Digital Light & Color

Having gotten tried of switching between the 'Composition Guides' for Diagonals, Golden Ratio, Thirds, and Root5... for use in the Crop/AddBorders transform or Window/Grid selections, the following combined guide in PWP5 text format was written:

CompositionGuides 1.0
begin
verbose 0
begin_object
Name "The Combined Guides"
line 0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0
line 0.0 0.0 0.3819 1.0
line 0.0 1.0 0.3819 0.0
line 0.0 1.0 1.0 0.0
line 0.6180 1.0 1.0 0.0
line 0.6180 0.0 1.0 1.0
horizontal 0.3819
horizontal 0.6180
vertical 0.3819
vertical 0.6180
horizontal 0.3333
Horizontal 0.6667
vertical 0.3333
vertical 0.6667
horizontal 0.276
horizontal 0.725
vertical 0.276
vertical 0.725
end_object
end

To install:
(1) Copy the above text lines into a text editor [Notepad, for example] and 'file save as' PWCompositionGuides.txt to a temporary folder.
(2) Find the original PWCompositionGuides.txt file in c:/Program Files/Digitial Light & Color/Picture Window Pro 5.0 folder and rename it: PWCompositionGuides_ori.txt, leaving it in the Picture Window Pro 5.0 folder.
(3) Copy the PWCompositionGuides.txt from the temporary folder and Paste into the c:/Program Files/Digitial Light & Color/Picture Window Pro 5.0 folder.

If you wanted to retain the original individual guides, copy the 'begin_object to end_object' text lines above and insert them in the PWCompositionGuides.txt file found in the c:/Program Files/Digitial Light & Color/Picture Window Pro 5.0 folder.

Depending upon the OS, there may be security procedures to go through to make the needed file changes in the Picture Window Pro 5.0 folder.

I believe this may also be valid for PWP4 but did not test.

Illustration -- (the blue, red, and green dots are for illustration purposes only and will not appear when the suggested changes are implemented):

That would leave me so confused I'd never be able to decide anything. :)

Perhaps I have a bit of a quirky mind but for me it is relatively easy to determine spatial relevancies.

For the illustration... wanting a close 4x6 aspect crop to center attention on the interactions of the eagle and crow, it became apparant that the lower left Root5 intersect needed to be centered on the eagle's body and then perhaps getting a diagonal intersect at the eagle's beak. A bit of re-sizing, shifting, and rotation of the cropping guides accomplished this... and then a slight more cropping guide adjustment to center the upper/lower right Root5 intersects at tree limb crooks and other diagonals to more closely match tree limb directions, making sure the eagle and crow had all their body parts and were comfortably "in frame"... this done while mentally ignoring the Golden and Thirds intersects/grid lines.

In case there is further interest in Combined Composite examples, the final illustrated image version and two others may be observed here: http://www.ncplus.net/~birchbay/09/IMAG ... _09_94.htm .

The top image is as explained previously, and bottom two images have the lower left Golden intersect at the eagle's eye and since there is no obvious horizontal/vertical references, these images were also slightly rotated to better conform with Diagonals... easily done with the 'The Combined Guides', focusing on the Golden and Diagonal grid lines.

Many thanks, it will be a useful tool.