Tools - Graphics Editors

Just a few notes on various graphic editors.

For my web pages, I frequently

Take a screen shot (via prt sc)
Paste it into an editor
Clip out just the part I want
Save it as a png-file (lossless and smaller than a jpg)

Occasionally, I want to add a bit of text, some lines, and perhaps a circle.

For this purpose, none of the "free" software discussed below is particularly good. (Two are freeware, MS Paint comes with the operating system.)

Image Comparisons | GIMP | Microsoft Paint | OpenOffice Draw | Opinion

Image Comparisons

These are 3 png-files - the GIMP image is considered golden. The other 2 were produced by reading the GIMP image and simply saving a png-file without making any modifications.

GIMP	Microsoft Paint	OpenOffice Draw

816x747 40.3 KB	816x747 42.1 KB	816x1056 80.2 KB

All 3 of these have the same width - 816
All 3 images are aligned to the top
OpenOffice has a height of 1,056, the others are 747
OpenOffice dropped the right-hand part of the image

GIMP

This actually is pretty good - in Windows XP. (Windows 10 was a disaster until I made the icons large enough to be seen.)

I press prt sc to capture the screen image to the clipboard and, in GIMP, select

File / Create / From Clipboard

Then, using the default zoom level, I use the Rectangle Select Tool to place a box around the area of interest. To make a precise selection, I zoom in to 400% and use the resize handles to place the selection edge exactly where I want it. Then, from the menu, I select

Image / Crop to Selection

File / Export As... is used to produce a png-file (compression level 9) - based on the pgn extension.

The problem here is that there is no easy way to draw a circle - Seriously!! Who would leave out one of the basic drawing primitives?

It is possible to fake a circle - but it is quite tedious.

Microsoft Paint

Microsoft Paint (part of Windows 10) has the ability to draw circles (and many other shapes), but lacks a user friendly way to select an area.

I pasted the screen capture (no problem) and tried to select an area to keep. Unfortunately, once a selection box is drawn, there is no way to change its size. All attempts to "adjust" the box simply resized the outlined area. Yet another complete waste of time.

Opening and resaving an existing png-file increased the file size from 40.3 KB to 42.1 KB - acceptable, but not what I expected.

Other limitations

This program does not support layers
Once a component is placed, there is no way to edit it. It can be resized and moved when you first draw it - but not after you try to do anything else.

OpenOffice Draw

This software apparently does not understand what a pixel is. I opened a png-file and it rescaled it to fit an 8.5x11 page. When I tried to save the result as another png-file, it

Increased the file size
Changed the number of pixels
Deleted several columns of pixels from the right-hand side

On the plus side, it

Allows me to draw a circle
Supports layers - sort of - pretty cumbersome

I am not sure what the point of this software is - but it is not useful for the purpose I need.

Opinion

Use GIMP to cut the desired selection and save it as a png-file. Open the file in MS Paint and add annotations.

Don't waste you time with OpenOffice Draw - its output (as a png-file) is of no value.

Author: Robert Clemenzi