I regularly want to draw transparent coloured ellipses around chosen areas on photographs, maps etc to highlight them. I have MS Paint of course, and that almost does what I'm looking for, but the ellipses are either vertical or horizontal (or just circles, of course) and they will only rotate in 90 degree intervals, so I cannot highlight something on a diagonal axis.
Is there a simple drawing programme that allows free rotation of the axis of an ellipse? I have recent versions of Photoshop and Gimp, but I find trying to understand the instructions either impossible or they don't seem to bring up the appropriate action that I was expecting.
You should be able to do it as a vector drawing layer in Photoshop (or PaintShopPro which is what I use). Then adjust the transparency and merge. The trick is in finding the quirky user interface to rotate the ellipse which ISTR involves grabbing a lollipop handle that sticks out from the centre of rotation when you do the right thing to activate it).
I knew there was a catch - for some strange reason the lollipop to rotate a newly drawn ellipse or rectangle isn't displayed until you select the Text tool (maybe it is the same in basic Paint & PhotoShop).
I revert to an ancient copy of Corel Draw for this It can scale crop and rotate images as well as objects. And always has been able to, so a really old copy with a valid serial number from ebay is worth having
I still use StarOffice 8 which used to be Sun microsystems but it still seems to exist and is only £11 for V9. I bought my copy from Avanquest and the box says works with
98/ME/2000/XP and Vista, so it was quite some time ago.
There is still an active user forum but the header then shows -
"User community support forum for Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice and all the OpenOffice.org derivatives"
Draw and elliptical selection of about the right size using the elliptical marquee tool
Go to the Select menu, and "Transform Selection". That will put a bounding box round the elliptical selection. You can resize, and if you place your mouse just off one of the corner handles you will see the cursor change to a rotate cursor. Click and drag rotation.
Once you have you selection scaled and rotated as you like, go to the edit menu and do "Stroke..." - you can then have it draw a line in round the selection at your chosen thickness, colour, opacity, blending mode, brush style etc.
Sun acquired Star Office and open-sourced it as Open Office, later Sun releases were based on that open source development. Oracle acquired Sun and briefly supported OO as an open source project then dropped it and handed the project to Apache. Since then LibreOffice has been the actively developed "unofficial" fork having inherited the bulk of the community, while the Apache version has apparently dwindled to nothing.
It ought to be added that Paint.Net (the name of the application) is
*free*, though you are asked to make donation if you want to.
Recommendations for Photoshop and similar need to be accompanied by a caveat as to the price. Adobe don't even sell Photoshop any more. They rent it to you (as part of Creative Cloud) for £600 a year.
MS only charge £60 for Office 365 per *year*.
IME, for almost all features required by the average home user, Paint.Net is just as good as Photoshop. There are few things in Photoshop that are desirable that Paint.Net doesn't have.
+1 Used to use Corel Draw in the early days of Windows. Relatively easy to use and intuitive unlike modern Photo and drawing packages. Does seem to be a big jump between the basic Paint, Irfanview etc and Photoshop et al
I would normally use Inkscape, which is a bit like a modern free CorelDraw. (although I've never used the latter)
It does vector graphics, but you can import and export bitmaps. So the OP's request should be fairly straightforward - import bitmap, draw ellipse, export drawing area as bitmap.
About 20(?) years ago, I started using PhotoImpact (taken from cover disks that came from some long-forgotten computing magazine). It was an excellent product that was subsequently purchased by [Corel, I think], who clearly bought it in order to kill it. Which they did.
By that time, though, I'd become quite adept at using it for the limited number of tasks I wanted it for (cleaning up, scale-matching and pinning maps and plans together, annotating plans, and cleaning up images for dropping into reports). I tried to update to currently-supported image-editing software (GIMP, CorelDraw, trial version of Photoshop, Photoshop elements), but resented the learning curve for those programs when I had a perfectly usable image editor that I was so familiar with.
Switching from Windows XP to Windows 10 put paid to that, but I liked PhotoImpact so much that I keep it on a Windows XP box -- unconnected to the internet and so not networked via WiFi, but sharing the keyboard, mouse, and monitor with a KVM switch. I use a USB stick to transfer the files between the two computers to work on them, which is a bit of a faff, but it's far less annoying than having to learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts for a different image editor.
(I'm 70 and semi-retired, so I think that arrangement will probably see me out....)
If you're considering photoshop but balk at the price, look at GIMP (free) - I switched to it years ago from Photoshop (which I did used to buy when it was still available to buy and more reasonably priced). However, neither fulfil the "Simple" bit of the requirement.
On 19/01/2023 11:53, Chris Hogg wrote: As someone who started with Photoshop - and found it hard going, I moved to Lightroom ......its superb for adjusting pictures - but not for drawing. Used to upgrade every other year - then they ceased support .. and want you take out a subscription. I know a lot of people move onto GIMP which is a free Photoshop-alike program
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