Mouse Gestures in Image Editor

The raster editor window in RealWorld Designer applications 2007.1 and later can be configured to execute operations when a mouse gesture is recognized.

Performing mouse gesture

Place your mouse over the raster image editor and press the right mouse button. With the button pressed, follow the path of the chosen gesture. While you move the mouse with right button down, the editor will draw a red trail to help you perform the gesture correctly. The simplest gestures are strait moves to the left, right, up or down. For example the left gesture is by default assigned to the Undo command.

Important: mouse gestures are not images, you must follow the given path, not just draw the same image.

More about how to configure mouse gestures.

Narration transcript

Welcome to another tutorial. This time, I'll show you how to be more productive by making use of the mouse gestures. A mouse gesture is a move you do with your mouse while holding down the right button. The application recognizes the move and reacts accordingly.

Let's start with something basic. Draw a stroke with the brush tool. Then, undo the stroke with a mouse gesture. Press the right mouse button, move the mouse to the left and release the button. The red line helps you see the mouse gesture in progress. Let's try it again. You can re-do with a similar gesture: instead of moving left, move the mouse right to re-do the last undone action.

The undo function also cancels shapes in progress as the Escape key. The Down->Right gesture applies the drawn shape, just like the Enter key.

You can also undo image filters. Practice the undo gesture for a while.

Right-click in the image editor to bring up the context menu and then select the Mouse gestures command to see the configuration window. There are 26 gestures and you can assign an action to any of them. As you can see, the right-left gesture is configured to swap primary and secondary color. Let's see, how it works.

You can also swap colors while drawing. If I switch to gradient filling, the color swap will invert the gradient.

Let's see what other gestures are pre-configured. When a gesture is selected, the right side of the window shows configuration of the assigned action. The up-right and up-left gestures rotate the image by 90 degrees.

These gestures let you intuitively rotate landscape and portrait photos. Undo the rotation with the well known undo gesture.

The cross gesture turn on automatic zoom. Let's configure the Z gesture to desaturate the image. Select it, pick the color adjustment operation and set saturation to 0.

Works OK. While we are at it, test the cross gesture to turn on automatic zoom. OK.

Now, let's got to the configuration again. A gesture is not a picture, you must follow the path from beginning to end, not just draw the same image. This is especially important with the circle gesture we are going to configure now. Let's assign the rotation filter to the circle gesture and test it.

What if I wanted to configure the rotation angle manually? Well, instead of directly using the rotation filter, we must use the Display configuration filter and the use the rotation internally. Also, select the Image - Viewer as the preview handler.

You do not need to use all these gestures, but it is well worth the effort to actively use at least the undo, redo and apply gestures. After a while you'll start wondering how could you have lived without these gestures for so long.

Thanks for watching.

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