Of course it’s not too much to ask to look at the documentation, yet most people like to try first, and then according to their first impressions, they may decide to go further, or turn RT off and delete it.
That’s that first impression that seems important to many first users.
I just wanted to raise the question and propose this idea of a small improvement, but I sure won’t fight over it.
Unfortunately many users need a lot of assistance, and to be taken by the hand.
On RT’s new webpage, there’s a link to rawpedia. Good. But the root page of rawpedia is an impressive table of content, and “Getting started”, is not that noticeable, even if it’s at the top of the “General information” list. Maybe a word and a direct link to “Getting started” could be added to the “About” section of RT’s home page?
I agree.
“Getting Started” is the very first article, it’s also the first thing you see when you run RawTherapee for the first time:
RawTherapee is not for all people. Facebook comes pre-installed on phones for a reason, Instagram thrives for a reason.
Good idea, we’ll look into that.
While nosing around in the RT manual I discovered the right click feature to open only one of the modules while all others are closed and like it greatly!
I would appreciate if there would be a possibility in the settings to have this as a default behavior for the left click. It feels somewhat cumbersome to use right click to “initialise an action” with the right mouse button where I usually use the left one.
In any case, I as a beginner RT user prefer the collapsed vs the all modules expanded view .
I have introduced several newcomers to RT @sguyader and have had similar feedback regarding the issues you have raised. I think your proposed solutions would be very helpful.
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Hello @sguyader,
I totally agree with you as regards the difficulty of approaching Rawtherapee at first sight. It is such a powerful tool, with so many options that it may be indeed quite overwhelming at the first approach…
I have started working with Rawtherapee when it was still a freeware, only available on Windows, but I do still consider myself a beginner…
Maybe its “difficulty” is one reason why there are so few tutorials on YouTube compared to Dartkable…
As Darktable is concerned, in my personal view, it is judged more easy to learn mostly because its GUIs is much more similar to Lightroom. Consequently, many photographers and advanced users are alreaday accostumed to both workflows.
As far as I am concerned, I do find the Rawtherapee interface much more professional compared to Darktable. It is not a case that, with the 2.7 version its GUIs has been vastly improved by Aurélien Pierre…
Another improvement for future releases of Rawtherapee might be having a GUIs to chose easily our own preferred tools [1]. Now you must write into a text file to select them, which looks quite complicated (“nerdy”) for the casual user…
As for your suggestion: “on first launch and opening a image in the editor, all the modules are unfolded, showing all the controls”, be ready to be surprised because…
On Linux Pro, an Italian magazin, this year, a contest among 5 graphic softwares (gimp, darktable, rawtherapee, lighzone, pixeluvo) has been proposed, trying these 5 applications with many tasks (each one with a final score).
As regards the best GUIs Rawtherapee has been judged better than Darktable because its tools are already unfolded which is somewhat different from what you are proposing, as regards the underneath controls…
Here is a screenshot in Italian (I am sorry about that but as a French I am sure you are able to undertand it…):
In all truth, I think that all comes down to personal preferences and taste.
IMHO, it is vital to read the manual (e.g. RawPedia) before approaching a professional software. And yes, I am fully aware that most users do not follow this principle at all!
Unfortunately, with open source software there are usually very few developers, at hand, to improve the GUIs. Even worse the documentation is quite often lacking many parts or, worse, quite outdated (but again, with Rawtherapee, the RawPedia web-page is quite accurate on the whole, IMHO)…
But, to conclude my looong rambling (sorry about that…), I do agree with you that there is always room for improvement as regards the GUIs!
I am hopeful that the recent fork of Rawtherapee [2] may be useful to explore all avenues. By doing so, both softwares are going to improve, in the long run 
[1] GUI for adding tools to Favorites tab · Issue #5256 · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub
[2] My take on RawTherapee
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You cited a magazine aimed at Linux users. Linux users tend to have less trouble “getting their hands into the grease” (it’s a French expression, but I’m sure you’ll get it) than “regular” users who often come from the Windows world in which they expect everything should come as is, clear and easy.
Hello @sguyader
You cited a magazine aimed at Linux users. Linux users tend to have less trouble “getting their hands into the grease.
I beg to differ about this 
I suppose I understand what you mean but as regards the graphical applications I am confident that many Windows users might surprise you about their personal skills.
If you think about the Adobe products, CaptureOne, Affinity photo etc they all run on Windows (and Mac) but not on Linux…
Therefore, we are talking about probably millions of users who, on Windows, can get “their hands dirty” on such applications and make a living out of it…
As regards Linux, most of its users are programmers not graphical professionals…
And yep, I have also worked myself on Linux in the past (mostly Kde stuff).
However, I am quite long in the tooth and I always come back to Windows in the end (out of habit mostly…) . Actually, I have started dabbling with Rawtherapee because, at its very beginning, it only ran on Windows (not Linux)
I would keep everything closed except for Exposure. The other categories under it look enticing to click and are very discoverable.
I don’t think it is needed to give those a ‘triangle’ as their style is very recognizable, and they look like clickable buttons.
But a default of ‘all closed except one’ might be an improvement.
@Silvio_Grosso what I meant by getting their hands dirty is rather that the average Linux users tend to not just ditch a program (not just for photography) that doesn’t look or work “right” out of the box. They’re more inclined to search, setup, personalize, get the code and compile,… and read the doc, than the average Windows users. That’s my impression, but I may be wrong.
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I see this comment all over the place (substitute the application names for any other application) and it always strikes me as something that doesn’t really mean anything.
What does it mean to you?
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I think I understand what he means. Darktable’s GUI looks less refined, more of a work in progress. RT’s interface is complicated, but the quality of the graphical elements is higher. When you first open each application, RawTherapee looks to be professional software, i.e. you would pay for it. Whereas darktable looks more like free software.
Of course this has nothing to do with their respective functionality or performance.
The problem I think I was getting at is that nobody ever explains what these things mean in such detail that it could result in someone from the project taking action to improve things.
“Looks professional” is completely subjective and without further explanation is pretty hollow.
I mean no offense to anyone, but if you have concrete ideas, please share them.
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True, it’s very subjective. See the thread about the new RT website, although most of us think it’s fresh and great, some (or at least 1) think it doesn’t look professional.
But it’s impossible to please everyone, and not everyone has the same idea of what looks professional.
You’re right, without detailed explanation, no one will be able to make improvements. But the average user is not a designer and they don’t always know why something “feels” this or that. You might get the impression that someone looks shifty, but you can’t put your finger on exactly why.
But I can have a stab at pointing some things out, bearing in mind this is very subjective.
darktable:
- I’m not a fan of the darktable decision to have everything lower case, even the first letter. This does not look professional at all to me. My day job is an editor and translator, so these things really stand out for me as ugly.
- Lack of 3D effects in the GUI: to me, this makes the interface look like a mock-up or work in progress. Almost all other imaging software I use has some kind of depth to it, which helps with ease of use.
- Borders and spacing: many elements are squeezed up next to each other, which makes for poor usability. Expand a parametric mask and look how close the channel labels are to the output slider (v.2.7).
If we consider RT and Lightroom for example, they do all the above in a better way, in my opinion. They have a more refined interface, 3D effects, clearer borders, better separation, cleaner fonts and capital letters.
I think RT is still too cluttered, but it does look more polished than darktable.
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[quote=“Morgan_Hardwood, post:6, topic:14105, full:true”]
“Getting Started” is the very first article, it’s also the first thing you see when you run RawTherapee for the first time[/quote]
It’s here: http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com
And IMHO it’s written quite terribly. Lot’s of random stuff patched together in no order.
Example: Tone Mapping
It’starts with: The effects of this tool are visible at any zoom level. However, due to the nature of the algorithm, only the 1:1…
IMHO it should start with a simple intro of what it is and does.
And please, let RT start with all menus collapsed.
Hello everyone,
@sguyader wrote
But it’s impossible to please everyone, and not everyone has the same idea of what looks professional.
Yes. I totally agree!
As regards the menu collapsed (or not) with Rawtherapee, at the startup, I don’t have a strong opinion on that but I am sure I will continue to work with Rawtherapee (and Darktable) whatever decision the developers will adopt in the end for the GUIs.
In general, on Windows, personally speaking I find many Linux softwares not pleasing to the eyes as regards their GUIs.
Rawtherapee is an exception but I think it is perhaps because it started on Windows and there is a Rawtherapee German develeoper who works on Windows himself right now
However I am aware that this is due to many factors:
- Me (by far the most important culprit), not having the time and strenght to look for new themes to download (for Gimp there are plenty of them to try but their quality is not always fine and in the end I always come back to the standard one…);
- lack of User experts, as regards the GUIs, availble to give a hand;
- most open source developers working exclusively on Linux. Therefore, when they are “forced” to release their software on Windows, quite often, the GUIs is not pleasant to the eye (I am confident that Gimp 3, with the upcoming GKT 3 move will be more pleasant to work with as regards its GUIs).
To conclude (sorry about my long posts but I do tend to be carried away easily), as regards the term “professional” IMHO every software who performs a task in the “best” possible way may be deemed “professional” even though it is a very specific one. For example, Zerene stacker does “only” focus stacking but it excels at that. Photoshop kind of allows you to do some focus stacking as well but it is not as good as Zerene. Consequently I consider Zerene more “professional” than Photoshop for this very specific task…
I am extremely fond of Rawtherapee because I always worked mostly with it over these past years. As concerns its colour corrections features, I do find it extremely “professional”. However, since the stable version (5.7) does not allow you to do “local editing” I am aware many users may prefer other softwares (Darktable etc). Therefore, we are back to square one:
But it’s impossible to please everyone, and not everyone has the same idea of what looks professional.
It is hard to discuss tastes, but let’s not forget that a lot of research is done on design and user experience. Some things work great, and some things are less effective. In my mind, the goal of a good design should always be to guide the user through the functions they need to do what they want. If that means you have to click an confusing number of times in vague menu’s, consult a manual for explanation of an option or clarification of a tooltip, use buttons that are scattered across your screen, or scroll through endless dropdowns, etc. then your software suffers from bad design.
RawTherapee suffers from some of these issues too, undoubtedly. Luckily we’re FOSS and anyone can propose a change (thanks @sguyader!) , or make these themselves.
So my 2 cents here are the following. And please keep in mind that my experience with RT is very positive (I think the GUI is not perfect though, 7.5/10 or something…)
- I support the suggestion to have all tools collapsed by default (in a clean installation), except maybe the Exposure and White Balance (those two provide the bare minimals to get anything decent out of a RAW file).
- I do not support the idea that you have to RTFM in order to understand the software’s (basic) functionality. But alas, that kinda seems to be the case for using (some parts of) RT, according to its About message on the website: On one hand, it welcomes newcomers and indicates it is targeted for them too, however the gist of the last paragraph to me is ‘… but you will have to study hard to know how it really works and ask a lot of questions’. I can see how that can put off newcomers, in particular if the GUI somehow suffers from a steep learning curve.
Edit: I do think RT has some pretty good default settings that will help newcomers to get some good edits from their raws!
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I think @sguyader last screen shot is excellent (with arrows and powerbuttons). Not only for new users but also for myself (have been using RT for years).
What most needs improving are many parts of Rawpedia; in particular those parts dealing with the more complex tools (e.g. wavelets, etc.). I would guess that this is more difficult and time consuming than alterations to the gui. While the manual does describe each tool in some detail, for my needs it lacks a section that is indexed by specific “problems” and then points to (or references) one or more suggested solutions; especially with examples demonstrating the alternate solutions of a given problem.
Otherwise, great job to all developers. THANKS.