I experienced a strange behavior. I opened an image for editing. I created a Color similarity mask in the Local Edit > Color/Tone Correction tool. I copied the mask to the clipboard and then pasted it into the other three tools (Smoothing, Local contrast, Texture Boost/Sharpening). You have copied the masks, the parameters of the Color similarity mask are the same, but the display of the mask differs in each device. It’s the same in the Smoothing tool, that’s fine. However, I didn’t get the same mask in the Local Contrast and Texture Boost/Sharpening tool. I didn’t set anything other than that, everything was at a default value.
Hi,
Yes that’s normal. It’s a consequence of the fact that the tools are applied at different stages in the pipeline. The mask is computed from the input image when the tool is called. As an extreme example, if you create a luminosity mask in colour/tone correction but then later set the slope to 0, the image turns black, so the luminosity mask applied in a later tool will be completely different.
What you want is (I think) what darktable calls “raster masks”, i.e. a way of “freezing” the mask and copying it pixel by pixel, instead of copying its parameters. I agree this could be useful sometimes, but unfortunately not implemented yet, sorry…
I didn’t modify anything after opening the image and investigated the “problem” by turning on only one device at a time in Local Editing (and I didn’t modify anything there either). This is how the above pictures were made. I was hoping that this would make the input image the same for all four devices, but unfortunately it is not.
I couldn’t think of darktable, but yes, that’s what I meant.
Well the major “offender” here is local contrast, because it uses a different image representation than the others (Lab vs linear RGB), and this has a non-negligible impact.
FWIW, in my experience however these differences in masks are hardly a major problem, given the quite different nature of the tools. I agree that having “raster masks” would be nice to have, but I still think that in practice you can live without them (or at least I can – and that’s why I didn’t implement them so far…)
