Some examples from other tools I dug up
Didn’t look into this until now but all the above work similarly to my proposal.
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haha well you could potentially, perhaps possibly know better than me in this case… It was the perspective tools discussions that seeded the idea which then sprouted reading this thread.
To get the same behaviour as DXO and DT, an additionnal state of tools should be added" open/closed" without modifying the gui
- when the tool menu is expanded, the tool is open. thus you can change all parameters
- when the tool menu is collapsed, the tool is closed
The activated/deactivated state remains as it is. as soon as you change a parameter, the tool is activated
so for crop tool:
- starting the tool: either open tool and change a parameter or click on crop icon (it opens and activate tool)
- once open and activated, the crop window and guides are displayed.
the crop window is moved by clicking on it (not shift-click) - once happy with parameters if you let the tool open, crop is displayed as now
- if you close the tool, only the crop window is displayed without guides (it becomes the whole image). if you are on “fit whole image to screen” the cropped image is fully diplayed.
Thus “fit crop to screen” is no longer useful. - if you deactivate tool then the whole image is displayed. You come back by reactivating tool.
I should say that for me, this logic is not better than that is done now by RT and really not worth modification.
I would much prefer that dev effort be applied on perspective tool.
To crop images I also use GIMP, Xnview , photobook SW and diaporama SW
As I mainly make paper photobooks or diaporamas, my experience shows that the way you crop is context dependant: you don’t crop a photo the same way for a page A3, a page A5, for a photo montage or for a diaporama view.
I agree with your reasoning about cropping, media etc. but have at som point changed my workflow from seeing exporting from raw as a one time step to one where the raw files are a continuous source of exported files for each media/context etc. I’m guessing it happened when raw developers got so bloody good and convenient.
For the export once, crop and adjust in gimp/equivalent workflow most of my suggestions are moot. Then the exported files are conceptually another level of source file.
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@agriggio: First, I think it’s great that you have made some changes to the crop tool! Thanks for that! For me, I’ve gotten used to the way cropping works in RawTherapee and I’m happy the way it is if it were to remember the zoomed in ratio, i.e. the zoom factor I get when pressing the Alt+f shortcut. When I browse (F3-F4) my photographs RT doesn’t remember this and the picture gets an offset based on the cropped area.
If your new crop-tweak could let me click a button to confirm my wished crop, @agriggio, it would be much simpler to use - cropping for me is an iterative process and I’m seldom happy with my first attempt.
So: the confirmation for wished crop and remembering the Alt+f-thing would make me super happy! 
Thanks for all developers effort in this fantastic piece of software! 
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RawTherapee preserves the zoom ratio as long as the photo you’re switching to is of the same original dimensions as the one you’re switching from, else it zooms-to-fit.
Alt+f zooms to fit the crop. It’s unclear what you’re asking for.
@Morgan_Hardwood: Sorry if it’s vague: I’m asking for that RawTherapee automatically zooms to crop when switching from one image to another, so that I don’t have to press Alt+f every time 
Now it’s clear
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@mks9900 the latest dev does exactly that, provided that you use a solid background for your images. Rationale: if you use a transparent background, you might be interested in seeing what’s in the transparent area
Also, now you can customize (a little bit) the behaviour of the crop tool in “preferences → image processing”.
@agriggio: Maybe I’m doing something wrong here, but… 
I tried the latest RT (5.3-399-gbb7afbe01) now and compiled it. I placed three images without any pp3-file in a new directory to try on. I have since before chosen a solid black background, and set automatic crop in preferences to be true.
When I cropped the first image, RT automatically zoomed to crop at 31 which is good. I went on to the next image; RT now maintained the 31 zoom factor from the previous zoom-to-crop (which I believe is the wrong behaviour?), cropped it a little more heavily on that one whereas RT zoomed-to-crop at 43%. Pressed F4 to the next image and default zoom was at 43 . When I pressed F3 to go backwards in the queue, RT always shows the image at 43 , not depending on the per-image-crop-zoom-factor (…).
If I press “f” (zoom-to-fit) the value for me becomes 24 %, which is the value I would have expected on an untouched image.
Does this make sense to you @agriggio or have I completely misunderstood everything? (Probably!) 
Just wanted to crop an image, didn’t work, I thought, then I read:
Cropping in RawTherapee does not discard the cropped-off area, it just hides it by drawing a crop frame and zooming in to fit the frame to the available screen space.
That means I can’t crop? I am on 2470. That would be a deal breaker. Need to search an ART ZIP
It crops when you save the output.
Tried and works. But I find it disturbing/distracting to work on an uncropped image.
The cropped area can be hidden with these buttons.
When getting started with RT, I also found this behavior distracting. Now, I prefer it, because it means that I can tweak the cropping whenever I want during processing. No final decisions are made until the image is saved.
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