My take on RawTherapee

Software
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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:

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Thank you, File Browser is working again :slight_smile:
I also didn’t want to say you should copy local editing from one of the other applications. It was meant as a suggestion on how to improve things.

RE curve based mask: Is local editing on a seperate path in the whole pipeline or is it in the same pipe after “color” tools? Will the mask also be changed when I adjust global exposure, white balance or HSL Equalizer while already having a mask curve adjusted?

An issue that I had from the first time I played with ART: Orientation of jpegs isn’t correct. Portrait orientation is ignored in both File Browser and Editor.
Another issue is with moving the image on the canvas. The low-res image is shifted making it hard to properly align for the high-res version. It extends the borders.
Short video (also showing JPEG orientation issue):
https://youtu.be/1RoCfJ0NQXE

BTW.: Would you prefer an issue on your REPO instead of keeping them stack up here? As you say it currently is under heavy development and probably you already know about these things…

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It’s only one pipeline, there’s no “local editing” concept per se. There are different tools, in different positions in the pipeline, and some of them support masks. They are grouped together in the UI, but that’s it.

Will the mask also be changed when I adjust global exposure, white balance or HSL Equalizer while already having a mask curve adjusted?

those three tools come before any local editing, so yes, they will change the masks. The rule of thumb is global edits first, local edits at the end. Of course that’s not always possible, but then you have to be prepared to tweak the masks.

Thanks for reporting, and don’t assume these are known bugs :slight_smile: They might be, but that’s not the norm. On any case, it’s better to report twice than never… and yes, if possible I’d prefer bug reports in the bug tracker, thanks!

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Can you send me a sample please? thanks!

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@agriggio Can you briefly explain the use cases for Log encoding and Tone equalizer?
Thanks for your work.

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The tone equalizer is based on an early version of the one of @anon41087856 (see https://discuss.pixls.us/t/a-tone-equalizer-in-darktable), with some tweaks. Essentially it’s a parametric tone curve, but it operates in scene-referred space (meaning no clipping, unbounded data), and happens much earlier in the pipeline than the usual tone curves. It gives you a way of controlling the tonal balance of the image. I use it very often personally.
Log encoding is a way of mapping from scene-referred to display-referred, using the ACES formula that you can find at GitHub - ampas/aces-dev: AMPAS Academy Color Encoding System Developer Resources (and which has been discussed extensively here as well), plus a re-linearization afterwards. You can view it as a “poor man”'s filmic, covering only the basics, without the magic of the desaturation and tone curves, which in ART you have to do by hand with the curves in the tone curve tool (this is by design). You can view this as an alternative to the dynamic range compression tool if you want (though nothing prevents you from using both). Personally, I like the output of dynamic range compression better most of the time, but there are situations in which log encoding is useful and works pretty well.
For both tools, the “detail” slider tries to preserve the local contrast. If abused, it can introduce halos. If that happens, move the slider to the left until the halos go away (or find the sweet spot between artifacts and detail preservation…)

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Thanks for the information. I think I really need to learn and understand that scene-referred / display-referred thing!

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Well this was bound to happen I guess. It saddens me a little, although I can not blame you for doing it. I do hope that the RawTherapee team ends up implementing the local adjustment tool sometime. Thanks again for the great work and the effort in making the dream of local adjustments in RT a relity! :slight_smile: you rock!

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Bug report including a JPEG file is here:
https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art/issues/4/ooc-jpeg-portrait-orientation-ignored

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ART_master_0.1-30-g7844e4667_W64_SSE4_190913.zip
uploaded at
https://keybase.pub/gaaned92/ART-W64NightlyBuilds

@agriggio

The crop tool is fully satisfying.

There remains the minor bug already detected by @ff2000 that was, I think already present in RT :
if you select theme-based, the whole uncropped image is displayed. I think it should only display the cropped zone.
Same with all themes.

edit: could you suppress the autofill tool or at least deactivate it by default.

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hmmm…it works for me with gtk 3.18. I’ll try to test with a more recent version, maybe it’s related to that.

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IMO no. Load Neutral Profile, zoom in, activate “Transform → Crop” module and there click “Select”. You are left with a hand cursor (move selection) and no way to actually select the crop. I think there really are use cases (as also noted in my previous post) to show the full image, like this.

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I think you can do this with a custom default profile, though I have to double check

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this is not the intended behaviour, seems like a bug. I’ll investigate.

fyi, now activating the crop tool will zoom out only if you are in “zoom fit” mode. if you are zoomed in, the level is preserved. again, if that’s not the case, it’s another glitch that will eventually go away (if properly reported :slight_smile:

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I noticed this case but it did not bothered me.
Yes Once you activate the crop tool, you have to activate select.
Then if no crop zone is defined, as it is the case here, one should be able to draw the initial zone. instead it is defined as the boundary of full image.

To draw the crop zone:
after zooming don’t activate the crop tool. directly select . Then you can draw the zone. the tool becomes active.

If you reset, the zone definition is not deleted (no zone defined) but it becomes the full image.

So the initial state of the crop tool should be “no zone defined” and the reset should come back to this state. In this initial state, of course select is ON. This will permit to draw a new zone.

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I am sure there always is a zone defined as soon as the crop module is activated. It’s just that currently the Guide Type is only drawn when you are in “Edit crop zone” mode. No idea if it is intentional or a glitch, but I think the Guide should be visible as long as the “Crop” module has input focus.
And IMO every option the GUI offers should be usable without the user feeling “stuck”. If I have to use the tool button “Crop selection” instead of enabling “Crop” module and clicking “Select” I can entirely get rid of the Select button.

Finally I hope Agriggio finds his peace with the crop tool, there for sure are better ways to spend the time on :slight_smile:

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this won’t happen. as for the rest, I’ll take a look to see if they are bugs. I’m still not sure I understood exactly what you are describing…

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If you select neutral profile, the crop tool is reset and deactivated. Then when you activate the crop tool, the initial zone is defined as the entire image. Same if you reset.
You are then not able to draw a zone, but only modify it after a “select”.

if you select a guide type, it is displayed (when in select mode of course)

and

I fear that for the crop tool you need two actions, whatever they are named and done ( activate and select, activate and collapsed:expanded) to define 4 states:
deactivated: no action of the tool, full image displayed
activated and selected : full image is displayed, you can define, modify the zone, you can change the guides. The zone limits and guides are displayed
activated and deselected: cropped zone only is displayed. no zone limit of course, no guide, no possibility to change the crop.

if you deactivate, the crop definition are kept.
if you change profile or reset, crop definition is suppressed. if you click activate and select (or select which activates the tool) , you have to draw a new zone.

agreed