I just spent a bunch of time processing a raw file in RT. I then finished it up in GIMP.
Afterwards, I went to look at the raw file again in RT, and it opened with none of my edits included. Worse, it overwrote the sidecar file so if I ever want to go back and work on this, I will have to start from scratch. How do I avoid doing this again in the future?
I typically save RT’s edits as TIFs, then open in Gimp. I don’t have it set to save the sidecars along with the TIFs. I thought the sidecar next to the raw file would be enough.
Is there a difference if I right click the raw file, then say, “Open with RT” versus if I select it from RT’s file browser?
If you close a raw file, the current state of your edits is saved in a PP3 file. Whether the PP3 file ends up alongside the raw file or in the cache or both depends on your settings.
Since the settings are saved to PP3 when you close the raw file, you must have done something to cause the PP3 to be lost.
I keep my sidecar files, both pp3 and xmp, in git, with the raw files checked in using git-annex. This solution has been working well so far, as long as you’re diligent enough to check everything in.
I could have sworn I’ve had problems with RT overwriting my edits in the past, so I didn’t know what to make of it when you said “Since the settings are saved to PP3 when you close the raw file, you must have done something to cause the PP3 to be lost.”
It just happened again: from the file manager, I right clicked a raw file with the sidecar PP3 right there with it, then said “open in raw therapee” from the right-click menu. The file opened with none of my edits and with the default processing profile applied.
This time, though, I manually selected the processing profile by clicking the “load processing profile” in the upper right, choosing the PP3, and my edits came back.
This is in Kubuntu 17.10 with RT 5.4, by the way.
Now if I had just opened the file in RT, then closed it, I think it would have overwritten my older edits with the default profile.
So I think this is a serious UX error, since I have lost a lot of edits in the past to this behavior.
But at least now I know why my edits were disappearing.
Sorry to keep bumping this - I want to give additional info because I claimed a bug, and I don’t want people to waste time chasing it down.
Using the same image that I had to manually open the processing profile, I went back to look at it again, and RT kept my edits this time instead of applying the default profile. So it’s not repeating its behavior.
I thought maybe the PP3 was from an older version of RT, so I tried opening it on from my backup drive where I had not yet saved the updated PP3, and again, it opened with the old edits applied.
So I am not sure what is going on, but I do not know of a reliable way to get it to reproduce this behavior.
