… with an unlimited number of masks each including all the known types of adjustments and the following functionality: brush edge softening, adjustable flow, a delete brush, showing-hiding mask, being active at all zoom levels, an overall intensity slider, etc., etc. Sliders for luminosity or color masking would be nice too - maybe better than the masking brush in ACR and Lightroom.
I also suggest that relevant developers state their status as such when commenting.
Otherwise it’s hard to know who is speaking from knowledge and who just from the joy of participating but without having a clue.
I sense mounting frustration on your part and I’m sorry you aren’t getting the replies you’d like to your posts. However, this seems unnecessarily hostile. The people here provide support in their free time, and each reply means someone took their own personal free time to try and help you. Its impossible that every reply will be satisfactory, and you’re free to disregard which ever information you please, but there is no need to make that public.
I am not a developer so I cannot comment on what may or may not happen in the future. However, if you care to read the introduction to the Local Adjustments section in RawPedia, https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Local_Adjustments you will see that the underlying rationale is to avoid having to use brushes and drawn masks. i.e.
This approach is completely different to the more familiar local editing methods used in applications such as GIMP, Photoshop, etc., which primarily use selection tools such as lassos, magic wands etc., associated with brushes, layers and blend masks. These methods can be time consuming and difficult to use accurately when complex shapes are involved.
It is worth noting also that the shape-detection algorithms used in Rawtherapee’s Local Adjustments are extremely powerful
and can be finely controlled allowing for very precise selections. Further refinement is possible with additional parametric masks but the shape-detection algorithms should be sufficient for the vast majority of local editing requirements.
Mica,
If you don’t understand my writing then just ignore me. I don’t need your misinterpretations. You seem to find it entertaining to answer questions I haven’t asked. I am not interested in your polemic game - You have not yet been close to being helpful regarding the questions I have brought up. Please spare me your “help”.
I think people have found ways to tie Krita or GIMP into their workflow and so the focus has been on the core mission of the software ie as a raw developer leaving brush masking to something with layers. The fork of RT , ART has brush masking but it may not meet your requirements…
I’m going to refrain from giving you my thoughts and opinion about RT’s masks, but I would like to say this:
Might I suggest that, questions about or topics regarding feature requests, issues and/or bugs and where non-developer answers are not really wanted, are asked on the GitHub RawTherapee section instead…
This is pixls and although there are (some, not all) developers here it is basically a user forum and non-developer users will vent their opinions.
RT’s GitHub section, on the other hand, is much stricter and basically developer driven. Occasionally a non-developer will chime in with their opinion, but that is the exception, not the rule.
How easy would it be to create a masking brush in RawTherapee
It can be done, because @agriggio implemented brushed masks in ART. I would not be able to replicate his work - I am not that good of a developer - unless I tried to port his work back into RT.
But, brushes and layers have been talked about in the past, and, as Wayne points out, were deemed unnecessary because of the unique way Local adjustments are implemented by @jdc.
So, as a maintainer/developer, I can say that while it is possible it is not very likely brushed masks and layers will be implemented in the near future.
I am sorry to hear that.
As stated earlier, the local adjustments in RT - as good as it sounds in writing - has its limitations as the basic way to separate the edited part is on luminance and colors. I have experienced a lot of situations where a specific area can’t be selected isolated, because the same luminance or color values are spread all around in the image. These functions are only a parts of the masking brush in ACR and Lightroom, and 8 out of 10 times the manual selection with a brush is more precise than anything else, i.e. it doesn’t spill the current changes into areas where they are unwanted.
I understand.
I just find it a waste of everybody’s time if people without the actual knowledge to answer a specific question constructively or when they have no new ideas to add - absolutely must air their opinion about everything - often in a negative way. I suggest they - in those cases - socialize in areas suited for their knowledge. That’s all.
If I had the GUI skills, two things would have been added to RT long ago.
the possibility to delimit an RT-spot by something else than a rectangle or an ellipse, for example a freehand polygon or a Bézier curve…Nevertheless the gain obtained will be in most cases marginal.
the possibility to use brushes (the tools created almost 20 years ago by Adobe…) associated or not with LA masks. It is true that there are tools - often unknown to LA - which allow to compensate for certain attributes of the brushes (removal of grease stains for example), but they do not compensate completely.
Some team members who had these skills have left RT and this is sorely felt, but who can I?
I earlier (in another thread) asked for a more flexible shape to mark a local adjustment area than just 4 points which currently can only be adjusted along one of two axis - and the answer was that rotation would be too difficult to implement. This excludes a more precise marking of a local area, and such a large area where the current adjustment will work against the wanted effect speaks for a brush.
In my opinion RT is not far from being an attractive alternative to most commercial raw-editors, and a few main criteria when people compare are:
the existence of a masking brush,
a smoothly working File Browser where all kinds of files can be opened (by reference) in the largest possible scale and otherwise be compared internally in a slide show function, and
except for raw files, no file loaded into the editor should be considered a new copy for editing unless this was explicitly demanded (it’s a mess with pp3 files piling up in the folders when those images are not meant to be edited).
And I almost forgot:
An aspect ratio adjustment working horizontally and/or vertically in Camera-based Perspective.
More than one incident of the Graduated filter.
Then RT would be good to compete with any raw-editor I know of - especially considering the difference in price!
Or why not give ART a try? It does most things that RawTherapee does (except wavelets and retinex) but has pretty good masking abilities including brush masks, polygon shapes, gradients which can be used on multiple instances and combined with colour-similarity or parametric masks to make it easy to select things. It also has an inspector so you can look through your pictures easily to decide which ones to keep. That’s much of your wish list.
Bear in mind that most these extra features have been produced and are maintained by one person, so be kind and reasonable when making suggestions…
Good call no capture sharpening either but many nice little features in ART for sure…ART will read the gain maps in my cell phone dng…does a really nice job relighting them…
The masking brush in ASK can easily be used, but it’s suffering from two shortages.
The most serious is, that the well know key combination for brushing in a straight line can’t be used ( - as far as I can see - it’s a. left-click to mark the starting position A - b. point at the destiny position B, and c. shift + left-click to fill the space between A and B with a straight mask (or line)).
This method can’t be used, as the Shift key toggles between painting and deleting.
Have I missed another method to create a straight line along an otherwise curved border?
The common understanding of Fill seems to be named “Hardness”.
“Feather” seems to be Blur of the total mask, while “Smoothness” looks much like Edge feathering.
Regularization is apparently the overall percentage scale (?)
It’s a bit difficult when the unusual choice of terms isn’t explained.
So far the two File Browsers for RT vs ART seem to work in the same way. There’s no way to browse through large version of the thumb nails in ART either (and still a TIF opened in the Browser will get a sidecar as if it was a new copy for editing).
So 2 out of 5 is better than nothing, though not ideal (the aspect ratio slider works fine).
I’ll have to check ART out for a bit longer to see, if I have lost functionality from RT that will make the swap harder.
I think adding a rotation to the current ellipse and rectangles would go a long way, if not solve all remaining issues. Would that be difficult ? I could give it a try maybe with some pointers to get started.
