ART vs RT takeup

I am an old RT user, since the first releases and wasn’t even aware this fork exists. Gave it a quick run last few hours and I (really) like it. Yes, RT has the edge in the amount of knobs one has available to achieve an end goal, while ART seems to bake in some sensible defaults for those knobs such that they are good most of the time and then hide them. In a way it could be seen as RT Lite and it may offer a milder learning curve for new users just starting working with raw files instead of jpegs.
I will start using both of them from now on if anything for just seeing how the two apps evolve in time.
My 2c: there shouldn’t be any kind of animosity between the two projects, I would go as far as to say that RT should mention the existence of ART as a less complex alternative for newcomers. Even proudly so, since it has real RT DNA.
Thanks @BarryThomas for your post that made me find out about ART.

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Luckily, there isn’t :slightly_smiling_face:

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IMHO, the default starting point is a poor way to compare two software packages. As an RT user, I simply created my own default starting profiles and work from there. The bigger difference will lie in how the the image can be advanced from there.

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That is what I also did all the time since starting using RT. What I also did (had to do…) was to remake them or at least re-tune them almost every time I upgraded RT.
I agree that "how far you can do/go is what often matters, but not for everybody. Having good starting point can be very relevant for some users(especially new ones) or for some use cases.
It depends, really.

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.

The RT default curve:
RT Tone curve
The ART Default curve
ART tone curve

And the default output
RT:

ART:

(I did manage to bring them to look the same, eventually)

@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.

Yeah, I still like what I see so far. I will continue using both apps from now on, ART looks very promising.

thank you, I didn’t see it

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)

Smells like you use an ART debug build…

@heckflosse and, how can I get the “normal” build?

Don’t know. It was just a thought, because in my experience with RT this kind of slowness almost always was caused be accidently using debug builds.

Hi,

did you build ART yourself? If not, what version are you using exactly?

Thanks!

I downloaded ART here:
https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art/downloads/

ART_1.8.2_Win64.exe

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?

please, provide the link to download your version of ART

I used this official stable build:

@Wladimir_K
Sometimes a restart often solves problems :flushed:

Edit: I mean restart PC or laptop.

Or perhaps the cache or the sidecar ARP is corrupted.
Without the Raw and ARP it will be difficult to identify the problem.

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.

Please see the attached RAW file

@agriggio

DSCF8929.RAF (24.9 MB)