Meanwhile, I also found a file where ART did bad, with the default processing profile, basically it used a very weird tone curve that ruined everything, It did well for other files taken in the same conditions, at the same time, but it screwed up for this particular one. Can’t seem to find out what was different in this one except significant flare.
I think ART tried to recover some detail in the highlight of the flare (and it did), but in the process blew the blacks and midtones. It is a difficult scene tho, can’t fault it too much for that.
@VDPhoto I have also found that ART occasionally messes up an image for auto tone curve matching, but I would say it is less than 1% of the time. It seems most likely to trip up when there are few dark or black tones in the image such as the cat picture you have shown.
For example, RT opens RAW from my Fujifilm X-E1 in 5 seconds, ART takes 55 seconds for the same file!! The similar behavior can be seen if I zoom to 100% - in RT it takes less than 1 s, but in ART - ca. 20 s.
Unfortunately, this lag makes ART praktically unusable.
@agriggio maybe I’m doing something wrong? (I didn’t change anything in settings)
The official build from link above has normal performances and opens all the RAF files I collected from Playraw in less than 5 sec (W10, i6700K) even the X-E2 files, knowing that all those file have a processing ARP file.
So, I cannot reproduce. Perhaps @Wladimir_K could upload the offending RAF to test?
So, I uninstalled the ART and installed it again using the link provided by @gaaned92. Then I restarted my PC. After that I tried to use ART.
The situation is the same - ART needs nearly one minute to open this file. RT needs less than 1 second.
I don’t normally use windows, so I’m not sure what is going on, sorry… if you have an antivirus running, you might try to disable it temporarily and see if that is the culprit. Another thing you might try is to rename the exiftool.exe executable in the ART installation directory so that it is not found (e.g. rename it to exiftool.exe.OLD) and see whether that changes anything… but mine are just wild guesses
The picture of the kitten shows so strongly why I love ART so much so far. Yes, the RT variant preserved much more details but I find the ART variant much more pleasing. Although I am an IT guy and love technology and do understand technical details, I do not want to deep dive in editing and rendering algorithms when doing my hobby. I do have the same problem with DT. I know one can get absolute awesome results with it and maybe I was just ruined by LR and C1 but I just want to move some sliders until everything pleases my eye without the knowledge about why it is like it is.
I hope ART will further go this way and of course I also hope that my assumption regarding the strategy is correct because there are already many technical open source editors but not one which is just made for photographers (not that the “technical guys” aren’t photographers). ART has huge potential here.
I hope it’s clear what I meant and I didn’t step on sb. foot. I had some problems finding the correct words.
RT did not preserve anymore details in the highlights. The details are still there in ART. Just a minor adjustment in the tone equalizer (or a minor adjustment in the tone curve) and it’s all back.
My monitor is calibrated
My web browser is also calibrated
Makes a big difference.
With ART, on opening the image I’m 90% there and I can decide which direction I want to go.
With RT, on opening the image I’m 75% there, a little more processing then I can decide which direction I want to go.
With DT, on opening the image I’m 66% there, some more processing then I can decide which direction I want to go.
But I have the most control with DT. It’s a balance between control, convenience and output/results. Let’s not start about DAM…
