

And about GIMP, I found it's very slow with large image (I tried a 6000x10000 one, and finally GIMP crashed.)
PS is 0.1 degrees from my tests. It rounds the number, so it actually "switches over" at the 0.05 point.

I can crop very quickly in PS. Don't use the crop tool, it's terrible. I do this:

- Marquee tool (M)
- Zoom to fit whole image (Control-0)
- Select the whole image (Control-A)
- Drag the top-left of the selection near the top-left point
- Zoom in on the top-left point (I press control-alt-0 and jump there with the navigator)
- Scroll across the top and left edges to confirm the positioning, and adjust the crop point precisely with arrow keys. (Keyboard: PageDown/PageUp/Control-PgDn/Control-PgUp. Or, hold shift and drag the navigator around.)
- Image->Crop to crop to the selection
- Repeat for bottom-right

It's very fast and precise.

I don't get why many people are sticking with only one tool. at least, I need PS, Gimp, SAI, Xnview.
Switching tools is a pain, and GIMP's UI is so awful I never want to use it.
Yeah, I use PS CS2 for my scan editing, and I have the same issue with errors in precise rotations. Even at the minimum in which CS2 allows it's still not perfect >.<
Me also thinks crop tool is terrible. It messes up the result, so I also use the Marquee tool (well, not always).

Switching tools is a pain, but also a must. SAI can't make circles, I have to open PS only to make one circle and copy it to SAI -_-;

Also midzki, how can you use SAI for your purposes?
Is it only me or SAI is ridiculously slow for tasks PS do like it was nothing, like:

  • Using Magic Wand
  • Deleting a selection
  • Fill a selection using Bucket
  • Fill a layer using Bucket
  • And of course, working with hughe images
I was basically just curious solely driven by my own laziness. It's good to hear some interesting responses.

I prefer to crop by eye and then use canvas size, just in case I want to preserve some details after all and make the canvas size bigger again to fill in the left over edge rather than crop it out. Bits of feet and fingertips come to mind. Can't really get a scan perfectly straight it seems, so there's always something that has to go heh. Ah well. If you want the whole thing buy the book I suppose.

petopeto said:
PS is 0.1 degrees from my tests. It rounds the number, so it actually "switches over" at the 0.05 point.
This is true for layer rotation. Not for canvas rotation. The accuracy is a lot greater here. A small 10000 x 50 or so test with a single line can confirm this. Like so:
http://upload.hattix.co.uk/files/longlines.png
Outer two lines are 0.1 layer rotation CW and CCW, the inner two are 0.01 canvas rotation CW and CCW.

This can be a pain since you're stuck copying layers out to new images to rotate the whole canvas and then back in. It does work quite well however when there are horizontal (or vertical - it's lots easier when the measure tool fills in your value for you anyway) features.

--
And speaking of PS and GIMP, after seriously breaking things trying to get PSDs to work between the two, I've been using bitmaps. I remember peto said something about tiffs on chat as well but if I recall my dtp classes correctly tiffs are about as hopeless in having no layers or any features, just flat image - the same problems bmp have with less of a size or maybe compatibilty issue.
Anything there that can speed things up? Any useful fileformat I'm missing here?
Image rotation is more fine-grained. The free transform rotation is just buggy.

Photoshop will save layers to TIFFs. I think it's a proprietary data block--other images may only see the composite image, so if you edit it in another program and save it you'll probably lose the layers. For more complex PS documents I'll still use PSD.

I've never been able to do anything useful with SAI. I never redraw stuff from scratch; I do all fixing with clone and patch tool...
I've mostly done what Peto has. I use the rotation to a degree and I fill in the blanks with the clone tool, the smudge tool and the patch tool.
For the quality & efficiency, editing should better to do following order.

1) rotate/merge/crop
2) filter
3) mask/clone/patch
4) redraw details in gaps which original image hasn't

It's a pain when I edit only one image to switch applications. but when I use batching on 2), there are no painful switching because process 1) & 3) are separated.

I use SAI only on 4). but I haven't filled gaps recently, so don't been used SAI several weeks :P

File format: 1):bmp result of 2)&3):psd.

Use only psd on PS because Adobe hates to write other formats. I'm using Xnview to export psd into others.
After a couple hours in a debugger, I managed to fix this.

In CS4 32-bit (Windows only, and you must have the 11.0.1 patch installed), change byte 009631D5 in Photoshop.exe from 01 to 02. (If it's not already 01, then you're either in the wrong place or have a different binary.) Back up your executable, obviously.

This changes the base for the rotation tool from 1/10 to 1/100 (in other words, it's .1^n). This affects both free transform and transform selection.

This also affects mousewheel changes. Before, mousewheel in the rotation field would move in 0.1 steps, and shift-mousewheel would move by 1.0. Now it's 0.01 and 0.1. There's no in-between (sorry, best I can do with a hex editor). You can still drag-rotate the selection for rough alignment.

You can change it to 03 if you want 0.001 steps, but I'm not sure that's useful (and it makes the mousewheel useless).
Uh, by the way, does rotation in photoshop cause moire with noisy images?
I'd love to rotate as soon as I get a raw from the scanner so I can crop out the black border to prevent denoising plugins from getting a false noise level for blacks. But just like resizing, rotating also includes interpolation, so if this causes moire with noisy images, I gotta consider filtering before doing anything else.
CS3: 00800138: 01 02