Watch Bruce William’s videos in his DT series episodes 13-16 and 39 all on masking but you’ll see all the variations on making shapes. Also search youtube for Boris Hajdukovic’s video series as he uses a lot of shape creating for his edits - and as you can see from his work on your photo, he’s pretty darn good at it.
No problem. Here is Bruce’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u
click on “videos” tab and all his videos are listed with episode numbers. 13,14,15,16 and 39 (and others) show how he creates and uses shapes for lots of different purposes.
But, don’t worry, in most cases it’s not a problem. It works even if the indicator looks weird.
As for feathering, tomorrow I will make another little video on how to control feathering and couple other things.
Each time you import images into darktable, for each image an xmp file is automatically created in the same folder where the images are located. Close darktable, delete (or rename) the xmp file that darktable automatically placed and copy mine there.
I spend yesterday, all the evening doing my retouching. It almost worked all of it. The video really helped. Thanks.
But in the end I used gimp 2.10 to finish some of the retouching, it was a lot more precise. 10 minutes of RT did cut a lot of the work that would have take me a good hour in gimp (I’m no expert in gimp, I just get my work done).
I see not having to use gimp in simpler situations, dog fur is much too difficult to control in RT.
That’s exactly what I’m doing too. I prepare the picture in darktable and do the rest in GIMP.
GIMP is actually my main tool for image processing.
That is the most important point. With time you learn to handle the tools better and better. The nice thing is, we have here an excellent collection of software with which we can do all tasks. You can simply install them, try them out and find out what’s best for your workflow.
That is one of the big advantages of free software.
I used GIMP’s resynthesizer plugin and removed leash and collar in a couple of minutes with a simple selection around the leash first then doing the collar. If you don’t like those couple of artifacts where the collar was, you can retouch those, but who except you is going to know what the fur under the collar looks like anyway?
Thanks for the info and will need to learn how to use the resynthesizer. The last time I look at it I got lost in the selection… Any recommended tutorial?