what a success! 
hello @agriggio here is an idea of improvement of the brush mask. It would be interesting, in my opinion, to have a cumulative effect when we pass several times on the same line. this would allow by choosing a low hardness at the beginning, to increase it gradually by returning to the line. this would allow a work in dodge and burn for example of greater simplicity and finesse. What do you think about it? thank you
@jllailes I think it’s a good idea – in fact, it already works that way 
But with a small difference: in order to enable the cumulative effect, you have to change brush settings. The logic is the following: all the consecutive strokes that have the same brush settings are considered part of the same group, and will not cause the cumulative effect to happen. This is handy because it lets you paint uniform areas without having to worry about overlapping strokes. When you want the cumulative effect, simply change (even slightly) the brush settings and paint over.
Here’s a quick demo:
Does this make sense? I find this convenient, but I’m open to other suggestions.
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I can still imagine the tool being ‘on’ by default helps newcomers. Many tools have no action with all sliders in the neutral position. What about switching those on by default? It makes a first encounter with the software more successful. Intermediate users can click to disable before changing settings, and true experts create a startup profile.
Another remark is the label “Regularization” in the Tone Equalizer. From the name, I would guess it affects the smoothness of the resulting curve - but it does something with local contrast. Is there any description of what it does, then I can try to come up with a label or help text.
Hi @agriggio,
yes this is exactly the method I’ve adopted to work more finely. But I found it a bit cumbersome to go back to the hardness slider every time. But also, with this method and the slider as it is configured, I find the progression curve a bit too steep. It seems to me that it only takes 7 passes on the same line to have 100% hardness. Is this correct ? Here is a video of my test…
if not, would it be possible to soften this curve ? and maybe to set up a keyboard shortcut to increment the hardness slider by 1 (without having to go back to it with the brush).
But indeed, I hadn’t thought about the fact that going over a line twice without changing the hardness is good… but it’s good !!!
Make sense – I’ll see what I can do
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Here is the Lightroom way of doing it. I think this is the same as Flow in LR. But LR also have something called Density. By combining the two , you can get a lot of options…
Jump to 1min in this video
the new increment of hardness is much finer. Thank you
Another request following my tests (sorry!! 
).
It would be really interesting if ctrl+Z erases just the last stroke. Currently ctrl+z erases all strokes. It would be necessary to generate a history line for each brushstroke. It’s frustrating to have to start again because of a clumsy brushstroke ! (it is always possible to use the erase mode, but it is heavier to use)
what do you think?
I can add an “undo last” in the brush tool, but I won’t clutter the history. I think this might be a good compromise
Yes, it’s a good compromise!
Is there a reason why Rawtherapee (and thus Art) doesn’t give back the full history when the photo is returned to the editor after it is released?
Regularization does precisely a (edge-aware) smoothing of the curve. If you use the tone equaliser to compress the histogram, then increasing regularization will help preserving local contrast. However, if you use the equaliser to stretch the histogram (i.e. pull shadows and/or push highlights), then increasing the regularization value will counter that effect. As usual, a (short) video is worth a thousand words:
Hope this clarifies…
then I can try to come up with a label or help text.
suggestions are more than welcome! 
I just pushed a couple of improvements to the brush mask:
-
there is an “undo last group of strokes” button now
-
you can temporarily activate the eraser mode by holding the SHIFT key while painting
-
you can force the creation of a new group of strokes by holding the CTRL key when starting a painting action. This means that you don’t have to change the brush parameters anymore to force the “cumulative effect” to happen, but you just use CTRL+click instead of a normal click.
Hopefully this makes the brush more efficient to use…
5 Likes
@agriggio, fully tested and approved… Everything works perfectly and is very ergonomic… the ctrl+click is even better than the increment of 1… and the undo button allows you to go up all the strokes if you want…
Frankly, I’m overwhelmed. Thank you very much alberto for this work and for listening.
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Perhaps “Local Contrast Recovery” or “Local Contrast Protection”, or even just “Contrast Protection”.
I’d expect it then to start at 0 at the left?
By the way I notice some decidedly nonlinear behaviour in the slider, is that intentional? Is it that from -5 to 0, small detail is increasingly protected, while at 1 and above a much wider contrast area is protected? This could be in a tooltip perhaps: “-5 to 0 increasingly protect small details, 1 to 5 add protection of larger structures”.
First of all I want to thank @agriggio for the large amount of work on ART!
I have a feature request about Vignette Filter: I think it would be nice to have a widget to adjust the tool, in the same way as the Graduated Filter… the tools are similar, and should have the same interface…
A note: on linux, the configuration folder is /home/user/.config/ART5-dev… should it be corrected?
thanks again!
Issues with brushes regarding status of painting tool:
- the button stays active even if you leave local adjustments tab resulting in unintentional paint strokes when you want to pan the canvas.
- finding the active “toggle on-canvas painting” button is hard as soon as you collapse the tools.
- If you have multiple instances of a tool activate the on-canvas painting in one instance, switch to a different one and then back to the previous one. you see that the button got deactivated but you still can paint on the canvas.
1+2 are usability issues. IMO on-canvas painting should be deactivated as soon as you leave a tool that has on-canvas painting activated, and probably start painting on the newly activated tool if it has the brush enabled.
3 is a bug.
Probably switch the button to a global location and (de)activate it according to the local state of the tool (which tracks active/inactive on-canvas painting)? and completely disable/remove it when not in local editing or all local editing tools are collapsed?
Hello.There may be a bug in the drawn masks. The ctrl + wheel works very well but not the Alt + wheel. The latter only works in increments of 1 and only after playing with the Ctrl + wheel.
The default is ~/.config/ART, but you can define a additional suffix (like 5-dev in your example) at build time. So you need to ask the one who provides the build you’re using to change that.
thanks for the reports. yes, there are still rough edges in the brush support, I’ll try to take care of them as time permits…
Thank you for your work !