Evaluation Notes - Photo Realistic
From GIMP GUI Redesign
Photo Realistic - creating high quality photo realistic
Contents
Icons in the Toolbox
- it is not easy (=quick) to recognise and identify each icon
- should have strong contours, be good metaphors, differentiated by colours
- pen and pencil have almost the same angle and colour, at least the colour should be different
- better icons wich depict the actual effect, are needed for Dodge/burn tool and Eraser
- Levels, Curves, Threshold are represented by an icon of their dialog window, not the its meaning & function
- all the transformation tools look the same, the colour and blobby shape is the same, just the tiny details differ and show the function
- Ink tool would be better represented by an icon of a nib, which is the essence of the tool;
- Crop/resize icon is not enough differentiated from the background, and it’s difficult to know what it is; traditional two 'L's (like still used on mouse cursor) is better
- Measure icon tool is too complicated, too many details; old one was better (look at www.docs.gimp.org )
Open Image Window
- Disturbingly, it is not a native dialog;
- Doesn’t show shortcuts/aliases/links to folders (in Windows).
- favourites is a native dialog feature available (almost) all platforms.
- a favourite folder should look like a folder
- Maybe GIMP could remember that during one session within which folder we want to see the files in Open dialog sorted by time.
Conclusions
- Open and Save dialogs should be implemented natively
- If you have cross platform projects, adopt them to the platform. Do not compromise, so that one size fits all.
Acquire Scanner/Camera
- To Scan you need to install SANE plugin. this can be traumatic experience
- first sub-devide these devices according to device type (camera, scanner, webcam) and only when there are multiple devices of one type connected, differentiate these by device name.
Open Location
- Technological solution, there is no user interface solution at all.
- It’s usefulness is very limited to copy and paste of technical addresses.
- Not acceptable is the fact that one has to type the whole "http://" part
- Not forgiving. It does the job, but you are not allowed to make any mistake.
- You should be able to go to a website and browse through the directories your way towards an image.
- drag-and-drop images works for IE , but not for Firefox.
Conclusions
- User has to adapt to machine! That’s wrong
- both dragging and typing should be supported
- Maybe there should be a small project to find the solution for a mini (ftp like) browser for Open location dialog.
Levels
- It would be useful to show CMYK in Levels.
- Open and Save options are not relevant at this step. It's better to have 2 sliders instead of 3. (?)
- It would be good to visibly show what we are doing when changing input/output levels.
- Maybe we could display the mapping in two dimensional mapping. Maybe there should be also output on axis.
- Levels could display all channels at the same time, with different colours.
Colour Balance
- It is good to have 3 different ranges to adjust (shadows, midtones, highlights).
- Now we need balance colour of shadows/midtones/highlights separately. We don’t like architecturally that you can’t access all radio buttons at the same time.We want to have an interface where you can really access 3 different regions with color balance simultaneously. Replicating 2 sliders for 3 ranges and linking the adjustment ranges by default.
- Taking one of 3 eyedroppers and changing for ex. hue, regardless of value and saturation, should be possible.
- Two dimensional solutions: colour wheel/slider will deliver simplification of this process.