Re: PhotoDemon
Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2020 9:53 am
Happy to see a very positive review for one of my favorite programs over on Ghacks: https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/27/photo ... r-windows/
TPFC Forums
https://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/
https://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=21652
To each his own. I guess it depends on how much time one has to get a task done. In my case I'm retired and use the program for editing my personal photo collection, creating or modifying Windows icons, etc., none of which is urgent. At any rate, I get around in PhotoDemon pretty quickly now that I'm used to the admittedly minimalistic GUI (no main toolbar and no right-click context menu). A bit of experimentation has given me a basic understanding of the various editing functions, though I'm certainly no expert.Special wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2020 9:15 amReally trying to like this, but constantly having to fight with it to get my old workflow to adjust, lacks so much customization like hotkey changing, panning with the middle click, changing what's on those toolbars, color of the background, etc. It's quick to load I'll give it that, but still sluggish while using it.
GerryB wrote:If PhotoDemon had the things you need, it probably wouldn't run on my little outdated Win7 netbook, which I bought in 2011.
I apologize that 8.0 shipped with poor stability on Windows XP. Supporting Windows 10 (and its myriad configurations) consumes a great deal of time, so PhotoDemon’s ongoing XP support relies heavily on user-submitted bug reports. If you are an XP user, please consider running PhotoDemon’s nightly builds so you can help me catch XP-specific bugs earlier in my development cycle.
__philippe wrote:Also see developer's recent germane and judicious entry (2020-09-11 16:28) in Photodemon comments section.
Perhaps we should invite him to continue the discussion in this forum topic ?
Awesome news, this was such a huge QoL thing I wasn't able to adjust without, the panning is pretty self explanatory, and the background colors are because more often then not I work with "dark" images and need to see their corners/edges better and on a light/grey backdrop it's hard to see what I'm looking for.@Special - I just wanted to let you know that current nightly builds include fixes for two of the workflow complaints you shared, specifically middle-click to pan the image and changing the color of the canvas background (check the Tools > Options > Interface panel for that new setting). Thank you for suggesting these fixes.
Only 85 billion photo editing programs? I figure there'd be more... And be careful what you ask here, I might just go hog wild and ask the world of you! I really love PhotoDemon, really what's not to love? Portable, great humble dev open to suggestions, feature packed already and only getting better, etc. but there are so many small QoL things missing, hope they can be implemented sooner rather then later, unfortunately thought I don't have a lot of time right now to go over the literally 100 of things I could ask... But I'll follow up here what I can to not leave you hanging!Workflow details like these can be trivial for developers to add, but we need users to tell us about their workflows in the first place! There are roughly 85 billion photo editing apps out there (my rough estimate ). No one has time to study them all, so developers rely on users to tell us when we've broken their UX patterns. I'm just fortunate that a user told me about this thread, because I can only imagine how many amazing ideas are floating out there on the web, in forums and comment sections where I will never find them...
On that note, can I ask for follow-up on your observation that "[PhotoDemon] lacks so much customization like... changing what's on those toolbars". What kind of toolbar customization would you like to see? Can you recommend other software for me to study, ones that do this well? Thank you for any details you can share!
Yeah no doubt, I don't underestimate the huge task this is going to be, image editing programs like these are probably the most "operation" packed kind of software there are (maybe Audacity has you beat though ), so I know hotkey mapping is no doubt a nightmare for you. (Also "PDF-XChange Editor" handles its many many hotkey customization very well, copy them! lol.)One last quick note on the "customizable hotkeys" request - I've received this suggestion before, and I'm all in favor of it. (Most developers are!) But it's incredibly complicated to do "properly". Here's why:
Words...
OK, so that wasn't a "quick note" at all. Apologies for the lengthy explanation, but maybe it helps explain why small programs like mine rarely provide good support for hotkey customization. (And despite my endless complaining, I am actively working on this feature. Each time a user mentions it, it moves further up my to-do list - so again, please share your feedback with developers! We prioritize the things we hear about!)
This is discussed at length above, but the short answer is "yes, I hope so, but it's very complicated so it may take awhile."perhaps customizable keyboard shortcuts in a future release