“Note that the effects of some tools are only accurately visible when you are zoomed in to 1:1 (100%) or more. These tools are marked in the interface with a “1:1” icon Zoom 1:1 next to the tool’s name.”
Can you give me one good reason why this is possible in other software yet RawTherapee can’t show it correctly? Effects are DISABLED if zoom is not 1:1. This makes them USELESS.
Some processing depends on the image size. When you zoom out, RT computes a thumbnail of that size and shows it to you. Sharpening is one of these tools, so if you applied the sharpening to the on screen thumbnail, the sharpening would be too much and the same settings produce less of an effect on the full size image.
I find it useless to see effects that are different on screen than in my output. YMMV.
Effects are definitely not disabled. The result looks different at 100% than when zoomed out
When zoomed out, you are seeing a buffer containing a quick-and-dirty decode of your RAW. Some effects can work on this sort of data. Some effects rely on the RAW data by way of the particular algorithms used, so the only way to visualize the effect is to view the image at 100%. 100% is wysiwyg, zoomed-out is not. To change this, a developer would have to choose an alternative algorithm for those effects which may only be visualized at the wysiwyg 100%. In the end, what you get in the output is an entirely different process by which all the effects are lined up in a certain order, the toolchain pipeline. From the documentation, “Everything that happens to an image, from the moment you open the file to the moment it is displayed on screen or saved, takes place in a fixed order. The data flows from one module to another - this is the toolchain pipeline. RawTherapee contains four pipelines (one for the main preview, one for the saved image, one for the thumbnail, and one other that currently escaped me).” Toolchain Pipeline - RawPedia
So, when your main preview is zoomed out, the pipeline skips the algorithms which work on the RAW data, and you see only effects which are compatible with the preview buffer’s data. Although computers are a tad faster than they were in the bad-ole-days, this feature allows many effects to be adjusted quickly without being bogged down without including the processing-time overhead that would be required if every RAW-dependent algorithm were to be included. At 100% there is a more finite subset of data in the preview, and the pipeline will include those algorithms.
Toolchain development experts like @heckflosse, @agriggio and others might be able to revise and extend these remarks for you. Welcome to the forum!
Thank you all for the answers. But I still don’t understand why a simple effect like sharpening is limited to 1:1 view. It’s impossible to fine-tune the radius without zooming out and judging if the preview is satisfying enough to export it. I would even be happy to wait for it to render, just make it an optional feature in settings.
If the end result were computed in full for seamless zooming and panning, then once the computation finishes you would be able to see the result of all the 1:1 modules even without zooming in.
Another reason to implement this enhancement.