I’ve tried all options for retouching: healing, cloning, fill and blur, with circle elipse and shapes. I even tried the brush once. This has taken up a lot of time so haven’t got around to testing with the wavelet tool yet. These are on the faces of people. Hideous artefacts every time except one instance: using the cloning tool with circle to remove spots or other small blemishes. But only on very small ones.
This is on Arch Linux updated weekly and has been happening for, IIRC, three weeks.
A thought to throw in for comments: I have not had any form of OpenCL installed until now. I did so last night and still need to configure it as it remains invisible to DT. But does it only speed up the processing in some modules? Am I correct in assuming it, OpenCL, should not have any effect upon the outputs themselves, hence its absence could not be a cause of my recent bad Retouch experience?
In case it’s of relevance, I’m using a desktop computer (midi-tower) with 32gB RAM and AMD Radeon Ryzen 5 5600G with, IIRC, 6gB but it may be 8.
BTW Retouch is a great tool. It is easy to get the wrong impression when something goes wrong but by trial and error I got used to finding the right tool within it for the appropriate job and until very recent days it has worked a treat.
Do you see the retouching artifacts in the preview only, or also in the exported image?
Am I correct in assuming it, OpenCL, should not have any effect upon the outputs themselves, hence could not be a cause of my recent bad Retouch experience?
It should not make a difference, but it can, in case of a faulty graphic card or a bad driver or or a screwup between libraries and drivers.
I’d try to switch from amdgpu to the radeon driver (or the other way). Disabling the 10bit mode might also be worth trying.
And stop overclocking the GPU, of course, in case you are doing it.
If I understand you correctly, openCL can’t be the cause of the problems you see as you didn’t have it installed until yesterday, and the problems started a few weeks ago…
Other than that, openCL should give the same results as the CPU path, as @UweOhse said.
Other than that, it would indeed be helpful to see a problematic file with xpm and perhaps a screenshot with the retouch module in use. I have seen some artifacts e.g. near borders, or in high-contrast areas with sharp separations. Usually I needed to adapt the shape or the source region
As the concensus appears to be that OpenCL is unlikely to be of help - future tense, we can’t expect much from an entity which for all intents and purposes does not exist in the past - I can leave that to one side for the time being.
A quick play with an image did show an improvement by using a smaller area than required with the clone and shape pair and the export to PDF looked reasonable too. A bit more work may well produce an acceptable outcome.
These are business portraits and were never intended for public release. I’ll ask the subjects in turn tomorrow if it is OK to post one here so you’ll see a modified head and shoulders including artefacts and screenshot of the first one who says yes. Let’s hope one does!
Hi Mike,
I thought of possible issues doing skin retouching. Here are some sample images of fixes and problems. The top image is a simple dark spot on the skin. Using the clone tool I get a very bad result because the source doesn’t match the target. However, if I use the healing options it doesn’t matter that the source and target are not perfect matches. It just works nicely because there is some sort of content aware happening. I nearly always use the healing option for skin repairs and in fact most repairs.
However, the healing option can stuff up when pasting near some detail as it reacts with the target area and produces artefacts. In this case the bottom image shows this young tribal girl’s face paint and how the healing option results in a blurred artefact because I am removing a dark spot right next to the face paint. But if I switch to the clone tool with minimal feathering (no feathering in fact), I can select an appropriate source to match the target and get a perfect result.
Just use the right tool for the right job. The retouch tool is great in DT and with 4.4 it even has a good response time.
Yes, I saw it but got sidetracked by a very serious family matter.
I did follow your example. It seems the healing tool now works where it used to be the one giving the artefacts, on my PC at least. The clone tool worked better then. Not tested fully yet, see below.
@UweOhse there does seem to be some difference between what appears in the darkroom, lighttable and exported (Image Viewer, not in DT) views but it is inconsistent. I haven’t had time to test fully yet as DT is too unstable to get very far with. That has been the case for a while but got worse since I installed OpenCL.
The instability seems to be caused by the OpenCL automation. DT stopped booting at all and I can now only start it from the CL and with the --disable-opencl flag. I found a very promising thread on the Arch Linux forum which may help me to sort it all out once I find the time.
- I can leave that to one side for the time being.