Hello - I have some feedback about the Trim to Selection feature. It doesn’t work as expected, and perhaps needs a name change or to be split into two features.
The word “Trim” brings to mind a pair of scissors. It implies that content will be removed from the image. However, selecting outside the bounds of the image actually expands the canvas to fit the selection. While I can see how this might be useful in some cases, most image programs like GIMP and Photoshop have a “Crop to selection” feature, which is something I need much more often.
A more intuitive name for this feature would be something like “Resize canvas to selection.” I would also request that a “Crop to selection” feature be added, because I usually start drawing first and then resize my canvas to fit what I’m drawing. It would be much more convenient to just draw a box around my drawing, not worrying about where the edges of the image are, and press a button to crop the canvas to that size.
Resize Canvas doesn’t remove content, it goes off-canvas if the resize takes the size down.
The Crop tool does remove content and it has the ‘traditional’ visual guides that people like to see.
The important point about Trim is that it does remove content. it removes any content (including off-canvas content) outside the final canvas region.
As for Trimming to a size greater than the current canvas then yes it does make the visible part of the canvas bigger because the canvas is already infinite and the white rectangle you see is the visible part of it, at the moment. That can be enlarged by resize or trim.
I think that Trim To Selection already performs that ‘crop to selection’ action as you described it. How does it not?
I’m not sure how else to explain it that I didn’t write in my original message. Can you point out where in my post my words might be confusing? Please see the gif also. “Trim” is a bad word for what the tool is doing.
The words Trim, Resize and Crop have their own long term ‘normal/ordinary’ use which may not correspond exactly with how they’re used in krita and how they’re used in krita may not correspond exactly with how they’re used in other digital image applications.
Thinking about this again and looking at your animated .gif, I realise that you regard the area outside your ‘intended final rectangle’ as being of no importance or even ‘not existing’. i.e. you’re treating the ‘painting area’ you see as a rectangular sheet of real paper which can be cut with the dotted selection line, to leave just the part that you are interested in.
I think you’re misunderstanding the fact that the painting area is infinite and the initial white rectangle (the current canvas size and location) is a ‘view port’ onto the infinite canvas, which can have painted content outside the ‘white rectangle’.
Trim does remove content, it removes any painted content outside the final trim size and position. It also adjusts the ‘viewport’ size and position to match the defined trim size and position.
If you definitely want to treat the canvas as a sheet of real paper then you can use the Crop Tool to do that and drag the crop rectangle handles around to fit the final size you want.
I don’t get it. It is doing what it should be doing conceptually and practically.
The fact that you added canvas with that selection seems more like a corner case of language considering the medium because despite the canvas had grown into non existing area everything outside it was trimmed.
Regardless of how weird it is I think it is good this behaviour exists.
A bit offtopic, but one of the things I’d like to do someday is making Crop Tool not remove/trim data outside of the new canvas on cropping…
Have you tried the Crop Tool? Because it by default has the “Grow” function disabled, so it does what you wish this would do. It also removes the data outside of the canvas just how Trim does. So basically Crop Tool is a more advanced function of Trim to selection. And when you already have a selection, Crop Tool would automatically set itself to fit the selection, too (if you have disabled Grow, you need to click the handle, since it looks like it first does outgrow the canvas, but it can be easily fixed just by clicking on the handle).
The confusing for you result comes probably from the fact that once upon a time it wasn’t possible to draw a selection outside of the canvas, so the Trim to selection function would never go outside of the canvas, too.
That sounds like Resize Canvas.
I’d like Resize Canvas to Selection and Resize Canvas to Layer as a complement to the existing Trim to Selection and Trim to Layer.
I did put a wishlist bug report in about it and other ‘improvements’ to the Resize facilities but it’s with all the many other wishlist bug reports
From a functional viewpoint, the Crop Tool is a different presentation of some capabilities of the Trim tool.
My point was that it is an existing area of paintable layer and it may have content on it because some people do use off-canvas content.
