Saving while in Paint tool

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GregL65
Posts: 10
Joined: October 4th, 2021, 2:21 am

Saving while in Paint tool

Post by GregL65 »

I'm transitioning from 7 to 8. I'm confused about workflow with the Paint tool.

I'm processing scans of children's story illustrations from century-old newspapers. After several other processing steps, there are still lots of little blotches and smears all over the image, mostly from the sloppy (by today's standards) newspaper printing presses of the day. And sometimes the newsprint had been smeared by decades of handling by the time the microfilm was photographed. And usually the microfilm has been abused over the decades, run through damaged or worn out microfilm readers which have damaged it, and adds artifacts of its own.

My workflow in PWP7 is to zoom way in, scroll to the upper left corner, open the Paint tool, and start cleaning up that part of the image. When done, I scroll down to the next area. When I reach the bottom I move to the side and go back to the top, and repeat until I've cleaned up the whole image.

I save often during this process. I just do Ctrl+S and it saves the current image, prompting me to overwrite. I press Enter to accept the overwrite and get right back to work. This workflow works well for me.

In PWP8, when I save it always defaults to a new filename (v1, v2, etc). I don't want hundred files of incremental blotch cleanup, so I change it to the original filename each time.

Then, when I'm done saving, two things have happened that didn't happen in PWP7. First, it zoomed out to Fit to Window. And second, the Paint tool has closed.

So I have to zoom in again. But there's no reference for what amount I had zoomed in when I did the work before, so I have to guess how much I had zoomed in. And I have to find my spot again. And then I have to open the Paint tool again.

With PWP7, it didn't unzoom when I saved, and the Paint tool stayed open. I just quickly saved and continued working.

Is there a better way to do this workflow in PWP8?
jsachs
Posts: 4203
Joined: January 22nd, 2009, 11:03 pm

Re: Saving while in Paint tool

Post by jsachs »

It should not really be necessary to keep saving the image. If you want to preserve all your changes up to some point, you can just start a new Paint transformation that picks up where the previous one left off. The new paint transformation automatically zooms and pans to the same location as the previous one. In addition, each time you click OK on a transformation, a workspace script is saved -- if PWP happens to crash, you can get all your work back by reloading the autosaved workspace script.

For transformations other than paint, clone, and other freehand retouching tools, if you hold down the Alt key when clicking on a transformation's thumbnail, it automatically zooms and pans to the same location as its input image, but only if the input and output images are the same size in pixels.
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
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