Cropping photos (Astronomy, Graphics & Video Software [WAS: VMWare / Wine))

[Eric Dunbar]

On 23/02/07, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Virtual Moon Atlas - Not even a Beta AFAIK
>
> How about http://moon.google.com/   --?
>
> > registax - able to extract frames from an avi, select the least
> > distorted frames, align, stack and process into an image, with
> > selections for "drizzle" mode, derotation, wavelet processing, etc.
> > (This one says it runs under wine, but I'll need to upgrade to version 4)
>
> > WinOccult - A program for predicting lunar and asteroid occultations of
> > bright stars,
>
> How about http://occult.tungstentech.com/default.aspx  --?
>
> > HP PhotoDelux (like Photoshop Lite) -- Yes, yes, I know that the Gimp is
> > supposed to be great - and I am determined to spend the time to figure
> > it out if I can, (especially since Photodelux is on the home desktop and
> > not the lappy where it belongs.) But it seems to me that the interfaces
> > are completely non intuitive.  Just trying to crop a picture left me
> > pulling hair out, let alone trying to get a layer to act as advertised . . .
>
> If all you need to do is resize, crop, simple color adjust, etc., then
> the gThumb image viewer that comes with Ubuntu ought to do what you
> want. It's pretty straightforward. Just right-click on an image and
> choose "Open With ...--> gThumb Image Viewer"

I must agree -- cropping images just doesn't seem to exist in FLOSS.
Recently I was trying to use only FLOSS to set up a file (so that I
knew I could tell some students it was possible). I tried OO.org,
Abiword and GIMP and ended up firing up MS Word because the FL/OSS
couldn't manage to present an intuitive cropping facility. GIMP could
but it was nowhere quick, Abiword and OO.org simply couldn't manage it
(I think one of the two offered an interface that you could TYPE in
some constraints but this is 2007, NOT 1984!!!).

Anyway, my encounter with OO.org and Abiword wasn't all bad. OO.org is
as oversized as Word without some of the more useful pieces of Word
(most notably Word compatibility ;-), but Abiword shows incredible
promise -- for your basic word processing needs and some limited (very
limited) page layout needs it's a really nicely crafted app with a
very bright future.