{"id":286,"date":"2011-04-25T13:30:50","date_gmt":"2011-04-25T13:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/?p=286"},"modified":"2011-04-25T13:35:50","modified_gmt":"2011-04-25T13:35:50","slug":"whupping-photos-in-shape-for-biology-journals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/2011\/04\/25\/whupping-photos-in-shape-for-biology-journals\/","title":{"rendered":"Whupping photos in shape for biology journals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The last time I purchased a piece of software to edit photographs, it was Photoshop 6 for PC. I had tried version 7, which did the job well, on others&#8217; computers, but version 6 did the job, and did it for years on end and many computers.<\/p>\n<p>However, I can&#8217;t install it anymore. Perfectly normal for software that came out <a href=\"http:\/\/photoshopnews.com\/feature-stories\/photoshop-splash-screens\/\">ten years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I have tried pretty hard to get <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gimp.org\/\">GIMP<\/a> to do what I want to do, but I don&#8217;t know how. I don&#8217;t want to invest in a version of Photoshop nowadays and find out that it doesn&#8217;t either, and that my hard-won reflexes are no longer current anyhow, which is the only reason I would upgrade.<\/p>\n<p>Anyone know of a resource that would tell me how to do the following in either a modern version of PS that I could buy, or in GIMP?<\/p>\n<p>This is sort of my workflow when I put together figures for papers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I open up all my photos that I want in the final figure. Usually TIFF but sometimes JPEG format<\/li>\n<li>Design a transparent base document with the final pixels-per-inch (or more) resolution<\/li>\n<li>Drag guidelines over from the rulers and place them where I want to frame each part of the figure (they&#8217;re usually multipart, lettered a, b, c etc.) and leaving an equal measurement of white space around them<\/li>\n<li>Note that these parts are not necessarily a reproducible size. They will take into account the shape of the object I want to show, so may be squares or rectangles.<\/li>\n<li>Paste in each photograph as its own layer, onto that base document<\/li>\n<li>Arrange them in position by dragging them around<\/li>\n<li>Perform a homotethic transformation &#8211; I don&#8217;t know what it is in normal English &#8211; but fit the part of the photo I want by enlarging or shrinking, to scale, the original photograph so that what I want to showcase appears in the guidelines I consecrate to that particular subfigure part. <em>Know what the scale factor was<\/em>, because most of my photos do not have automatic scale bars written in and I often have to calculate them and add later.<\/li>\n<li>Be able to rotate the photos at any angle so as to best adapt my axes to the frame.<\/li>\n<li>Be able to rename the layers by the letter of the part of the figure to which it corresponds.<\/li>\n<li>Adjust contrast and color so that the backgrounds of comparable photographs are similar, if they were not all taken at once under identical conditions (usually the case)<\/li>\n<li>Be able to clone-stamp out bits of dust in the background or if they are in a non-essential edge of the photo. I believe that much clean-up is permitted, and I&#8217;ve always done that out of respect for the visual message.<\/li>\n<li>Be able to annotate with Arial text in any color, as a separate layer (or more).<\/li>\n<li>Be able to add any color curved or straight lines, solid or dashed, and arrows and arrowheads, as a separate layer (or more). Be able to duplicate these additional forms.<\/li>\n<li>Save the entire figure with its layers.<\/li>\n<li>Save the entire figure with all layers fused into one TIFF file.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Suggestions, please! Links also welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The last time I purchased a piece of software to edit photographs, it was Photoshop 6 for PC. I had tried version 7, which did the job well, on others&#8217; computers, but version 6 did the job, and did it &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/2011\/04\/25\/whupping-photos-in-shape-for-biology-journals\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guestposts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}