Subject: [Gimp-gui] Original layer visibility in transform tools

From: Gez <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 18:17:41 -0300

Hi,
There's something that affects my workflow pretty substantially and
I've tried a couple of times to raise the issue without much traction.

I guess this is the right place to discuss it.

It's the original layer staying visible when any of the the transform
tools are used.
Although it might be useful to keep sometimes the original layer
visible to compare between the original and transformed instances, most
of the times it's terribly obstrusive, killing the context you're
working on.
At least in my experience (I'd really like to hear if anyone has a
difference experience that challenges this claim), most of the times
you need to shrink larger images rather than enlarging small bitmaps.
Bitmaps will always look bad when enlarged, so in the practice
enlarging is something you want to avoid as much as possible.
On the other hand, importing a large image and scale it down to the
needed size is a much more common practice.
Is in that common practice where having the original layer visible
becomes annoying as any large image will cover the context and you
won't be able to see the result of your transformation in context
unless you hide the original layer.
Up to GIMP 2.8 you could click on the visibility icon anytime and hide
it, which made it easier to avoid the problem, but in 2.9 you can't.
You can't turn the visibility off when transforming, you can't
transform a layer that has the visibility turned off.
The only way to avoid the problem is playing with the opacity.

Any of the above workarounds suck when you're working on a complex
artwork. They are impractical.

In my opinion, the original layer should be hidden once the transform
tool is invoked, so the transform preview is the only thing you see, in
its target context.
It might be useful to have an extra switch in the tool options to make
the original visible, but in my experience, it would be something that
is hardly needed.

What do you guys think? Is there something I'm missing or is it also
annoying you too?

Gez

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2015 23:07:08 +0100 (CET)

> tool is invoked, so the transform preview is the only thing you see, in

I quite agree with you.

To be precise, you can toggle the visibility off when transforming, but you
need the visibility on when committing the transform, else nothing is done
and you lose your transform (thing I do often and irritate me a lot).

Thomas Manni