Hello , and excuse my (very) bad english.
What Andy puts forward in his contact with DT – as well as RT can be summed up in 2 points, which I will explain next.
a) As we say in French: "Une question n’est difficile que si on ne connaît pas la réponse " : “A question is difficult only if you don’t know the answer”
b) Complexity (I will come back to this concept) is essentially a matter of habits and learning.
As some probably know - this is personal, but every developer/user will find similar quirks:
- I am old (75 years old), very ill, this last point has been a big handicap for the last 3 or 4 years.
- Moreover I am not a computer scientist but self-taught, my code is bad (it is necessary to optimize it…), and I have trouble understanding the code of others (that of DT, to a lesser degree ART…) .
- On the other hand, my training as an engineer and manager, then as a sociologist and ergonomist brought me 2 things:
** a permanent need for innovation
** knowledge of individual and collective reactions to usual or new situations.
The Need for Innovation:
- it is a psychological and sociological behavior that we have or that we do not have - it is neither better nor worse than the “application” behaviors where the individual (the group) feels more at home ease in respecting procedures, a known environment.
- Rawtherapee was an opportunity for me to flourish. I seek no profit, no glory, no ego. I do this for fun and as a hobby. This led to modules which at the beginning and still now have shocked or been rejected (most often by cognitive misunderstanding or ignorance of my purposes). I would cite Retinex, Wavelet, Ciecam, Abstract profiles, White balance auto by temperature correlation, Local Adjustments, etc. These modules may seem complex, they are essentially for 2 reasons:
- the vocabulary which is that of the researchers, for example that of Ciecam which is partially found in that of DT
- an ill-adapted GUI.
Once the user has passed the a priori, understood the concepts and learned to use them (with the help of documentation, videos, forums, etc.), he often becomes an unconditional supporter.
Researchers (sociologists, ergonomists, psychologists) distinguish 3 stages in the behavior of individuals faced with a system (this is particularly useful in nuclear and railway security, etc.)
1 - the gestures and behaviors are automatic, the person has acquired experience and masters the system well, … but what happens with a new procedure?
2 – gestures and behaviors require calling on the memory of previously learned but known situations. Again, what happens when the system has not been used for several weeks or months?
3 – gestures and behaviors require the use of knowledge (when it exists). For example when faced with “wavelets” the reaction might be “what the hell is this” / “I don’t understand anything”, or “I know but why are we using this here”, or "I know, I’m going to dig deeper . »
In general, faced with a new product, the user is in 3) above… And we often end up in a rejection. Experts speak of unlearning and new learning. This implies a desire for change and work…not easy. The system control step is 1)
What further complicates things is the graphical interface (in the case of software). For RT I took what was there – without understanding, I work like a monkey copying what works. The GUI is based on programming knowledge, the innovation has often been made elsewhere, but the language, the programming are abstruse.
A beginner will obviously notice that the GUI of RT, DT, Lightroom is different. This is obviously an obstacle to the newcomer.
The other obstacle is the understanding of the system: a systemic analysis (which has been one of my specialties to understand the functioning of companies, organizations, …) could facilitate this understanding, but the implementation with isolated people is almost impossible.
Going back to RT is to the underlying requests of Andy and others (requests which I respect), if I had been able/knew how to do them a long time ago it would have been done….Difficulties mostly due to the GUI . But also to the weakening of the team for a few months…
The comparison between the 2 products is also a matter of knowledge and understanding (to arrive at 1). The ideal would be a combination of the two… almost impossible. I know that RT has been inactive (in terms of official publications) for about 2 years, but that doesn’t fully explain why innovations in DT (scene refere, Sigmoid, new color science,…) are hotly debated on the forums and that similar processes on RT (Ciecam, Sigmoid, Munsell correction, Auto WB…) are currently in the shadows;
Jacques