Okay,
Another silly question.
In C1 there are sliders labelled clarity and structure. Lower left hand corner in the image below:
I find they are useful for “tightening” up an image for lack of a better term.
Is there an equivalent in ART?
thanks
chris
Hi @doobs,
Selecting an image in the browser means that you want to perform some operations on it. Opening it in the editor is only one of the available operations. Others include e.g. copying, moving, renaming, adding to the output queue, applying some profiles, etc. In fact, you can select multiple images for most of such operations. This is the logic behind the behaviour you see.
As others have said, this doesn’t sound normal. What kind of images are you working on? It takes a fraction of that time on my 8-year-old laptop…
Looks like a glitch, yes, but something that has to do with the interaction between the GUI library used by ART (i.e. GTK+) and Windows; in other words, not something that can be solved by ART I’m afraid.
This is a known weakness (of many) of ART I’m afraid.
Preferences->General->Layout->Editor Layout->Multiple editor tabs in own window mode
and then restart
You can use “texture boost / sharpening” and/or “local contrast” to emulate both. I don’t remember what clarity and structure do exactly in C1, but IIRC they act on different frequencies. For clarity, you can try “texture boost” with 0.2 strength and 0.5 detail and tweak from there. For structure, maybe raising the local contrast curve in the middle? (again sorry but I don’t remember what structure actually does)
HTH
Thank you,
As usual, very responsive.
Kudos
I forgot:
Besides what others wrote, many of the sliders have a global shortcut assigned to them: if you move the mouse wheel while a specific key is pressed, you can change the value of the slider even without moving the pointer over it. For example, hold ‘e’ and use the scroll wheel to change exposure. You can see the full list of such global shortcuts by pressing f1 in the editor, and you get this:
Thanks.
Ok more silly questions:
Can the shortcuts be changed?
If I edit (process) an image in ART and then close ART/image, the next time I open ART/image the history is gone. Is there a way of retaining the history?
Greatly appreciate everyone’s patience
I’m in central Louisiana and despite my mother’s side of family being from south Louisiana (Elton area) I couldn’t order coffee in French – or at least what passes for (‘proper’) French in Acadiana – if I had to. Good thing I don’t have to!! I’m apparently 'murcan-ized – I use a massive big-gulp coffee mug instead of those little tiny demitasse cups my Cajun relatives used. And I don’t like chicory (which is more of a NOLA thing anyway).
On my very middle-of-the-road / average Acer laptop (Ryzen 7 5700 CPU, 16 GB RAM and a cheesy little embedded GPU) a 24mp Canon CR3 raw typically loads and cleans up in about four seconds.
IME I’ve found the biggest ‘culprits’ for impacting processing times are sharpening, noise reduction and especially the Texture Boost / Sharpening (local edits) tool. No problem with how they work, it’s just what they do can be inherently resource-intensive (particularly TB/S with higher slider values). I usually find the right values for the image in question and then turn them off until I’m ready to export.
Nope.
Nope. Use Snapshots for that. That saves the current state of your editing into a snapshot. You can make as many as you like. Next time you open that photo, all your snapshots are there because they are written to the sidecar file (arp). But history, no.
No, sorry.
You can’t retain the full history, but you can save snapshots and those will be kept. Not quite the same thing, but maybe still useful?
Thanks.
I’m getting there.
For the time being I’ll prolly process in both C1 and ART until I’m more comfortable.
Honestly, ART is definitely less intuitive to me, but that’s me. ART is definitely more fiddly than C1.
But ART is not going anywhere, and I can’t in good faith assume C1 isn’t going to evaporate.
Greatly appreciate all the support.
Hello @doobs,
You have certainly chosen the open source raw converter that is the most intuitive to use. Perhaps you still need a little time to get used to ART.
No one can guarantee that ART will last longer than we will.
But there are completely different qualities here:
Look, you ask important questions here and some experts answer you quickly and knowledgeably. And, although you claim to be a beginner, even the creator of ART is making an effort to help you get to grips with the program. Personally, I think that’s more than great.
You can be sure that nobody here wants anything from you, especially not your money. Everyone here is trying to make sure that you enjoy ART, and a lot of people do!
I think Alberto’s support is worth more than anything else - provided the software works and you can achieve good results with it. Countless users can confirm that this is the case.
If you have any doubts, upload a raw file with the results you achieved with C1 as a Jpeg. Then some people will try to show you what you can achieve with ART. But please write what is important to you: tonal values, contrast, subtleties, sharpness or colors. So that it doesn’t degenerate into a competition of personal taste. You will then be offered .arp that you can apply to yourself to further develop the results.
Keep at it, it’s worth it, both in terms of photography and morale. You will soon realize that ART can make you very happy. That’s my personal experience.
micha
Most of the time, when you’re used to software and you try a new one, you have to forget the muscle memory you built while using the first program, and this takes a lot of time. Similar tools/filters will not be at the same place and you’ll find that their are not placed in the correct place in the new software. But if you really dedicate enough time to become accustomed to the new program, you’ll be fine. And if you go back to first one a long time later, you’ll find it less user friendly.
I used RT for a fairly long time in the past. When I tried DT, Lightroom, C1, or any other program, I just couldn’t get around and found that RT was the most intuitive of the bunch. Then I switched to ART since its beginnings, and now if I launch RT I feel lost.
As for me, it is even worse…
Whenever I use the same software, to apply some very medium advanced feature, getting back to it, after a long time, quite often, I don’t remember how to perform this same task even though, in the past, I was able to do so.
Currently, I record these steps on my computer (OBS studio, as software) in order to watch them later on. Yeah, it is a bit nuts 
My rule of thumb is: whenever you are an advanced user, stick with this software, because you are very likely to spend a lot of time in case you want to change it…
ART is my main toolbox as well, but I always kept an eye on the develpment of RT (I used that since v2.4). But since a year or so I noticed that many photos opened in RT look kind of splendid by default. By default I mean just hitting the auto-exposure button.
Two examples.
This one is ART by default.
This is RT by default.
Another one, ART on the left.
It’s probably just me, but I think the RT examples look oversaturated. Somewhere around a third of the way from the ART images to the RT images is probably the sweet spot.
If you like the more saturated and contrasty look, you can very easily create such a profile in ART and have it become the default profile for new images.
Yes of course I know how to do that in ART, Sébastien, but I still think that RT throws some color magic (by @jdc) to the image. As said, it doesn’t always work, depends on the photo.
Personally, for these 2 pictures, I prefer the less saturated image of ART: particularly the one with the sand-blue sky, which looks more natural to me…
This being said it is really a personal 100% questionable preference of mine.
If one takes a look at the Play Raw, on this forum, whenever an image is proposed to the users to being modified at will, the results are extremely different depending on the choices of the different users…
Back to the topic, in the past, I have read that the ART rendition of the image (before any retouching by the users) was considered better, compared to RT, because ART supports LibRaw.
At present, in the development branch of RT (5.11 upcoming release), LibRaw support is pretty much done.
Thank you Paul
When I open an image with the Neutral processing profile, the results look practically the same in both programs. The big difference is my personal preferences and not the software.
Can I please ask everybody to not “hijack” the thread and keep the topic on questions about ART? If you want to discuss more general topics about this vs that, habits, what is intuitive, what is knowledge, and so on, I think this would deserve its own thread in a different/more general category.
Thanks for the collaboration!
