Oh, sorry: Birds-Of-Feather, refers to informal sessions in conferences for folks with a particular common interest.
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Do you have any SHARE or GUIDE in your past?
No, mostly aerospace. I did present my dissertation at a computer conference, don’t remember the name, have the materials somewhere in the basement…
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Birds of a feather flock together… how appropriate :- ) Never heard of the term before. Does it include having a beer? Then I am in!
We have already at least two things in common (maybe even three if I include my time with a now defunct Minneapolis based computer company).
Hobby:
Answering that particular point, since it came up several times… If you look at filmic, tone equalizer and color balance, I have put a lot of tooltips in there, often 3 or 4 lines per slider, explaining what happens if you push the slider right or left, what the side-effects might be and what problem do they solve. Just looking at the questions that arise, it’s very obvious that many people don’t read them, even if they are straight in the software (no need to browse an external doc).
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It was a more general comment, particularly related to masks. No problems with filmic, and since I don’t use the others…
Le mer. 12 févr. 2020 à 13:13, Aurélien Pierre via discuss.pixls.us noreply@discuss.pixls.us a écrit :
I think that the OP offered us a life experience, similar to so many others of us, some even did not realized yet being in the same situation.
One comment though… Regarding the intuitiveness, at the time I’ve started with Adobe Illustrator, QuarkXpress, ArchCAD, Adobe Photoshop, those were aliens to me. Why? Because their methodology was according to the professional designers, printers, photographers, publishers and architects. I was just a programmer. In time, I’ve educated myself, now I find these natural, so, when somebody designs UIs for some field, must do it according to that profession approaches. In conclusion, if a professional recognizes a tool as effective without an extensive training, you know it is right, a success, your work was not in vain. Luckily, we have not one excellent free photography development tool, but two (DT & RT)! Educate yourself, people, know what you do and be rewarded!
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2020-02-13T08:00:00Z
Aurélien,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Seems completely understandable considering all the efforts. This post is a very teachable moment. Your analogies applied to learning were masterful.
Photography is a hobby for me. We’re fortunate to have so many photo editing options to fit any possible want or need. darktable has been as much fun to learn as using the camera.
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I fully agree, Aurélien.
Complex software can be learned, but software that is too simple to be useful cannot be learned - because there is nothing to learn.
Documentation is the solution for those who find a particular software difficult to learn.
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True, however software can often be more complex to use than it needs to be.
I like the KDE ideal, “simple by default, powerful when needed”.
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I think there should be an Expert or Advanced Mode (or whatever name) so that everyone who wants to make use of the wonderful power, complexity, cryptic naming, etc. can continue to do that and have access to everything. Then a Photographer or Normal Person Mode (or whatever name) that has a refined set of controls with usage and naming that conforms more closely to what almost all other successful photo editing software has evolved to after many years of careful thought and design and feedback from millions (tens of millions? hundreds of millions?) of users over many years. They all have product managers and others who help give direction and priority to the developers. Lightroom, ACDSee Pro, On1 Pro, Exposure X5, Corel (Bibble) Aftershot Pro, DxO Photolab, C1 Pro, Aperture, and others. That is my opinion.
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Oh hell no! Divergence in UI is not something that can be seen as positive. Especially overall. This might be adressed like denoise (profiled) module in darktable works - auto modes, allowing adjustments but working on non-auto sliders.
I can assure you that usually that’s not what happens 
Heh. Recently on reddit there was some user mentioning that darktable doesn’t follow established standards for UX regarding most basic things such as switching between images. Turns out - there isn’t one! to quote my reply from there:
plus regarding UI (again, mine):
Another remark:
It’s beauty in the eye of the beholder. And UI/UX is more of a process than recipe.
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Again, we miss the point here.
No matter what GUI you use, image processing is an expert thing. It’s optics, electronics, psychophysics and computer science. Little of what happens in there can be called “intuitive” and nothing is easy. Algorithms may be simple, but the concepts they temper with are not.
A simple UI on top of a complex process is a scam. That means some stuff gets decided behind your back (by hard presets or AI) or the processing algorithms have been made inaccurate to remove some parameters. It’s not “more refined” vs. “less refined” control, it’s “accurate colour science” vs. “sloppy colour science”. The only correct way to simplify a GUI is to remove features at all.
Successful software only have more people to teach you how to use their product and more users to sing their praise.
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And a hurtfull one at that - I’ve read cases of people with sort-of reversed analphabetism caused by simple UI. People affected by it couldn’t move past simple UI to complex one (additionally, most of those were kids).
Ah, the “Gnome” way
Yup. Nobody’s bitching about AutoCAD or SolidWorks being too hard UI/UX, people simply learn them.
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I’m confused. Doesn’t this just mean ‘people who can read’.
Bah. My bad. “People who used to be able to read, but now got limited by simple UI dependence and can’t get past it”. I wonder if there’s proper term for that.
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Ah. The audiobook generation.
As a preface: I am hugely grateful to your posts and discussions you initiate. Firstly because regardless of how and what, I think it’s really productive and helpful to focus on expressing arguments. Knowing your intentions and facts their based on, and acting on them is one thing, explaining them such that others can comprehend quite another. Secondly because I personally benefit a lot from bringing the topic closer to a “physical methodology”, simply because I am trained there and not that much in photography/color theory/… (I know I can’t neglect that either if I really want to get “it”). Don’t take my criticism as opposition, I am much more prone to express criticism towards people and subjects I find highly interesting and helpful.
Your statements are too black and white and using absolutes for my taste. I do have a hunch that’s mostly a rhetorical decision, nevertheless I can’t leave it unchallenged (probably in a not very rhetorically brilliant way):
How do you define “image processing”?
If you just take it literally, i.e. putting an image through a process, I am doing “image processing” when I take my mountaineering snapshot straight out of camera and rotating it to get a straight horizon. Is this an “expert process”?
In my view thinking in terms of “expert” is a fallacy in itself. There’s no such thing as a defining line between experts and non-experts. If you ever believe you are over it, and you know all you need to, you most definitely aren’t.
These statements contradict each other: Why should simple algorithms be able to apply to complex concepts, but a simple UI not?
There is no User Interface without thinking of the user. You are obviously free to design a UI for users that have a minimum level of knowledge on the concepts, but that doesn’t make a UI targeting users below that a scam. I do totally agree with
That just doesn’t make it a scam. Depending on your target audience defaults and abstractions are useful or detrimental. It entirely depends on your user’s knowledge and intent. There’s nothing scammy about designing an UI for an image processing program targeted at users that do not want to learn about the concepts in depth. You may not like that, and that’s perfectly fine. Just as it is fine to create a simplified UI for a simpler needs, it is fine to create a UI that tries to expose all the underlying concepts. One doesn’t exclude the other.
Without defining the target audience, you can’t fully judge a UI (obviously there are aspects of an UI that are independent).
I believe lots of the defensiveness comes from a often expressed attitude of users along the lines “but Adobe&Co do it that way”. That doesn’t deserve much more of an answer than “Yes, what’s your point?”. Then the ignorant come with the second line “they are the professional solution, what they do must be good”, which doesn’t deserve an answer at all.
And in my opinion “professional” is inherent in the problem: Professional image processors need to do as many projects that meet clients needs, and I have never heard a graphic artist complain about to high standards in clients needs, only about too low and too often changing standards. So a professional solution doesn’t need to be technically excellent, it needs to be streamlined: Get most done in the least amount of time. That’s not the focus of DT/RT as far as I see (and luckily so).
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Image processing, in this context, is taking raw garbage from a camera sensor and preparing it for display, acknowledging all the technical and psychophysical parameters, in order to match the visual memory of the scene you shot. Because sensor recordings definitely don’t match that at all.
The parameters to be taken into account are sensor metamerism, noise level, sensor to cone-response tristimulus matching, CFA patterns, dynamic range mapping, gamut mapping, medium to medium illuminant (chromatic) adaptation, plus all the optical flaws reversal (noise, moiré, hazing, CA, distortion, blur, etc.), and I forget many of them.
To account for these parameters, you have to understand them and very often make educated guesses to setup your corrections and adjustements, because most of the colour science we have is made of approximated relationships that are valid under certain hypotheses, and no software can automatically assess if the conditions of validity of the relationships are met for a particular image.
That’s what I call an expert thing : it requires training and experience. Just because whenever your image doesn’t meet the conditions of validity of the simplified relationships, you need an extra step of correction to “force bend” the image in such conditions.
You didn’t understand. Just because the algorithm is simple (say a couple of additions and multiplications) doesn’t mean that the quantities we are adding/multiplying represent something easy to understand (variance, chromaticity, integral of the spectral sensitivity along a spectrum, …). There is some level of abstraction to handle there. So, how do you expose these in UI ? You try to use non-scary words that will disallow users to google their actual meaning ?
Then, the problem is, in an image processing pipeline, while most of the algos are relatively simple (except for denoising, frequency splitting, deblurring and such), there are lots of them, each accounting for a particular parameter of your image. So, it’s a complex process, even if built from mostly simple bricks. Same question : how do you expose these controls in UI ?
Lightroom and Capture one have solved that : they don’t expose most of the hard stuff, and impose it for you. Problem : again, their colour science relies on approximations valid in a certain range. What do you do when you are out of this range ? You are locked out…
Except it doesn’t depend. The things that need to be done on your raw picture to prepare it for display are the same in any case. The colour science to do so is hard to understand, not 100% reliable (and often black magic), and also users may want to impose their visual preferences and style.
So the choice is between exposing all the params in GUI or saying users : “this soft is intended to give ok pictures in 80% of the use cases, but screw you if you fall under the remaining 20%”. The scam is software editiors pretend the choice is only about user control and ease of use. It’s not. The choice it whether you get screwed or not when the default params of the soft will fail.
If you find a better way, you are better than me. But so far, I only heard vague political statements about “what should be possible or done” from people who don’t have a clue about what is actually computed in the pipeline, and not a single actual “how to simplify without degrading image quality”.
I get it. GUI should be about users, users are not engineers, good UX is good…
Now, how do I expose the patch-wise covariance threshold between a mask and a guide in a user-friendly way ? How do I make an edge-aware wavelet spectrum decomposition UI intuitive ? How do I auto-tune a dynamic range mapping for every possible camera ever made and every possible image settings consistent at any scaling size ?
Once you look into the specifics, your GUI goodwill vanishes. It’s just a can of worms, and it’s easier to just give classes about how to use the complicated soft than trying to simplify it in a way that will probably only make it worse.
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It is a myth that Lightroom and Capture one are easy to use.
At least if you used to darktable you miss simple things in both of them. C1 UI feels overloaded as well. You can’t move sliders that far compared to darktable.
And if darktable is too complicated: What about Photoshop or Gimp? They must be unuseable.
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