I'm back. It's been more than 3 weeks since my last post and I apologize for the delay but I had to take care of other things.
In this post, I answer
Rekrul about...
About copy and paste.OK, I just tried it again, following your instructions.
I made a square selection, pressed CTRL-C, then CTRL-V. The pointer changed to an anchor, but nothing else happened.
Let me stop you right there. It looks like nothing happened but if you looked at the layers dialog, you would have seen that your selection was copied in a "floating" layer (meaning that the operation was indeed successful). The pointer changing to an anchor means that you will anchor the selection if you click.
I clicked outside the selection and the box went away, but then I had to press CTRL-V again to make the copy appear.
You anchored the first floating selection and you pasted a new one. You could have used the first one instead.
Moved it to where I wanted, clicked outside the box and it pasted it.
When you press CTRL-V it
pastes the selection. When you click outside the box, it
anchors the selection. (Just to make sure you understand the terminology and what's going on.)
If I wanted to paste additional copies, I had to press CTRL-V again for each one.
If you paste a new copy, the previous one will be anchored automatically (saving some time). Doing multiple CTRL-V shouldn't be noticeably slower than Ultimate Paint "stamping" method assuming that you keep your left hand on CTRL-V and your right hand on the mouse/arrows the whole time.
About GIMP lacking an error message.Just as an experiment, I tried to remap CTRL-arrow and it told me that it was an invalid shortcut. However when pressing the arrow keys alone, absolutely nothing happens. I wish it would pop up a brief explanation so you're not left wondering. Like "We're sorry, but GIMP doesn't allow remapping that key".
Not including every error message is generally a bad practice and this is a legitimate complaint from your part. However, I'd like you to keep in mind that GIMP is a free software made by a team of volunteers (anyone really). They don't have full time employees dedicated to
QA testing and as such, it is expectable that they wouldn't think about every invalid
use case.
I am not involved with GIMP development myself, but you could
submit a bug report if it matters.
About multiple selectionsCan Gimp allow you to make multiple, unconnected selections at the same time?
Yes. Hold [Shift] while making a new selection to add it to the previous selection. Hold [Ctrl] to subtract the new selection from the previous one. And more rarely needed, hold [Shift]+[Ctrl] to intersect the new selection with the previous one (intersecting means to keep only the part that is shared by both selections).
You can use this in inventive ways. For instance, you could select a box then remove a color with [Ctrl] and the color select tool to keep the inside of the box that's not of that color.
I actually needed to do this for a project I did.
I wanted to make a scan of the copy protection codewheel for the C64 game Demon Stalkers, but I didn't want to rip my original codewheel apart to do it. So I drew two pencil lines on the back at the 12 & 9 O'clock positions and placed two pieces of tape on the edges of my scanner. I then aligned the wheel to the first selection and made a scan. Then I turned it to the next one and made another scan. I did this 24 times, which gave me scans of all the words on the back wheel, nine at a time, visible through the windows in the front wheel. I marked the exact center of each scan, then created a blank copy of the back wheel by erasing one of the scans and filling it with the same color. I then loaded each scan and used the multi-select option to outline each of the nine windows and the center mark simultaneously. Once copied, I could switch to my copy of the back wheel, line up the center mark and paste in all nine words at once, which would automatically be in the right positions. I repeated this 24 times and ended up with a filled in copy of the back wheel.
It works. Personally I would have layered all the images in GIMP and then erased the plain part of each one except the last to see underneath. Then I would have aligned them if needed and "merged them down" for export. The advantage of working this way is if something goes wrong, you can go back and adjust the problematic layer independently.
About drawing with an image part.Also, is there any way to select part of an image, copy it and then just draw with it, at the original size? Using Paste requires you to position the frame and then click outside to make it permanent. Using the copy in the brush panel shrinks the size to a thumbnail, seems to rotate the brush as it moves and blends the edges.
Can I just copy, say a 100x100 area of the image and then draw with it, with no change to the size, no blending and no rotation? Basically I'm looking for something similar to copy & paste, but where the copy becomes your brush, follows the pointer around and you just use the left button to stamp it down, or hold the button and move the mouse to draw with it.
Yes, you can. However, you won't see it follow your cursor like in Ultimate Paint (you'll only see the outline). If you need to precisely see what you are going to stamp, use copy and paste. For drawing, you were in the right direction with the brush panel "clipboard brush". To prevent size change, you must click the small icon next to "size" (in the tool options) called "Reset size to brush's native size".
Use the pencil tool instead of the paintbrush tool to get rid of the blending.
About the rotation, I don't understand. Make sure "Angle" is set to 0 and if you are drawing with a tablet, check the "dynamics" options.
