Can we make RawTherapee look less complex on very first sight (for brand new users)?

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 :slight_smile:

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. :slight_smile:

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! :smiley:
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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.

RawPedia is a wiki… If you think it has shortcomings, then by all means register an account and have at it!

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I have been thinking about UI and such for a long time. One approach to make it more pleasant is to display the Favourites tab by default with key modules that are collapsed. Another approach is to have a basic mode that looks and works similarly to the simple Batch Edit interface.

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+1 for a basic/beginner mode. It should have only relatively simple / commonly used functions. e.g. any tool that needs the use of more that 3 sliders to get halfway decent results may be too much for newbie.

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It definitely a matter of taste. Everything you say you hate about darktable I like.

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That’s why we should focus more on usability and the perception of complexity, rather than on looks

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I agree about usability. That’s one reason I spent a lot of time on auto-calculation of contrast-threshold for dual-demosaic and capture sharpening and on developing auto-radius for capture sharpening. Currently the latter does not work fine for xtrans files but you know, I’m working on it.

Imho usability is also about having good default and (even better) auto-calculated values.
Of course that doesn’t improve the look of the gui, but it makes live a bit easier…

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Totally agree! RT keeps getting better and better in this thanks to sensible settings and default tools enabled.

Yep, it’s all very subjective. But I never actually said I “hated” anything. I’m not a fan of the lower case letters at the start and my points were mainly an attempt to explain why many people think RT looks more professional then darktable.
I love both programs, but I can see why many new users are scared off quickly, and that’s a lot to do with the GUIs.

Do we want to attract new unexperienced users and can we make RawTherapee easy to use for these users?

I’m not sure about the first part. It seems to me that RawTherapee is developed by and intended for photo specialist. And that is of course ok in all respects.

When I study the attractive and impressive new webpage I read the following (just an example):

“RawTherapee gives you best-in-class demosaicing, including using two demosaicing algorithms on the same image, compositing pixel-shift raw files with automatic ghost masking, working with multiple-frame raw files, dark frame subtraction, flat field correction, and hot/dead pixel correction!”

This is impressive but it doesn’t attract unexperienced users. No where I find a text explaining that it’s easy to use RawTherapee as a new user and easy to tune photos to become much better than a default jpeg.

I’m sure we could make RawTherapee easy to perform basic but important editing:

  • The file structure is easy to understand. No need to import folders, work with collections and understand the catalogue.

  • The auto-matched tone curve facility was a giant step forward securing that you as default get an ok image to edit.

  • The default settings invoking new modules are great.

  • The latest version of “Edit your first image” is fine and explains how easy it is to use RawTherapee in a basic way.

……….but we need a way to switch off all the complicated stuff and invoke a basic/beginners mode. This should be the default mode unless you turn it off.

I am well aware this would be a whole HEAP of work…but could one have the option to switch to a starter version, with basic tools only, which guides one through loading and editing images…kinda like Rawpedia but live?

For what it’s worth, having initially run away in terror I’ve now come back and am slowly working my way up the learning curve.

PS Not sure if it’s a fix, or if I’ve turned the right button on or off but the thing has stopped demosaicing obsessively at every opportunity, thank God! :slight_smile:

PPS Again, thanks SO MUCH to you guys who put the work into building it for us techno-illiterates

… I think that RT has a logical, super logical interface. Above the “easier” commands and to get off the more sophisticated ones. If you have just opened for the first time, you pretend to use everything, you are presumptuous… and read the manual first of all.

To me the interface becomes logical only after you have played with it quite a bit. Meaning that you have fully processed quite a few images in RT.

Everybody has to read the documentation to be proficient with this application, but I remember when I first launched it and was willing to try everything, touch every tool, slide every control, … Exactly as a kid with a new toy, but a really complex and capable toy.

I don’t know what you do in your country, but here the very first thing we do when unpacking a device is putting aside the manual :laughing:

Perhaps one of the easier ways to prevent scaring off new users would be adding a toggle button (beginner/advanced) that would hide/show some tools, not intended for casual users.

Even a casual user (beginner) will often encounter problems which one cannot adequately solve with the “basic” tools. I assume such cases were the impetus for the development of the more complex tool sets. That is why I have suggested Rawpedia (or at least a section of the manual) be devoted to a format that initially highlights (or starts) with common, but otherwise complex problems, and proceeds to suggest the various tools which may be useful; and in some order of the complexity of the tool’s use.

Just my two cents:

For a good processing of bayer raw files in RT at least the following should be enabled as a starting point:

  1. raw ca correction at default settings
  2. for low ISO raw files also capture sharpening at default settings
  3. either an automatched or a standard tone curve profile
  4. dual demosaic

All of the above need some processing time. If you procress 12MP D700 files on a 8-core machine, that doesn’t matter much, but if you open a 36 MP D800 file on a 4-core machine with all the above mentioned tools enabled you get the impression, that RT is slow, which is not the case.

One idea to improve the behaviour (I don’t speek about the gui, but about making RT faster when using default profiles and so improve the user experience) follows below:

The raw default profile uses auto-matched tc, which is fine, but the current implementation of auto-matched tc requires the raw to be decoded twice when a raw is opened the first time. For some raw formats (e.g compressed sony arw) that’s negligible (as they can be decoded using multiple threads), but for other raw formats that’s a major slowdown (e.g. especially Canon CR2 files are somehow slow to decode). It should be possible to avoid the additional decoding step for auto-matched tc. That would really improve auto-matched.

A fighter plane will never be as easy to fly as a cessna… and that’s fine.
Those who want something more simple can use Picassa…

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I’m actually a long-time (hobbyist) Blender user and there are some interesting parallels between this conversation and the very long running one around Blenders UI; although I don’t think they’re exactly the same. I think it’s fair to say Blender interface has gone through two major revisions and it’s had major benefits for the Blender project and its users but it certainly hasn’t been without controversy.

For what it’s worth, I think Rawtherapee might benefit from Blender’s approach in that Someone has to sit down and have a good hard think about what the expected workflows might be and what variables might drive those workflows (technical qualities, subject matter, user proficiency perhaps), then do a ground up rethink of the user interface.

As a new user, I’d have to echo @XavAL above, in my opinion the only way to really understand RawTherapee is process a bunch of images with it. There are quite a few tools that I haven’t even touched and honestly wouldn’t know when it would be appropriate to use them, let alone how to. It’s on me to learn that, of course, but some assistance from the application itself would help.

Rawtherapee is pretty daunting to get started with and once you get through the “getting started” guide, the documentation is pretty sparse (both on the wiki and in terms of video tutorials).

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It might be nice to put all the “beginner” tools in the favorites tab to start.

If documentation and video tutorials are lacking, this is where the community of users should step in. Users should show other users how to use the application.