Two questions I was wondering about and could not find documentation or other posts/discussions on.
What is the definition of “hardness” when applied to a DT mask (e.g. brush in any module, retouch shape), what does the hardness level actually control? as opposed to Opacity which is clear and intuitive to me. In practice it seems there is an interaction between ‘hardness’ and ‘opacity’ that seems to result in an ‘effective opacity’ that actually gets applied to the mask - if that’s the case then I don’t understand the point of having two parameters, sounds confusing.
The second question is about the Default Value for the opacity of new masks; I installed DT3 (RC2 and current master), and every time I create a mask (brush, shape/circle, or “Path”), the mask has 0% opacity, i.e. it doesn’t produce any effect. I believe in past releases, the initial opacity was 100%, I’m guessing other people will get confused as well. Is there a way to set the ‘default opacity’ for new mask shapes to 100% as it was before?
Had that issue by myself after upgrading to 3.0 (master). Fixed it by going up with the mousewheel while holding the CTRL-key.
Think that saved the default opacity of 100%, but I’m not sure about this since I don’t have an updated manual for dt 3.0
I don’t use dt. Hardness often has to do with how much the brush shape is applied. A soft brush would taper at the edges. And yes, starting at 0% opacity is weird.
Thanks @afre for the hint RE hardness, that makes sense and aligns with the ‘feathering’ (as some modules other than Retouch call it)
@pphoto I’m using this too, however in my case the opacity is not “remembered”: I set it to 100% while adding a new shape, and then when I add a second shape DT goes back to 0% again, it’s kind of annoying. I tried setting opacity to 100% both while initially adding the shape, and also after the shape is added. In both cases, new shapes get 0% again by default.
On my system 100% opacity is default, but unfortunately I can’t say what I’ve done to enable this.
Maybe there is some information in the manual 3.0 about that when it’s released.
Continued testing again with DT3 final /retouch module, and after trial and error now opacity got set at 100% and survives new shape creation and DT restarts; it can be decreased on a per-shape basis. Unfortunately I didn’t notice what was the combination that triggered DT to remember the opacity value and keep it for new shapes. I guess I hit that combination twice now, one go to 0% and now back to 100%.
@pphoto did you notice in Retouch module that “continuous shape insertion mode” is on by default now, is that the case for you too? meaning that when you insert a shape you can continue inserting shapes without having to reselect the shape type. Before, this mode had to be triggered with Ctrl+click on the desired shape. I suspect this one is a bug b/c it can get confusing specially for people not familiar with DT’s antics
