@stokerg
Thanks for the reply. I realize this software is primarily focused on "proper" graphic designers, but these features would greatly facilitate my workflow. Even just allowing the modification of the crop mask in the transform panel in Designer (which should be as "simple" as passing the XY coords of the bounds which are already stored in a vector somewhere to the transform panel) would be useful. Even if the tools are different, the ability to "look under the hood" and modify them in a precise manner would be invaluable. When I'm cropping microscope images, and I want to maintain the same scale between several different images in a figure, it's useful to be able to crop all images to the same dimensions, and then scale them to the same size in Designer.
Currently the workflow is:
1. Open microscope image in Photo and crop to specified # of pixels x and y (which does behave in a centered manner thankfully)
2. Export cropped image from Photo (As "open in designer" opens the original photo, not the photo with the crop applied, even if you save the cropped photo as a new Photo file. I would argue that this is not the expected behavior by most users, even with the "non-destructive" nature of editing in Photo)
3. Open cropped photo in Designer
4. Resize to fixed size using the transform panel, and manual size entry
5. Position image, and apply new scale bar
This could be shortened to:
1. Drop image into Designer
2. Apply constrained ratio center crop to desired size
3. Resize to fixed size using the transform panel, and manual size entry if necessary
4. Position image and apply new scale bar
While the number of steps is not that different, the difference in number of clicks is massive, especially for a case like mine where I'm processing on the order of 20-30 microscope images for a publication.
Again, I know I'm not the primary user type for your software (though a few of my colleagues do use Illustrator, most use ... Powerpoint ... to lay out their figures), so I don't expect my feedback to make it into the featureset for a long time. Thanks for taking the time to respond, and if you have any ideas of how this workflow could be improved, I would welcome it.