I think that this proposition combine the precision of the photographic vocabulary with an introduction to their use. I think I will subscribe to this idea.
I can’t guarantee that I will never use the word intuitive again, although if it stirs up so much angst, perhaps I will think more carefully about the consequences next time… 
Using the technically correct term with a tooltip seems to be a sensible way to go. I had heard of delta E, but like others, only because I had played with locallab in RT, and before then I had to look up what it meant.
Is ART going to be used by a handful of enthusiasts or a wider crowd is a bigger question…
I agree, this is an independent issue. the goal should be to have the best tool possible, optimizing ease of use but without sacrificing quality. I would of course be happy if art gained popularity, because more users ultimately means a better quality product (more testing, more bug reports, more potential contributors, more ideas…). however, gathering more users is also a matter of marketing, which is something not fun, so I won’t give much priority to it
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Hello everyone,
I’ve been testing Art for several months, until this last final 1.0.14 version. I must say that it became my main software (after using Darktable, then Rawtherapee…).
I think it brings together extraordinarily the best of what can be expected. Congratulations Alberto for your work.
I really hope that your software will be supported and further developed.
An idea of future development perhaps, would be to implement a selection of shapes by path, in order to be able to select the masks with even more precision.
Also @agriggio , if it’s possible to support your work financially, please give a link to make a donation.
well done 
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@agriggio. Hello Alberto, perhaps the following question shows that I totally misunderstand your concept of masks: why can’t I use for example the Exposure modules on a mask, or the Details modules?
Without a baseline, yes. But focus groups and marketing departments will look at their target market to gauge how intuitive their product is. “Can my mum work it out?”, “Can a user of average intellect use it without any help?”, “Can a child figure it out?”, etc.
There are a whole ton of assumptions involved of course, but there’s a reason millions of dollars are spent on figuring “intuitive” out before launching a product.
Which brings us back to the question: what is the target market for ART/RT/darktable? If it’s the enthusiast community, then it will be a very high bar for what we consider “intuitive” and Aurélien’s assertion is true. But if the intention is to reach a wider audience, then I think it would be fair to ask “How easy is it for a user with basic knowledge of photography and imaging software to work out how to use this software within a couple of hours?” Or something like that (completely arbitrary time used just to make the point).
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Hi @jllailes,
thanks for the suggestion. That’s definitely something I’d like to try out – though I need to read some literature on this first.
I don’t really take donations, but thanks for the offer! However, ART is standing on the shoulders of many giants, several of which do take donations (e.g. RT, darktable, and pixls). You might want to consider them…
Essentially, that’s an architectural limitation. Remember that ART comes from RT, which wasn’t really designed with local editing in mind. In particular, RT is not very modular, so supporting masks for all the tools is a nontrivial amount of work. If you need that level of granularity, I think darktable and photoflow are much better choices than ART.
At the same time, though, do not underestimate what can be done with the mask-enabled tools that ART provides, they were selected so as to cover as much ground as possible with as few different tools as possible. They obviously can’t do everything, but I claim they can do most common things for which you would like local editing. Feel free to ask questions and I’ll try to provide evidence to back up my claims (or fail while trying 
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@paulmatth to add to what @agriggio said, for local exposure, I use the color correction tool/ ASC CDL slope, offset, power sliders . It’s not really “intuitive” (see discussion above 
) but powerful.
Details module: perhaps I miss some local denoising. But I am not sure to be able to use the present denoise tool at its full power (detail recovery/detail threshold use, final smoothing with guided filter…)
@agriggio I second the suggestion of @jllailes. May I have an other suggestion : to be able to copy a raster mask from one tool to the other.
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Ok, I suppose that’s my first challenge 
How about this? I didn’t use the Denoise tool at all, only Smoothing. Comments are welcome!
_DSC1373.ARW.arp (12.8 KB)
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Impressive!
I just made a first inspection on the output jpeg. I note first that the fur details are not lost, and the grain of remaining noise is very fine as can be seen on the background.
Never thought this tool could provide such result. I have to study the settings
I made a rudimentary use of smoothing that did not convince me.
I wonder what is the reasonning behind this sophisticated combination of 4 smoothing (3 global and one for background)? could you explain?
Did you experience the use of smoothing in conjunction with denoising?
smoothing is based on the guided filter, which (in this particular application) is essentially an edge-aware blur. the 2 instances operating on chroma work on two different scales, one for higher frequency noise and another for lower frequency one. then I added one more for luminance. I could have stopped there, but I wanted to also show some use of masks, so I smoothed the oof background a bit more.
note though that this was mostly for demonstration purposes, most of the time the Denise module will give better results with less effort. but if you need to apply noise reduction locally, smoothing can do the job imho
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Yep, this tool is actually very powerful and does way more than the name suggests. I overlooked it in the early days because I thought it only did colour. And of course it can also do global adjustments, despite being in the local adjustments section.
Hi all,
I’ve renamed “Log Encoding” to “Log Tone Mapping”, does this help?
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Thanks for explanation
Tone mapping is more user friendly than encoding. Log suggests that there is some log function under the hood and is widely used (D-log, V-log…) in video.
I have still a few questions:
-
what is the difference (apart the masking) between
local editing/smoothingandnoise reduction/final smoothing/guided filter? -
where is located
noise reduction/final smoothing/guided filter? at the end of pipeline as suggested by name or with noise reduction? -
I see you use ACES P1 as working space. Do you use other working space? do you recommend to use it? Is there a drawback to use small WSpace? In that case should not be better to delete them?
-
I looked at the RTvx_ACES-AP0 and RTvx_ACES-AP1 output profiles. It looks like ACES profiles, but they are not ACES compliant profiles as they contain a non linear TRC. It can bring confusion to users who want to output in a linear space. As it is possible to create ICC profile, I propose to delete those profiles.
That’s OK for, I will try to find a good french translation for this line.
Hi,
smoothing in denoise applies the same algorithm, but it happens earlier in the pipeline (“final” in the name refers to “after the normal denoising”, sorry if that was unclear).
I normally use ACES P1, but Rec2020 would be essentially the same I think. This is a working space that is generally recommended by people who know a lot more than myself about this
For more info, have a look at Elle Stone’s webpages. In particular, regarding small working spaces: Limitations of unbounded sRGB as a universal editing space
As for the RTxx_ACES profiles, these come from RT, I never use them actually, so I didn’t realize the have a non-linear TRC. I agree, that should be changed.
Bravo Agriggio,
Who wouldn’t want their very own photo editor?
I haven’t installed it yet, because, well, there is potentially a huge amount of work moving between platforms, and a lot of work having more than one. One should keep time for taking photos 
I will second Aurélian’s distrust of “intuitive”… which too often means “what I understand even if it’s wrong”… viz the discussion of whether log-encoding includes the log function, and if it’s non-linear. Don’t be afraid to stick with what you think is correct after some checking… having taught various stats and computer algebra packages, the wailing complaints about " I shouldn’t have to use := or == when I could just use =" drop away once people understand what they are saying.
It’s ok to be first… hell, link to a page wit the actual formula spelt out, that would be the most precise for some of us.
Surprising that there is no wikipedia entre for delta-E…
Good luck!
Graham
hi, and thanks for your input! in general you are right, but in this specific case ‘encoding’ is as generic as ‘tone mapping’, so if people are more familiar with the latter, I have no problem with this.
but big G points straight at this:
Elle Stone’s web pages are always instructive.
And a page that seems to confirm : Chapter 1.5: Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) - Chris Brejon.
So we should restrict to ACES P1, Rec2020 or Prophoto for working space.