Live Rotation in Photoline

[RobS]

Hi,

I'm currently evaluating Photoline on MacOSX 10.6 as an alternative to Photoshop and am generally really impressed by this very well kept secret graphics application.

One thing I find a big improvement is the ability to directly distort a selection by dragging the corner or mid-point handles without having first to turn 'transform' on via an edit menu option... Instead I can warp, skew, scale directly in the main image window... What I can't see how to do is rotate... I can change the pivot point, but how do I rotate without having to go through a dialogue box and enter an angle. I'm looking for the same immediacy and visual feedback as there is with skew, scale and so on.

I've tried right-click, command-click, option-click, control-click... The closest I get is a pop-up menu with 'Rotate layer...' as an option, but this just opens a dialogue. There seems to be no means of directly rotating a selection about the current pivot-point by grabbing (somehow) a corner handle and dragging... The same way that photoshop works once edit->transform->rotate is active.

Am I missing something, or is this not currently possible in photoline?

Many thanks

Rob

[bkh]

Of course, PL can do live rotations. Select the layer tool (arrow), then move the cursor to one of the handles at the corners of the layer. The cursor will change to a hand with an straight arrow cursor (for resizing). Once you move the cursor a little away from the layer, it will change into a hand cursor with a curved arrow. You can now click and drag to rotate the layer around its rotation point.
There's also an explanation with pics of the various cursors in the (online) manual, Section 6.2.1: The Layer Tool.

Cheers,

Burkhard.

[RobS]

Thanks... That's what I expected, but it took a while to find. All I could do was distort, shear and scale... never saw any of the other cursors... but then extended was turned on, which doesn't seem to support rotation. Reverted to 'normal' and all is right with the world!

Got there now.

Cheers


Rob

[bkh]

Didn't think of extended mode - sorry. Glad you figured it out by yourself.

Burkhard.