Extremely basic question about image handling in paint programs

How does one tell a paint program : I give you this image to edit, then you give it back to me with exactly the same limits, and don't ask me where they are, the limits are those of the object I gave you to work with ?

Sorry this is so basic and clumsy a question I cant even find the words, but I've been struggling for years to do that and I STILL haven't found the solution.

It can be in Microsoft Paint, it can be in Paint.net, any desperately simple program to do the following :

- Take a snapshot out of the screen with MS Snipping Tool or somesuch. Or a plain photograph.

- Put it into a paint program.

- Do someting to the image. Something very simple. Usually draw a red rectangle onto it to show something. Or underline some words.

- And that's all. After that I want to "take out the image from the program" and put it elsewhere. Paste it into Word, anything.

- But I want the image and only the image. Not the stupid white thing behind it. They call it the canvas I think. I want the program to understand by itself it has to bring out of itself what I brought into it. Not less, not more. I dont want to draw a rectangle around it to show to the program where the photograph is. It knows that. It's obvious. I have already selected the zone when doing the snap, I don't want to do it again and struggle with the limits and risk putting in the image too little or too much. How does one do that ? There must be a way.

Thanks, ThrashZone. I finally found the solution, sort of. I'm not at all used to paint programs. It's a special logic you have to master, and it's not written anywhere. Not anywhere readily available at least. Apparently the thing to understand is you need to select an image (or part of it) before you can do anything to it.

Just in case it might be helpful, what I remembered I had to do in MS Paint was to minimize the canvas with the mouse to a very tiny size, before I paste the image. So that when I select the image, whatever size it might be, the canvas snaps up to its borders, which it would not do if it were larger.

And in Paint.net, apparently the image creates its own canvas to its size. You can then make the canvas bigger through the menus if you need to. Also you can't even draw a line on an image if you have not used the relevant command to select it beforehand. And it's unfortunately possible to draw shapes on an image which won't stick because the image is not selected.

Again this is to the best of my understanding, and I might be mistaken in some respects.

Callender said:

Maybe take a look a GreenShot.

Hi, Callender, how are you ?

I agree that a screen shot program with editing capabilities is (in principle) the best option for what I'm trying to do. I have Greenshot installed, as well as Pic Pick and Ashampoo Snap 8. I tried (and uninstalled) many others. None of them fits the bill. There's always something (very basic) lacking. I almost always end up using Windows 7 Snipping Tool, which does almost nothing, but does it perfectly.

Which is much better than pretending to do a score of things, and getting half of them right.

Greenshot has one brilliant feature : you can order it to do automatically what you wish with your screen grab, as soon as it has been cut off the screen. Copy to the clipboard, copy into Word, save in some pre-set place, save to a cloud service...

And it has a rotten disability : it's not high DPI-aware, so that its embedded editor is practically useless. Its icons are so small that editing the screenshot in Greenshot is out of the question.

It also has a stupid, smart-alecky anti-feature : if you try to delineate the zone you want to grab starting from top left, and going downwards to the right, as is customary, then you get a label with the cursor coordinates right where you need to look carefully, in order to adjust the top left corner of your screen shot. So instead to help you, it gets in the way as though it were nagging you. The solution to that is to start on bottom right, and extend the capture upwards and left.

This is so unnatural that I have only discovered this solution a few minutes ago.

Oh, and also, Greenshot is green. This is hideous, and they should be prosecuted for that. This slimy green it uses to identify the selected zone is incredibly ugly. Also, it's inverted : it's the selected area which is coloured, whereas the correct thing to do is to put a layer of colour on the unselected area, so you can see the selected zone as you want it and as it will be : with its actual borders, and no added colour or effect.

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
With gimp and I believe paint.net you can right click on a separate layer and click on merge down to combine the 2 or three layers

I have just learned to use layers with Paint.net. The implementation is not bad. Although it does seem a bit like overkill to use layers for a few boxes and arrows on a screen grab.

Callender said:

Another app worth a look. Can be configured to send images to Paint.
Portable PicPick Download
Download:
PicPick Portable | PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB, portable and cloud drives

Yeah... now that you mention it... Pic Pick. That's a beautiful application. You had me fetching it again from my Systray... play with it... and that's probably the solution. It has a very nice embedded editor.

I guess it's the very concepts of a paint program I did not grasp : canvas, select... I miraculously dug up some notes I had jotted down about Paint.net, then forgot. Don't know where I found the material, though, because when I visited Paint.net site yesterday, I could not find any help worthy of the name. Plenty of instruction lists, plenty of "tutorials" on very specific achievements, but no manual, no explanation of concepts, no overview of the product.