My take on RawTherapee

Software
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@heckflosse Thanks for the tip. I made preliminary test with jemalloc on RT.
I did not made precise time measures, but effectively the gain is not really noticeable on my use cases.

Perhaps with very big images, huge image directories and complex processing, it can bring some improvement.
I will continue test on ART.

@agriggio
I made some trials with your local editing with nice results.

I have some questions:

  • Why not define first the mask and then apply the different editing tools on the selected region?
  • What is the reason why “brightness, contrast, saturation” is not present in the local edition tools? Perhaps I missed the way to do that in the local editing.
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Hi,

I like to keep things modular, especially since the tools are applied at different points in the pipeline, so it makes more sense (to me) to define the mask specifically for each of them.

saturation is there. Brightness and contrast are defined differently (and in some cases vaguely) depending on whether you are operating in “scene” or display referred space. Now, without opening that can of worms :slight_smile: I’ll just say that I found the slope/offset/power sliders adequate enough for my needs

P.S: btw, I’ve tagged the current head with 0.1 as you requested. I’ve also deleted all the RT tags from the ART repo to avoid confusion

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but, thinking about this a bit more, I might add also a divide slider, which should let you manipulate contrast more easily… I’ll do some experiments

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So, I’ve just added a “pivot” slider to the Color Correction module. The formula is now the following: y = (\frac{x \cdot slope + offset}{pivot})^{power} \cdot pivot, which allows you to control both brightness and contrast easily:

  • brightness is x \cdot slope
  • contrast is (\frac{x}{pivot})^{power} \cdot pivot, where pivot is typically around the middle gray point (so about 0.18 assuming your input tonal range is in [0,1])

Let me know how that works!

3 Likes
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Formulas are very helpful to understand what is happening.
As I never used the color correction module in RT, I have to experiment to become more efficient with this tool.
The use of the four sliders is not straightforward for me as they interact. Its the drawback of a very versatile tool.
Effectively it is possible to control brighness and contrast.
Thanks

https://keybase.pub/gaaned92/ART-W64NightlyBuilds/ART_alberto-dev_0.1-8-g23b139b25_W64_SSE4_190908.zip
uploaded

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@agriggio @gaaned92 I have put in place the automated win64 build for ART, first package is available here: Release Continuous build · aferrero2707/art-win64 · GitHub

I will now prepare the same for the Linux AppImages.

Took a bit more than expected, but the similarities with RT are such that I expect the package to work out-of-the-box.

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a quick win10 64bit test worked fine - thanks

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Thanks a lot! Really appreciated. FYI, I have cleaned up the ART repo a little bit, and in the process I’ve renamed the main branch from alberto-dev to master. I suppose this matters for the automated builds.

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ART_master_0.1-26-gaad5e9fcb_W64_SSE4_190913.zip
uploaded at
https://keybase.pub/gaaned92/ART-W64NightlyBuilds

I enjoy the automatic perspective correction plus autocrop

Screen-2019-09-12_19-31-46
Screen-2019-09-12_19-31-461007×816 80.8 KB

There are still glitches when deactivating the crop tool. I will report if you need.
the cursor stays as in crop tool for modifying crop zone.

1 Like
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please do. I am changing the crop ui, so glitches are expected for a while… the sooner they are discovered, the better :slight_smile:

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There was a lot of discussion about the crop tool.
What I would like:

If crop tool is activated:

  • if tool GUI is expanded, the crop region is displayed. it can be set, reset, modified.
  • if tool GUI is reduced, then only crop region is shown. it cannot be modified

glitches with master_0.1-21-g9a05a02d9

  • perspective correction activated and autocrop selected. crop tool is activated but the crop zone is not shown.

  • rotate is deactivated but there was a rotation applied by the perspective correction. if you select straight line, the rotation cursor appears and effective rotation will activate the tool. I don’t like that I prefer first activate the tool the select straight line. If you click the hand tool yo go back to normal cursor.

  • To show the crop zone it needs to click on crop/select and put the cursor inside the display zone. And the zoom is reset.
    A hand cursor appears to move the crop, but it is not the hand tool!

  • To move the canvas, you have to click on the hand tool but then the crop zone disappears! and the zoom is reset (I don’t know to what)

Now imagine that I want to zoom for instance at 200% to adjust the crop zone. It is only possible by using the navigator panel

Hope I was clear :flushed:

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did you try the current art behaviour? it’s essentially like that, but instead of reacting to expanding/collapsing the tool, it depends on whether you select/deselect the crop tool in the toolbar

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  • yes with last build master_0.1-21-g9a05a02d9

  • It is essentially the behavior described above and the complete canvas is displayed when deselecting the crop tool. That would be better that only the crop zone be displayed without changing the zoom when deselecting the tool.
    The only possibility to deselectthe crop tool is to select an other tool.
    the behavior of the crop tool in the toolbar should be the same as the select button in the crop GUI.

  • the activation of crop tool or hand tool reset the zoom.

  • What is surprising is that the cursor of the hand tool is a cross and the cursor of the crop tool is a hand!

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I (respectfully) disagree :slight_smile:

in what sense are they different? can you elaborate?

this is by design.

the cursor of the crop tool is a crop, when you are outside of the crop area. it becomes a hand inside, to show that you can drag it around. I agree though that this can be confusing, I will think about something…

thanks for the feedback! :+1:

1 Like
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I should also add that you can still move and resize the crop without changing the zoom level: just use shift+drag inside the crop area for moving, and ctrl+drag over the edges for resizing

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I respectfully disagree also.

When the crop is done to taste, when you deselect the crop tool, the only thing you want to see is the cropped zone. It becomes the new image. all things external to this zone is useless and disturbing.

So what is the way to see only the cropped zone?

I thought as you referenced only the select in the tool bar that you were going to give an other function to the crop/select button.

In my opinion, defective design.

Yes I know. bad trick.
Either the crop tool is selected and you can modify the crop zone or it is selected and active and you see only the cropped zone. That is more understandable.

  • Why crop tool is not selected when using auto crop?

That is my opinion but I can accomodate of other solution.

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I understand the rationale for showing the whole image when selecting the crop. A crop is something that affects the whole image.
On the other hand the crop also affects details at the border of the crop: I do want to crop out disturbing elements but keep things I like. I sometimes move the border just by 1-2 pixels :wink: And that currently is difficult as I can’t pan the image in crop mode (moves the selection) and selecting the crop tool while zoomed into the area of interest ART zooms out again. I can imagine a solution: If no crop is selected yet selecting the crop tool zooms out automatically to select an initial (rough) crop. If the tool is selected while already a crop is active keep the zoom level. Probably we want to auto-zoom out in other situations like when the user selects a different crop ratio - not easy to judge when zoomed in.

BTW @gaaned92 deselecting a tool can be done by mouse right-button-click somewhere in the image. That seems to automatically zoom to the cropped area.

One bug though: Zooming out reveals the whole image when I select “background color of the preview: theme based (Shortcut: 9)” instead of painting a semi-translucent mask.

And one last thing: RawTherapee has an (inactive?) branch “rawcrop” that IMO is supposed to really crop the image so that further editing only is done with the cropped pixels instead of the whole image. Could you have a look if you can integrate that?

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Some other things:
There currently seems to be a bug in File Browser: I can’t select an image. Yesterday that still was possible. have to open images via cmdline.

As you already changed the pipeline and especially became incompatible to RawTherapee: Could you try to allow duplicating tools? One drawback with RTs Favorites tab is that as soon as you add a tool as favorite it gets removed from its original position. Keeping it in the original position seems to be impossible with current RT code. Also a real duplication (new instance) like in darktable (including masks for each tool) would be awesome.

Local edits: I don’t understand why there needs to be a completely new set of tools, it’s the same with RTs newlocallab branch. What newlocallab IMO does better than art: editing is mask-based, I can use several tools for one mask. In ART each tool can have several masks for different editing on different regions. The problem is that I can’t share masks. I often change toning, contrast, brightness, saturation, local contrast, sharpening, … for one area. I have to draw the mask again and again for each tool.
Darktable allows to reuse already existing masks. I can simply select the mask I drew for “basic adjustments” in “local contrast”. If a mask manager is too much for you a simple “copy mask” and “paste mask” shouldn’t be too hard but usable, at least for now.
Lightroom uses a similar approach as newlocallab with the difference that it uses the whole set of globally available adjusters for local editing. I really like that.

Finally: what did you do to the contrast threshold in sharpening?!? In RT when I load high(er) ISO shots dialing up the threshold to not sharpen background noise masks out all the details of the bird, sharpening only the outline. With ART I finally can mask out all the background noise while keeping in all the detail of the subject for sharpening. No idea how you did that but it is AWESOME! :+1: :ok_hand: :heart: (can’t show screenshots as the images are on another PC)

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Hi, thanks for the detailed feedback!

I think we are miscommunicating… this is exactly what is supposed to happen with the new interface. If that’s not the case, it’s probably a bug. I’ll try posting a short video later to show what I mean.

I am far from an expert in human-computer interaction, so I welcome suggestions. Can you elaborate on why you think it’s bad?

Ok, if people find it confusing this is certainly something that can change.

This was one of the glitches I mentioned yesterday. Thanks for spotting it! Should be fixed now.

Yes, that was my line of thinking.

I have fixed this, now if you hold “Shift” you can pan around when in crop mode. (I didn’t push yet, as I’m working on some more fixes).

However, if there is a large consensus that crop mode should preserve the current zoom, I can definitely consider that behaviour.

I’ll take a look, thanks! As I wrote yesterday, you have to be a bit patient, there will definitely be some glitches in this for a (hopefully little) while.

To be honest, I have other things that I consider more interesting to try first.

This was really a big oversight, sorry about that! I already pushed a fix. Let me know if that doesn’t work.

I can understand all this, but let me be clear (at the risk of being a bit rude – sorry in advance, no offence meant): ART is “My take on RawTherapee”, not darktable, not Lightroom, not RT with locallab. I am totally open to specific suggestions about how to make it better, but I’m not very excited about suggestions on how to make it a “clone” of something else.
Regarding the specific point of rearranging the pipeline/putting masks everywhere/etc. It can certainly be done, but the amount of work would not be small. It would mean working on this full time, or taking forever to complete. Neither of the options interests me, sorry.

There’s a copy/paste for area masks:
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Copying/pasting the curve-based masks makes less sense, because the same curve will affect the image in different ways depending on the position of the tool in the pipeline. That said, you can still copy/paste the individual curves if you want to.

Thanks again for all the comments! I will follow up later with more news on the crop UI. If I forgot to reply to some specific question, sorry in advance, and just let me know.

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Yep, film grain would be a wonderful addition to RT. I wouldn’t need 2 editors for most of my workflow…
Someone please do it! Ill buy a beer! :slight_smile: