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Tony Jackson

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  1. As @carl123 shows in his screenshot, use the Transform panel to change the X & Y coordinates of a selected object to non-integer numbers. You can also enable Force Pixel Alignment and Move by Whole Pixels on the toolbar next to Snapping. If the Transform panel isn't visible use View > Studio > Transform. Sorry, can't make the Quote system work today... Hi Lee, thanks for this note – it has pointed me down another avenue! In practice what I've learned is that I can avoid the 'Move Tool' by using a marquee, which I can drag around without any artifacts, so this solves my immediate problem. It is a bit clumsier than I'm used to, insisting on an extra layer all the time, and only posting where I copied from, rather than where I've politely put the cursor, but I gather that that is nowadays the way of things, and I'm getting quicker at it. And to avoid an impenetrable stack of layers I try to discipline myself to merge my working document and the layer with the paste on it as soon as I'm happy with where it is. Just today I've discovered that the reason I couldn't adjust my marquees (meaning I have to keep doing it until I get it pixel-correct) is because I'd taken the circumflex symbolt to mean 'Shift'. Alas, my shift-up key is broken, so when I spotted a panel offering to latch a 'modify' mode to my marquee-drawing I was very pleased (my supplier of keyboards is hiding in lockdown I presume!) I've some other things to learn, but I'm on the way, my diagram is substantialy complete. I'd like to be able to reduce its file size, which seems to have crept up with little, and lately a big jump, as I reduce the mumber of pixels in the drawing! Nice if I could define the small number of colours I want which I suspect is part of the problem, as also some text I've typed in which I got near to rasterising, but not near enough! I will have an experimental go at the transform panel. With something like my squiggle, which is inherently pixellated in the original, I'm not sure how I wuld decide on a position for it – perhaps a number of x- and y-pixels of displacement. I will check. Thanks for the prompt! Best regards, Tony
  2. Hi Carl, Thanks for your note! How can I change the X/Y coordinates – or better, how can I arrange for non-integer numbers of pixels not to be allowed (if that is what the issue is)? I can't see any display of coordinates on the screen? The original squiggle clearly doesn't offend, the pasted version does. I found that if I enlarge to, say 2000% I can drag the pasted squiggle so as to eliminate the artifacts eiither to the sides or above and/or below, and reduce the number of shades they display. Pretty fiddly, but possible. No way I could find to eliminate the artifacts both up and across at the same time. The 'clicking' or 'notchiness' of the way things move I find very helpful, but I guess it doesn't apply when I'm drgging a paste away from its copy-parent? Best regards, Tony
  3. Hi Matt, Thanks for your kindly interest! I obviously hadn't spotted that the forum was divided in this way. Will it offend if I copy and paste to the questions forum, or should I wait until a moderator moves it? Best regards, Tony.
  4. No reply on this topic! Does this mean that I've wasted a load of time getting to begin to cope with a program which won't support pixel-accurate editing? I'm sure I've managed to get some stuff to copy clean, but I've wasted a lot of time picking out jpeg-style artifacts one pixel at a time since. Not just cut and paste. I've unclicked anti-aliasing, but text I produce with the text tool still appears 'smoothed', and thus quite out of keeping with the document whose style I'm trying to conform to. This blurring is clearly a topic which some others have wrestled with, and a behaviour which is surprising in a professional application. No such problem with Photoshop, but those of us without big corporate employers are no longe able to use it. Any one suggest something more suitable I might try? Best regards, Tony.
  5. Hi Walt, following some discussion under "Absolute beginner" here is an example of what I've come across. "Sample Squiggle" was a blank document, in which I made a random squiggle in black with the pixel tool. I then copied and pasted it (using Cmd C and Cmd V), and used the Move tool to slide the copied version away downwardss from the original. If you enlarge it to, say, 3,000% you will clearly see a mid-grey artefact attached somewhat unpredicatbly to the shape of the original. Less obvious is a very pale grey artifact, usually on the opposite side of the line. Some bits of the line are not affected at all, so far as I can see. I found three levels of grey. I would copy from my diagram, but in pasting it into a document you could see I would be corrupting it anyway, which would be confusing. But if you care to believe me I will say that I usually get more complicated blurring than this. I've put up the original diagram, renamed as "Wiring x", and at position 57 on the scale at the bottom of the page, and about half way between top and bottom there is a box with the legend 'Na 7' in it. The box is made of two black one-pixel-width lines, with the space between them filled with pink. A similar box, with the legend 'Na 5' is to be found at 47 on the bottom scale and a bit above the middle vertically; it show no sign of blurring. I can't say for certain whether this is something which I copied without the paste problem, or something I made from scratch. But this is what Na 7 looked like originally. The pattern of artefacts is similar, but different. The letter 'N' has artefaacts on both sides of its legs and of its diagonal. You will see that the original single-pixel line is still there in my 'Squiggle' example, but it has been lost in the Na 7 example. Interestingly, when I opened the diagram the squiggle vanished. Luckily I had saved it! Best regards, Tony. Wiring_x.afphoto Sample squiggle.afphoto
  6. Good morning all! A surprising silence on the topic of the messed-up paste! So I asked a professional user friend (he does instruction manuals for white goods, among other things). Seems he couldn't persuade Photo to paste something clean-edged which he copied, allthough the same action came out fine in Photoshop. Very hard to believe, but is this a bug? I had a closer look at a paste on the diagram this morning. The blurring seems to have added a grey row of pixels sideways, but not vertically. So my letter N has a single-pixel grey line all around it, except at the top and bottom of the two vertical lines. So I did a little experiment: I drew a single-pixel-width vertical line, ten pixels long. Copy and paste, then Move to move the copied lline sideways. I now had two vertical lines, both sharp. I then copied a nearby block of six pixels width and nine pixels height, but with only the bottom six pixels full width, then two pixels height at four pixels wide, and one more pixel of height at two pixels wide. Copy-paste-move, and out slides a block whose original width has been reduced by one pixel, but to which has been added one pixel-worth of grey at each side (nothing at top or bottom.) I'm pretty sure it is not a bug, because I have details which I copied and pasted earlier on in this odyssey, and they look clean and clear. Can any one help with this? Best regards, Tony
  7. Well, it is round, you see different things through it, it is not long and thin like a telescope, it is accurately round, so probably not a vegetable thing. Could have been a porthole, I suppose, but a porthole sees just one thing nearly all day. There's something which looks like an eye-dropper beside it, which I suppose implies disease ..?
  8. Silly me, I imagined, like the one on the other side of the screen, I had to click on it and then click on the thing I wanted it to take up. That was the missing clue. I spent about 40 mins on the colour panel page this morning without spotting it - partly because I believed I should (but couldn't) find the "HSL Colour wheel. No matter, yours was the clue I needed. Now the only real blockage is the weird jpeg effect when I cut and paste... Thanks for you help! Best, Tony.
  9. I have saved to TextEdit in the past, although this hasn't been a problem recently. I use Firefox, which has a similar function I think (but I couldn't find it just now!) Meanwhile, quite good progress. I've not found any way to be clear about exactly how it works, but I've managed, one way or another, to make a reasonable fist of the colours in my diagram. It usualy takes a fair while to select a colour for use in such a way as for it to be useable for colouring part of the diagram – I can't find any source of a logic about it – particularly the small magnifying glass in the Colour panel seems almost invariably when clicked upon to return the coloured circles to what I'm trying to avoid, but so far I've always managed to trick it into changing to the chosen colour eventually, but I still haven't spotted what the critical step is! The biggest leap forward was the discovery (helped by a friend) that I had a load of layers running. I carefully examined them all and turfed them out, excepting the main one, which I gave a name to. (First I flattened a layer with a pasted detail into the main layer). And now all the things which seldom or never worked usually work. The one peculiar stumbling block is copy and paste. At the beginning of this experience I was making good use of this, but now any time I paste (into the obligatory new layer) the element I've copied is jpegged, with all its clarity gone. Worse, when I try to strip the noise by hand and replace it with nice clean pixels the program adds spurious jpeg-style noise outboard of it. I did make a letter J with the pixel tool to overcome such a difficulty, but it took a long time. Clearly something has changed, but the help system on 'paste' stops with an illustration of the command in a menu. I'll attach the diagram as it now is – took a long time to create and persuade the program to accept a yellow which was sufficiently visible, and I shall experiment with the brown when I get more confident with the colour use process. I'm using Flood Select/Flood fill, which works fine, the difficulty is persuading the colour panel to accept my choice. Incidentally the help system clearly has a colour panel which is quite a bit different from mine. I dare say that this is because it can't imagine any one being happy with 8-bit? Of course on a file like mine, with nine colours (if you include black and white) the merit is all in file size and ease of manipulation, so 8-bit is plenty! Best regards, Tony. Wiring+1ap.afphoto
  10. Hi firstdefence, thanks for doing this! ... Well, I composed a few paragraphs of reply ... Took a little while to discover that double-clicking the video made it go full screen (I couldn't see what you were doing, or read the text etc). Clicking on the 'shrink-back-down' button at the bottom right made it shrink again. And in the process, deleted everything I'd written in the last half hour. The main thing that I'm trying to do is to select a number of non-contiguous occurrences of a colour, then choose/make a colour more like the one I originally made and used and saved as a .png (not in Photo), but which Photo 'corrected' when I imported the file into Photo. Then copy the desired colour into the space occupied by the undesired one. What you have done is to spread the smudgified Photo colour further, by copying it into the colour panel (yours looks very different from mine, with its groups of sixteen progressively less bright colours), and then selecting another place (a red line) and filling that with the bad green. I've been trying to recreate a suitable colour in the colour panel, then copy *my* colour into the drawing. Any time I click on the drawing the colour panel reverts to the smudgified Photo colour, or sometimes an even more smudgified one. I can't believe it is too hard to get the process to work constructively, but so far ... But thanks for your patient efforts! Best regards, Tony.
  11. Hi R C-R Yes, a friend pointed out the transparency feature. I've occasionally come across it in GC, but basically I mostly work from scans, so there is nothing transparent about my work unles something makes it transparent. It arose seldom enough in GC that I don't think I ever got around to 'challenging' it. In the present case it covered a lot of my image, and made it harder to assess how it was going. One thing which is critical to the usefulness of this kind of file is that the different lines be followable, even at low magnification. With the transparency over/underlay this was much harder to judge. And although I'd set all the colours to legible levels in the original, Photo changed them all as soon as I used it to open the file, so putting this right was quite a high priority (and something of an annoyance!) Anyway, my 'tablecloth' is dealt with (easily, in the event). The colour problem seems to be a good bit trickier. I can't believe it is that complicated, but despite a good many hours of tutorial watching, experimentation on the image, and evidently pissing some people off with questions which seem inane to them I still have a muddy image with colours I cannot change, in what must be the simplest image most of you have ever seen! I chose Photo because GC (which I've used for 20 years or so) became less and less competent at the sort of work I do – I'm still using quite an old version, having bought and ditched a later, less competent one. I'm sure diagrams are a minority interest, compared with sci-fi dream-images or w.h.y, and my concern to keep the character of old documents likewise. Still, clear and accurate information, legibly presented, is surely not to be despised, and in principle such as Photo is a suitable platform on which to do this work? Thanks for your patience! Best regards, Tony.
  12. Hi Anon, thanks for this! That is a leftover from my efforts to get back my green... Obviously the word 'mask' means something in particular. Nothing offered by the help system seemed to make any sense in this context? I believe you but don't understand you! The only small anomalous areas I can think of are where in GC I used white as a colour to get rid of something (can't remember what or why). Could this be relevant? Apparently I had the entire documet 'selected' – but I didn't see the ants as I was working on a small patch near the middle, so I didn't know. What adjustment? Done. Should I un-click it in the Layers panel? Yes, the Contiguous option is not checked. So now I click on a part of one of my green lines... and nothing changes, as far as I can see. No ants, no colour change..?
  13. But ... I don't now how all my blue lines got the ants around them earlier! Presumably I have to repeat the trick to start learning how to change them? And nothing so far gets anything but black pixels out of the pixel tool. And my white background is dressed like a tablecloth – is this unavoidable? Best regards, Tony. Hi, a few things. The tablecloth is gone – I took courage in both hands and clicked (somewhat counter-intuitively) on Transparent in the Document menu. So now that it is no longer transparent I can no longer see the tablecloth! The marquee to edit pxels: I'm starting from a scan of an old document. Part of the process is to tidy up the icons in the diagram. If, for example, I've a bulge in what ought to be a smooth border I can draw a marquee around them and move them twoards the border. It doesn't work too well in Photo because I can't change the shape of the marquee, so when the first part of the bump is back where it belongs I have to make a fresh marquee to carry on with the next bit etc until the job is done. Scanned lines always have some alignment error, and dragging a marquee-worth of pixels is part of my process for straightening them (and sometimes things I want to keep which the line passes through. When I get better at it I hope that Photo will be cleverer than I am at straightening images! The marching ants have stopped appearing when I click into a colour area with the Flood Fill Tool. The help system etc tells me that it will replace the colour I've clicked on with the colour I've selected in the colour panel on the right. So I selected a bright green. And it came out brown again. I've done it 20 or thirty times, I guess. always with the same effect. I tried selecting red, for example. and got brown again. Along the bottom of the window it says "Click to Flood Fill" but after fiddling a bit more widely in the colour panel I find that clicking on the dull green gets all the colours messed up, not just the green. The copy and paste – the thing I copied was a recurring element of the diagram which I tidied up and put near the edge of the document. Then when I find one that got away I go and copy the cleaned one and paste it over occurrences of the same shape elsewhere in the original. In my previous editing program, Graphic Converter, I seldom got it exactly in position, but I could always nudge it around with cursor keys or mouse. With an old French house to restore to habitablity I don't have time to learn how to do a video of this! I'm happy to put up a copy of it if it will help any one grasp what I'm trying to do. It is of course incomplete, the colours are wrong etc. And now I learn that I can't upload the file because it is more than 512 MB. Not so surprising, except that on my drive it claims to be 8.1 MB. I'll try again using 'choose files' rather than dragging it: Oops! There are now two of it! And I can't delete either of them. Plus the name of the file keeps getting tacked onto the end of the text... Ah, once the first file finished uploading I was allowed to delete it, so another 15 mins or so and it should be there. And until then I'm unable to see a preview, so can''t proof-read. Meanwhile I need to eat! Wiring+1ap.afphoto
  14. I wish! I choose what to copy, and it copies it. But I am prevented, mysteriously, from deciding where it is copied *to*, and wherever that happens to be, I'm prevented from moving it, seemingly. The help system? It tells me where to find the Paste command, but nothing to do with who I should ask permission of to paste it where I want it. Approaching 40 years of using only Macintoshes, you may imagine that being told where to find the command did not to add much to the sum of my knowledge... I watched some them again this morning. No information of any use to me. I want to select all the occurrences of a colour, which I once did by accident, but nothing as simple as that got a mention. I've now got the Flood Fill tool working on all occurences of a colour, (it is Photo's choice of a dull green, replacing, unbidden, my original choice of a bright green) but nothing I do in the colour area prevents it from simply replacing all the green with mud-brown. I'd like to lose the tablecloth on which my disgram has been placed, but while some of the tutorials had tablecloth sections, none said what they were, what they were for, or how to get rid of them. I looked in vain for some kind of tutorial for using this unfamiliar forum software. I think I'm getting better at it, but a long way short of good! I've never needed to learn a forum application before, they were just intuitive. I begin to feel about Photo that its arcane ways are designed to prevent people who didn't study graphic design at university or teach themselves Photoshop from invading the space of those who did! A bit like medical and legal worlds, where jargon or latin words are used to keep 'ordinary' people out. I had a career in quite a technical field, but I was always careful to minimise the use of jargon, as I sought input from the non-specialists to whom my work would eventually go. I'll keep at it for a bit... Regards ,Tony
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