Exposure / Tone Curve / Parametric / Perceptual not working as tooltip suggests?

The other day, I was playing with the most recent play_raw ([PlayRAW] Autumn Island - #26 by s7habo) and I wanted to try a tone curve to enhance the clouds. I thought I’d try parametric/perceptual (whether that was a good choice is another matter, but that’s not the subject of this post).

At least one of the following statements is true:

  1. The tool is not working correctly.
  2. The tooltip is incorrect.
  3. I am stupid or crazy.
    (never dismiss option #3).

The tooltip shows:

When I do what the first sentence says, the cursor turns into a hand while the left mouse button is pressed, and no adjustment point is added to the tone curve.

When I do what the second sentence says, the cursor again turns into a hand while the left mouse button is pressed, and moving the mouse up and down moves the image preview up and down as the hand cursor would suggest. Again, nothing happens to the tone curve.

I ultimately figured out how to use the tool with the square sliders at the bottom of the histogram and the other sliders below that. But I was thrown for a loop for a while by that tooltip!

So, the bottom line: am I stupid or crazy, or is that tooltip out to lunch?

Did you click that button where your mouse pointer is currently located? If not, it can’t work …

Its not working in parametric … I use NURBS usually, and here it works. In parametric you get additional sliders below the curve.

Interesting fact: After switching away from parametric and back to parametric it also works there …

Yeah I did try clicking that button. When I do that, the cursor changes to a cross-hair before I click the mouse button, and four vertical lines (red, green, blue and white) are shown on the histogram while I mouse over the image preview. While the mouse button is held down, it still changes to a hand, and moving the mouse still drags the image preview around.

I had no idea what NURBS is until your mention of it made me Google it. RawPedia has only heard of it in one German-language post, so I am going to guess that you do this in some other package.

It still doesn’t work as described by the tooltip for me when I switch parametric → custom → parametric.

Perhaps we are on different RT versions or different systems…I have:

gord@CSI09-Ubuntu:~$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 4.4.0-78-generic (buildd@lgw01-11) (gcc version 5.4.0 20160609 (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.4) ) #99-Ubuntu SMP Thu Apr 27 15:29:09 UTC 2017

gord@CSI09-Ubuntu:~$ apt-cache policy rawtherapee
rawtherapee:
Installed: 5.1-1dhor~xenial
Candidate: 5.1-1dhor~xenial
Version table:
*** 5.1-1dhor~xenial 500
500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/dhor/myway/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
4.2-4 500
500 http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages

By selecting Parametric, you are by definition restricting your adjustments to the ‘parameters’ represented by the sliders below the graph. It makes no sense to add individual control points in this mode, as it would in, say, Control Cage mode or Custom. Perhaps the application should disable (gray out) the control point button when Parametric is the selected option.

1 Like

Makes sense to me, @tbransco, as well as altering or suppressing the tooltip.It was the tooltip that led down the rabbit hole. The parametric tone curve works, and works well, but just not as the tooltip misleads the user to do.

NURBS is the German Abbreviation for the last kind of tone curves. But don’t ask me what it means. As I tried to explain in my last post, when setting the tone curve kind to parametric, then switch it to any other kind and back to parametric it works as the tooltip says. I believe it is some uninitialized variable in the program.

@ChasingShadows Moin, Karlheinz!
It means Non-uniform rational basis spline (or at least that is what the letters stand for). Or something like nicht-uniforme rationale B-Splines in semi-German.

MfG
Claes in Lund, Schweden

@Claes Moin moin, that answer was almost what I thought :slight_smile: