How about replacing invalid with custom?
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That was my first suggestion. It’s probably still my preferred alternative.
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Read the manual is a good advice… If the manual is designed to be read by you.
Reading the user manual to deal with your tv set is good. If you only have the technical repair manual to sintonize your tv set, many people would better stick to the radio.
People have used temperarature, tint or other concepts for long as with good results without having to apply to a master in physics.
I like reading technical detsils if they are well explained and adapted to a wide audience.
But don’t expect an artist to deeply understand black body plank radiation.
Software is there to help people solve complex tasks in an easy manner. If I have to deeply understand every equation involve, then i would be able to program it myself.
Invalid “use custom” ??
This is the problem…the software is open source project worked on by developers to produce software that edits images as they want to edit them with tools that they have designed. Their goal is not to make a difficult task easy its to make of an image what they want and we as the users get the privilege to tag along. If this software also offers utility for us then we adopt it and have the job to learn how to use it. Of course to an extent they will try to craft the tool to be efficient in the way it works but this might not always mean simple or easy. I think this is a nuance that gets forgotten…
We as users can make suggestions and those suggestions may be adopted as collective scrutiny and discussion evolves and if the dev feels there is merit. Often to me comments made about darktable and what it can or cannot do are framed as if people were looking at a piece of software from a commercial enterprise that they had paid for and that is something different. There you have paid for something and the company should have an obligation to serve you as the user…
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Well yes, that depends on the project goal.
And of course no obligation from developers.
As a developer myself (time ago from that) implementing the solution that i could use was the ‘easy’ part. When it reaches a broader audience is where things get difficult.
You know what you are doing and the limitations, other people are more in the dark side and would use the interface in other ways, sometimes unexpected ones.
So I fully understand what aureliene is talking about, and understand what he says.
But if you want to widen the audience, just expecting people reads the manual and understand it is not realistic.
Concepts exposed in the manual are quite technical and nobody without a good mathematic and color science formation is going to understand them in depth.
Making it more easy and understandable for common photographers is not easy.
Nakibg then easy and versatile enough to be used for the moee advanced users with good understanding of color science is even harder.
I am aware of the efforts of aureliene to explain the use of the modules and color concepts to us.
In my case with mixed results: it improvex my knowledge but not enough to u derstand what i am doibg with the modules, due to my limitations in color science.
May be time given other people with better knowledge in color science finds ways to make the concepts more understandable.
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Just ‘oops’ ? Not really serious, it would just imply to think about something and avoid any reference to maths.
How about keeping the word invalid, making people ask about it again and again until
becomes folk wisdom and people will keep saying something “i didn’t knew too, but then i read the manual and i recommend you do so too” 
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That’s completely wrong and also this is the origin of the whole problem.
Many people are still confused that color is somehow related to temperature when it comes to white balance, even in the classical software and interface (just browse your average photo forum). So, as of now, either they built some practical notion of the temperature <=> color mapping (as some arbitrary amber-red → blue axis) with no understanding of the theory, or they had to learn how light spectrum correlates to temperature of a planckian radiator (whether they call it planckian radiator or not).
In this context, I don’t see how much worse it is to just warn about the wrongness of the temperature. There is no need for physics if you don’t want them, you only have 3 things to understand:
- if daylight-ish illuminant, then
color <=> temperatureby some physical law you don’t need to understand – just know there is a link, - if not daylight-ish illuminant, then color is whatever. Typical software offers
color <=> (temperature, tint)but that is piling up shit on top of wrongness, so we simply offercolor <=> (hue, chroma)with no further assumption – it’s robust and generic, - in our classical transparent way, we tell you if your illuminant is daylight-ish or not, and let you decide how you want to proceed from there.
That’s all.
A lot of photographers/artists/tech-shy people know when to use a polarizing filter and what it does to picture, yet very few of them understand the principle of filtering light waves depending on the orientation of their electric field. If you don’t understand it, you take the word as an arbitrary label, learn the result obtained with the technical apparatus labeled so, and learn how to control said apparatus to obtain said results.
Just because I strive to publicly expose the reasoning and the inner technicality doesn’t mean everyone has to go to M.Sc to use the thing. There are 2 use cases (daylight-ish or not), and a label that tells you which one you are in, just follow the recipe.
Besides, talking about color temperature without ever saying the name “illuminant” is also part of the misunderstanding, because the illuminant is the thing which (equivalent) temperature is measured. So people will have zero chance to understand what’s going on with temperature as long as they are prevented from conceptualizing a real-life object that is actually hot/emits radiations.
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Thank aureliene. Thank you a lot for your time and efforts for trying to make us understand these concepts. Not all developers (few of them, indeed) take such an effort.
I think i more or less understand what you mean, and as often i am sure you are right.
I don’t meant temperature and tint is the correct model.
I meant they are concepts people have managed to ‘u dertand’ even no in depth or being a not completly correct model.
But literature and tutorials have simpkified this concepts enough in a way that comon users can manage them.
I undertand more or less what is temperature as the temperature of a black bpdy that radiates a given light wave seen as a precise color.
But tint us not as easily understood. Many colors are not possibleusing just a radiation body.
So tint is a kind of deviation from the locus? Of the radiatong body, something like the distanxe from the nearest color that can be emited with it.
I don’t know if that is exactly what tint is, but i think it is a working model for not technically people.
It seems quite an artificial model, by the way.
I would be glad to change it for another one. You say chroma and hue.
But we will need a better understanding of what chroma and hue is.
I have seen previous links to very good books and online tutorials.
But reading almost 300 pages would be a bit hard to begin with.
I will try to read them slowly and see if i can understand part of them and improve my knowledge.
Meanwhile i would need a working definition of what chroma and hue is.
I have read this terms in many places but used in a loose way.
I had thought hue and chroma were similar, but it is obious they are not.
I have read dtdoc about color concepts, but not fully understood what hue and chroma is, will need to find more examples about it. And read it slowly and in a big screen and not in mobile to see if I can understand it.
Just replace invalid with see manual 
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It’s not darktables purpose to widen audience; main purpose is to widen capabilities useful for those that are limited by simplified tools
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I’m going to chime in here and say that darktable is too powerful to not expect people to read the manual.
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The manual is useless when it gets too technical for most peopke, but the ones who understand the color science.
I can understand what hue is, everybody has used the color wheel.
Chroma is not as easy to understand.
I love aureliene explanations about color concepts, anyway.
I have to read it more carefully to see uf i can understand it, but some .ore graphucs with the color wheel and may be some graphic about what chroma is may help.
Results are great, we just need get used to the interface and new concepts.
The manual tries to keep everything straight in constant terminology without making it hermetic.
If you don’t understand chroma or hue or both there’s https://darktable-org.github.io/dtdocs/special-topics/color-management/color-dimensions/ 
specifically made to explain terms used.
As you can see - the manual is SUPERB.
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I would agree, the manual is great and I use it almost daily.
But I can see why some parts are not always easy to understand for some. This is partially because some of the concepts are inherently hard to understand. But I have also noticed some terminology from the world of mathematics and physics used, which can further cloud comprehension for those without this kind of background. I’m not sure if the manual still includes such words, but two that come to mind are “orthogonal” and “abscissa”. Layman’s terms for these would be something like “at right angles” and “x axis” respectively. The manual’s attempts at being very precise and technically accurate are one of its many strengths, but keeping it in plain English as much as possible should be a goal in my opinion.
I’m an editor by trade and have previously offered to contribute to the manual if more volunteers are needed…
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http://www.huevaluechroma.com/ This is a great site with some nice explanations and examples…
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contribute as much as you can Including huevaluechroma stuff.
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Thank you all.
I have read it but not fully understood it.
Hue i think i understand it, it us the classuxal color wheel.
Chroma has a definition that is not all that simpke… What do we understand for colorfullness compare to gray?
It is not so simple to understand
I thonk of it as some kind if aaturation, but not in the perceptive world but in physucal world.
O us gray 100% full color corresponding to hue.
I have to study the graphs, but in the mobile i cannot see the well, will havd to wait for a pc screen.
The explanation about saturation and chrima sounds very inyeresting.
The link would help too, thank you.
Will do, thanks!