Image on one monitor and controls on another - is it possible?

Software RawTherapee
3

I’ve long wanted the same feature myself, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem possible at this moment.

However I made myself a small RawTherapee patch that partially solves this issue:

  • if the environment variable RT_PREVIEW_PROTO is set to png or jpeg,
  • and if the variable RT_PREVIEW_PATH is set to a file path,
  • whenever the preview changes inside RawTherapee main window,
  • the pointed to file will also be rewritten with a large enough preview (between 1920 px and 3840 on the largest side);
  • then I just open that preview image with any tool that supports image reload; (for example sxiv and geeqie; ) (optionally color management should be supported by that viewer and the proper profile should be loaded;)

The patch is quite small and available on GitHub:

(As bonus point, if the preview path is on a remote file-system like NFS, or exported via HTTP, you can preview it on any device.)

That being said, as @Thanatomanic mentioned, it does come with some performance penalty mainly due to the large preview size. You can improve that performance by decreasing the nWH_min variable to a more sensible value.)