I just merged the last major pull request I initiated (Selective Editing Color Appearance and Abstract Profile) into Dev. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
I’m going to summarize the major changes I’ve implemented since version 5.12. Of course, I wasn’t the only one making these changes. Thanks to everyone involved. I won’t discuss changes made by other developers; they’re free to highlight their contributions.
Several important changes have been made. I won’t go into detail, but I will only mention the new features and their likely consequences.
Capture Sharpening (CS) (developed in 2018 by Ingo and, in my opinion, an exceptional sharpening system) has been significantly improved. Two features have been added: one to allow (CS) to work with noisy images, and the other to reduce noise on flat areas while maintaining sharpening on structures.
Capture Deconvolution (in Selective Editing) is an evolution of Capture Sharpening, allowing it to process non-RAW files. It can also act as a new sharpening tool on a portion or the entire image, restoring sharpening to images after noise reduction.
Selective Editing > Denoise has been significantly improved by taking contrast masks into account.
Selective Editing > Blur now allows you to generate several types of blur, notably to isolate the main subject.
Abstract Profile has undergone significant changes, making it considerably more efficient, particularly for its role at the end of the process in a scene-referred workflow.
Selective Editing > Color Appearance (CAM16) has also undergone significant changes, including the addition of the ability to process negatives in ways other than the excellent Film Negative module. This was a user request, specifically the ability to adjust the gamma of each RGB channel. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to test its actual effectiveness.
Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch (GHS) has undergone significant changes to make it almost automatic, both for the dynamic determination of Black Point Linear (BP), White Point Linear (WP), and Symmetry Point (SP), as well as an evolution of the Inverse GHS mode. The key question is: “Is it a tone mapper?” Ideally, it would have worked in Raw mode, but colorimetry issues at that stage are virtually insurmountable. Hence its placement in Selective Editing, which operates immediately after the Working Profile and White Balance are set. This position doesn’t quite fit into the ‘Scene Referred’ concept, which aims to place these modules towards the end of the process. However, I fully stand by this placement for GHS; otherwise, the system simply doesn’t work. I’ve come up with the name ‘Pre-Tone-mapper’; if anyone has another suggestion, I’m all ears (for me GHS is sufficient).
The documentation hasn’t been forgotten. @paperdigits has done considerable work to evolve the old Rawpedia into Hugo. Many modifications have been made, particularly to address the points mentioned above. I hope it will be online soon.
All the changes made, especially to GHS and Abstract Profile, should allow for a different approach to image processing, a new workflow, a sort of “game changer”. I’ll come back to this in a later post. I’m not saying that the other processes are bad or less good, but I suggest you try something else.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for the Windows executables problem.
The fact that all these changes are now in the Dev environment will allow (Windows issues aside) for a consistent system to test and a larger panel of testers. Thank you in advance.
For a while now in the release builds repository only a debug release of windows RT has been listed. Can the site be set up to start offering a non-debug version again?
I don’t have much idea about how RawTherapee’s autobuild works on Github, but this autobuild works for me without any manual intervention with the .dll files.
I think the issue is which .yml file is chosen for the automatic build, “windows.yml” automatically take care of dependency issues, but “codeql.yml” probably aren’t doing that (at least that’s what I would think after reading the code from the 2 .yml files), the link above is built with windows.yml so it’s fine, but a codeql.yml build might not be the case, I would assume.
I’m also reading your new RawPedia articles and hope I can contribute to them soon .
As for the rest, the Windows executables, there are several problems. The ‘release’ executable in Dev doesn’t compile because a library for the Icelandic language is missing… But it compiles for Debug, It’s a mystery to me.
Just because the system is compiled doesn’t mean it works. Something is clearly missing between the compiled file and the executable: the link to the libraries necessary for Windows to run. This “broken” link (unless you can show me the circumstances under which it might work) depends either on Msys2/Mingw64, or on Microsoft, or both, or something else entirely?
Every day (or almost) I update Msys2 (pacman -Syu). Compilation goes smoothly, but execution, even from the Mingw64 command prompt, doesn’t work (I try ART and it’s the same problem).
Fortunately, I have Linux, which compiles and runs without any problems. I’m not saying it’s better or worse than Windows, but a study conducted a few years ago showed that approximately 60% of users were using Windows. We can’t ignore this fact, but my very limited knowledge of system computing doesn’t provide me with a solution.
And if someone more competent than me, and who speaks English, could move things forward, that would be great (solve the problem themselves, contact the Msys2/Mingw64 team, etc.). @Lawrence37 was handling these issues, but unfortunately he’s unavailable.
I’m not entirely sure what is going on, but the automatic build from Github Actions (link provided above, here again, download the “RawTherapee_7419merge_5.12-173-g45bf5d99b_win64_release” one) works, it has all the dependencies and can run on Windows, it does not prompt any error when I open the rawtherapee.exe in the zip file; whereas the automated build in pre-release lacks some .dlls and cannot run. My intention is to point to an alternative working dev build to people to test, and raise the point that the .yml stuff used in Github Actions may have something to do with missing .dlls.
Indeed, the last update I made, just to make sure everything was up to date, in PR 7419, works perfectly.
It’s a very curious phenomenon…
Nevertheless, it’s an alternative to try Windows with all its features.
Thank you, but I don’t understand why it works here and not elsewhere, nor does the compiled version?
So, but I have absolutely no idea why, use this link… Windows run… Link with windows
There are additional features awaiting development, but ignore them… A very curious phenomenon: I compared the DLLs between Msys2/mingW64/bin and those in the link… They are the same.
This is the latest version, which is the sum of all the major changes made since September 2024, including three large Pull Requests opened by me (and of course, other “smaller” ones for bugs). Each PR has been reviewed by several users and by Copilot. There’s a lot of code, a lot of modifications, a lot of changes.
To create the documentation with Hugo, I had to try a bit of everything…
Of course, nothing is exhaustive.
Therefore, the version in “Dev” or the Windows version with the link provided by @syyrmb corresponds to this sum of changes. This doesn’t mean that everything is perfect and that there are no bugs. The main changes are listed at the beginning of this thread.
Link to Windows executable - Pull Request 7419
To use the Windows version of the referenced PR as a “normal” version (without the modifications introduced by this PR), go to :
“Preferences > General > Define general complexity” and change ‘Essential tools’ to ‘All tools’. Of course, there’s no guarantee this will work; this PR has never been reviewed.
This is very complicated for me, given my limited English and computer skills, and the lack of up-to-date user documentation. Nevertheless, I will try to do something, to explain by example how to use these new features.
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