I was having issues using retouch near the edge of a cropped image.
I wanted to remove this lamp and branch. Easy enough, we simply brush over it with the retouch tool on healing mode.
However because of the pipeline order, by default retouch comes before crop, it samples to the left of the image where there is more branch / lamp and adds this ugly black smudge.
Swapping the module order so that crop is before retouch allows us to ignore that part of the image and removes these ugly smudges.
I also wonder if applying crop early in the pipeline has performance improvements as it reduces the number of pixels being worked on earlier? Is there much downside to putting the crop quite early?
Sometimes when working retouch in DT or even GIMP it is better to switch to clone rather than the healing options when these dark smudges occur. The healing is affected by the area being fixed while the clone is a straight copy. Also with the healing tool, reposition the source to match the direction of the edges of objects can improve results. I have learnt this from doing extensive photo restorations. Good luck.
BTW, I like your solution of switching module orders for the case shown.
Crop was moved later in the pipeline than retouch so that you can use source areas outside the cropped region (which was not possible before, as the retouch module only saw the cropped area).
So in your case, you could temporarily switch of the crop module, adjust your retouch, and re-enable crop after.
Fwiw, I prefer the possibility of having source areas outside the crop, it’s very often very useful.
This makes sense, I actually came to that conclusion eventually, but the larger amount of retouching made darktable run a fair bit slower, so in this case it was a better outcome (and less fiddly) but I appreciate this also.
The best pixelpipe order depends on the usecase - if you need stuff from later cropped areas then an early crop isn’t the best idea.
So you can change the order if it fit’s to your use case, but in general it’s better to have it later in the pipe.
While the retouch module in DT is amazing it can really be slow to use if there is extensive number of scratches and spots on an old photo that I am restoring. For this reason I do most of my spot and scratch repairs in GIMP after I have finished with any work in DT. But I do love the incredible capabilities of the retouch module in DT when it is just a few areas that need attention.
