Unfortunately, this option tends to be faulty on win 10. Especially after a dirty installation it tends to forget what it saved …
what do you mean?
Just install in the same directory as before without deleting anything upfront
@ChasingShadows Please post steps to reproduce (step by step).
I install in the same directory as before lot of times per day. But my before may be different than yours.
I think I know what’s going on. My current setting here is:
ToolPanelsExpanded=1;1;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;1;0;1;0;1;1;1;1;1;1;0;1;1;0;0;0;1;1;1;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;1;
Whenever you introduce or shift a panel this sequence gets changed … that’s why it looks like it is unstable and unreliable …
Did you untick the Automatically save ... checkbox in preferences, @agriggio mentioned in his comment?
of course, but I think my idea is right. If you Introduce a new 1st tool, then all other already existing tools are shifted by one place. So the wrong tools get opened …
Testing…
Still can not reproduce. I must miss some thing 
if you run on the bleeding edge, you have to accept the risk of getting cut 
1 Like
That I don’t have a problem with. 
Well, I tried again. I closed all tool panels. Then I clicked the button
And nothing got saved 
I tried it again and figured out, that “now” does not mean now. It means you also have to click the okay button in addition
Then it was still not okay. The wavelet tool insists in staying open …
I will try tomorrow with installing the 5.3 and save the settings there and then try again with 5.4-rc2 …
1 Like
Confirmed
this looks like a bug, thanks for spotting 
well it would be weird if you clicked on ‘cancel’ and the options got saved anyway, wouldn’t it?
1 Like
IMHO, no! The text says save Now, it does not say “now after clicking okay also” But I know, that all the other options are saved on “okay”. So may be that is just personal taste
Now I did more testing with the ToolPanelsExpanded.
I reinstalled the official 5.3 in an empty folder. I manually removed the line ToolPanelsExpanded from the options file using Notepad++. Then I run RawTherapee and enabled just the following tool panels (if i closed one, I did not care for subtools): Exposure, Retinex, Sharpening, Noise Reduction, White Balance, Film Simulation, Crop, Lens/Geometry, Rotate, Sensor with Bayer Matrix, Demosaicing.
This resulted in
ToolPanelsExpanded=1;1;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;1;0;1;1;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;1;1;0;0;0;1;1;1;0;0;0;0;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;
Now I reinstalled 5.4-rc2 into the same folder und run it. Now the following tool panels are open: Exposure, ToneMapping, Sharpening, Contrast by Detail Levels, White Balance, HSV Equalizer, Color Management, CIE Color Appearance Model 2002, Wavelet Levels (as already said this one insists in being open), Crop, Resize, Post Resize Sharpening, Dark Frame, Flat Field.
I changed the settings the way it was in 5.3 and saved.
This resulted in
ToolPanelsExpanded=1;1;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;1;0;1;1;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;1;1;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;
I do not agree non this statement. Well I did something similar like upgrading from 5.3 to 5.4 and I expect that my settings are kept. The new settings may of course have some default setting. If this would have been a real dev version, then may be okay… that’s way I didn’t say anything before
sorry I didn’t understand this was the case. I agree that upgrading from official releases should work
Be aware that for the W64 builds:
- for 5.3 stable build, option file is located in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\rawtherapee - for 5.4-rc2 build, option file is located in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\rawtherape5-devas for development bulds.
@Morgan_Hardwood should’nt be better to locate the release candidates config folders in ..\rawtherapee?
@gaaned92 release candidates are not stable releases, they are meant for testing, not for production use, so I’m inclined to say “no”.
According to RawPedia I can use an environment setting
RT_SETTINGS= LOCALAPPDATA\RawTherapee
which I did a long time ago.
In my opinion this still works as the correct path is used …