I’d be happy to see how to do it.
Hi Alberto,
I feel you are really onto something important here. Rawtherapee, Darktable and any other programs have to reach the stage when they say old is old and get rid of the bloat in the software. Certainly the creators of commercial OS like windows and Mac draw lines in the sand when it comes to backwards compatibility. Programs and hardware that run on Windows 98 are unlikely to work on Windows 11.
Personally I don’t feel the need for backwards compatibility in editing software, because I edit an image and export it as a new image file. Then in the future when the software has improved and I have improved I might re-edit the original image file in the hope of achieving a better result. I don’t need to open up my previous editing steps. I start afresh.
Thanks for your effort with ART. I will let my students know about the software because it has such a nice GUI and functionality.
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Excellent point. Starting fresh with a legacy RAW file to use new tools and expertise is often time well spent. Retracing one’s old editing steps, on the other hand, not so much. 
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Hi Alberto,
I watched the video and played around in Art applying multiple masks. That worked fine for the options available in local edits. However, I really like your intuitive tone equalizer module in Art. Would you ever consider making that an option in local editing tools? I hope the tone equalizer makes its way into Rawtherapee as it is a nice tool. BTW, I took a look at Rawtherapee and there appears to be no local editing in RT. Is that the case or did I miss something?
@Terry
Of course, there are local controls in Rawtherapee (very different from those in Darktable and ART), as well as many other new features…which are not in the 5.8 February 2020 release…
Some may say that some of these new features or improvements to the existing one (Wavelet, etc.) are complex and not very useful…Try them…
@patdavid beautifully wrote a text that foreshadows what version 5.9 will be very soon, thanks to him.
https://rawtherapee.com/2022/07/rawtherapee-5.9-wip-and-project-updates/
jacques
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Hi,
I could certainly consider that, but I would also invite you to give the “tone / color correction” tool a chance in its current form. It is reasonably flexible already IMHO, and I’m happy to provide examples if you find some tasks challenging. This might not be as convenient as having a tone equaliser with masks, but it has the advantage of being there already 
IIRC @Lawrence37 might be working on this. He might correct me if I’m wrong.
See the reply from @jdc, local edits are supported in the current development version.
HTH
@agriggio
Alberto, thank you
@Terry
The “Tone equalizer” is a component of “Local adjustments”
https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Local_Adjustments
jacques
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Regardless of what is of is not available in the various versions I truly appreciate the effort you all put in.
Thanks for sharing this link to @patdavid’s post. An excellent update! Question: Does anyone know if support for the Canon M6 Mark ii is among the “others” noted at the end his blog post?
The current dev build seems to be opening them correctly. Although it can’t show their exif data. I think I’ve read about that already. Seems to be WIP.
Thanks - yes, I guess I should’ve been more specific. I can open the RAW files from my M6ii, but as you note, there’s the lack of EXIF info.
That keeps me from using RT. It’s one of the key reasons personally that I moved on to ART. Just wondering if this is one of those things that will be featured in 5.9.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that CR3 exif info won’t be arriving until sometime after 5.9, but I can’t seem to readily find mention in the blog post update.
Needless to say, when it comes to enjoying FOSS, there’ll never be complaints from this user. All such volunteer efforts are greatly appreciated and highly prized.
RawTherapee relies solely on the CPU (but well optimized) and does not have any GPU acceleration. I may be wrong, but I believe DarkTable utilizes the GPU as well. System configuration can therefor play heavily on which is faster.
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Yes darktable can use openCL via a GPU if present and the drivers support it.
Did you ever try the windows ultimate performance mode?
I would also upvote the watermark module. Advantage is that we need not shift to another app just for watermarking. I prefer darktable over RT just for this reason. So, having the watermark module is very much preferred.
Curious: You note you prefer darktable over RT for this reason…
If the development folks at RT see broader interest in watermarking (i.e., than may be the case with ART users), that might be a distinction worth noting.
I don’t think I agree with this. To me backward compatibility is very important. More often than not I go to older photos and re export them for different purposes. I may want to include (or drop) GPS data or create smaller (or bigger) files. Also - the scope of files can be quite large (thousands) so re developing them is a non starter.
While I understand in some cases users may want to just start afresh - backward compatibility is an important feature for me.
My thoughts are not entirely RT/ART specific - they are generic - simply to illustrate the merits of a different view on backward compatibility.
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An entirely valid perspective - thanks for laying it out so straightforwardly.
Although I don’t personally have any desire to pick up where I left off on edits from years gone by, I can certainly understand and respect the use case you’ve described.
I guess the trade-off “cost” for backward compatibility eventually comes down to carrying all that legacy code baggage along forever forward into the future. Seems like a recipe for trouble at some point.
We’re all used to the notion that legacy software doesn’t work forever - especially on new OS versions. Where the best cut-off point falls remains an ARTform (bad pun, sorry, 
).
Hi,
To clarify, ART is backwards compatible with itself at least until version 1.0. it’s just not compatible with rawtherapee
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