Good and Bad Things About Crop Tool

[shijan]

Good things:
+ It works.
+ It snaps to document edges and rulers using Alt key.
+ Dynamic Symmetry overlay looks cool and provides visual mark for center point.
+ "Inscribe" (as side effect) allow to quickly set crop area same size as image and provide nice starting point for further crop adjustments.
+ Can use Presets (hidden in global menu in top right corner of the panel)

Bad things:
- No "Centered" tool setting or hotkey. This makes near impossible quickly crop symmetrical borders.
- Undo doesn't work with Crop movements.
- Impossible to use already created Rectangle Lasso as Crop area when switching to Crop Tool.
- With special menu command Rectangle Lasso can crop layer in Picture Mode, but can't crop document in Document Mode.
- No quick "Reset" button for value fields. Need to use Reset command in global menu in top right corner of the panel.
- Buttons rows arranged in unusual order compare to other tools with similar options.

Here is small example sketch with added missing options:

[Gerhard Huber]

The layout doesn't work like you show it. The maximum panel size is exceeded.
"Proportional" is a problem, since it is activated by the size fields.
When the user enters values, he expects them to be adhered to and thus to work proportionally. Even if a "switch" makes it possible to switch this off.

[shijan]

The layout doesn't work like you show it. The maximum panel size is exceeded.

Not sure if i understand you, but panel have same size as original Crop panel and it is still smaller than some other tool settings panels. And there are plenty of empty space there for even more buttons.

"Proportional" is a problem, since it is activated by the size fields.
When the user enters values, he expects them to be adhered to and thus to work proportionally. Even if a "switch" makes it possible to switch this off.

I didn't told anything about "Proportional". i told about "Centered" option toggle. So Crop handles could work in same way as "Centered" Lasso or Rectangle object.


I also have no idea why from your opinion Crop tool should be designed in first place to enter numbers (or overloaded it with even more confused DPI option). It is OK to see numbers and be able to enter manually. It is also very nice that Crop tool preserves aspect ratio if it was entered by numbers. But all those are secondary options. In most situations users just want to drag handles and manually adjust Crop area of the image.
For entering Crop numbers and changing DPI for Layer/Document it is way better to use dedicated separate tools from menu "Change Layer/Document Size"