I’ve been using RawTherapee for a few days now, and I really enjoy this software. However, there’s one thing I’d like to ask about: tonal width.
I’ve searched for information in Rawpeida, and it says that tonal width is the range of tones affected by the highlights slider or the shadows slider*. However, I feel like something isn’t quite right.
Firstly, when I increase the highlights tonal width, the area affected by the highlights slider becomes narrower, which seems to be the opposite of the explanation. But when I increase the shadows tonal width, the affected area becomes wider, which matches the explanation.
I understand it’s not really important as long as I can still use it, but I just want to understand why it’s like that, or if it’s perhaps a minor programming error.
Reading the pull request and this comment in particular, I think it is behaving as intended. The name “tonal width” may be somewhat misleading. They do affect the tonal width, but they directly change the adjustable end of the tonal range. The shadow range goes from black to the value of the adjuster. The highlight range goes from the value of the adjuster to white.
It might be worth testing on a gray ramp…Following your comment I pulled up an image and it didn’t seem to work that way on the image but a gray ramp might be a more robust test.
EDIT…seems fine using a gray ramp… works as expected…
That makes sense, but i think the interface is misleading. Both of the sliders (for “highlights tonal width” and “shadows tonal width”) show a blue bar starting at the left and extending to the selector. The further to the right the selector is, the longer the blue bar; the longer the blue bar, the greater the tonal width of the shadows or highlights is suggested. Which is true for shadows, but not for highlights.
The interface could be improved by having the blue bar start on the right side for highlights, so the blue bar would increase in size when you slide the selector to the left. That would more accurately capture the effect of the slider.
