This is something I have noticed as well - and not just here, but other sites too. Thereās always someone ready to criticise DT, but rarely do they offer any solution more elaborate than āmake it like Lightroomā. And when they do, like here, almost invariably fail to consider DTās goals as a raw developer and its ātargetā users, or if the proposed idea even fits into DTās technical architecture.
Thereās currently someone putting actions behind their words (!), by working on a new tone eq UI. Looks very promising too.
I assume you mean denoise (profiled) and astrophoto denoise. How would you combine them? Technically they work in very different ways, so itās not like you can reuse any of the sliders. Without completely rethinking how they work, you would essentially end up with two modules in one, at which point you may as well just keep them separate.
Hereās a little exercise for you (and anyone else with a clever idea): Sit down with pen and paper, and sketch out the UI/UX. Make sure you cover all current use cases. If you can come up with something that is an actual improvement on the current situation, Iāll be very impressed indeed.
You just provided a good example of ignoring the technical realities.
Have a look at this:
The two yellow dots are not there for fun. Those modules dictate where many other modules can be placed in the pixelpipe. HL reconstruction and demosaic both depend on a somewhat correct white balance to function correctly, so WB must come before. Color calibration CAT works with RGB pixels and so must, at a minimum, come after demosaic. CC CAT is also not just a new UI on top of the old WB algorithm - itās completely different. If DT was like LR, where the processing pipeline is hidden, this wouldnāt be a problem and they could indeed be combined in some way, but since the module order is the processing order, they have to be separate.
And nothing wrong with that. They just shouldnāt be using darktable then. If they want something free, both RawTherapee and ART are mostly like that. Or they could go with just about any of the commercial options. And lets not forget that there are plenty of former LR and C1 users that prefer the DT way (hi @bastibe), so should they then be forced to use something they would consider worse?
But thatās the thing, they mostly donāt do the same thing, even if it superficially may seem like they do. I count six different modules that can denoise - but they all have they pros and cons, while also working in different ways that mean they canāt easily be combined. Which is of course one of the things that makes DT a raw toolbox and not an āon-railsā editor like LR. Short of making DT exactly like LR, I donāt think thereās a way to placate the users that get confused by that. Now, there are some modules that could be removed without losing any functionality, such as curves where tone eq does the same and more, but I donāt even want to think of the amount of complaining that would trigger. Even something as replacing the old Lab levels with RGB levels managed to piss several users off, despite there being no functional difference.
I love people having always a simple view of things that seems to work for THEM.
