First of, my cordial thanks to RawTherapee’s developers for such a great program (which in fact allows me to achieve the visual results of photography the way that I prefer by not defaulting to image over-processing like commercial Raw developers).
In my daily use of RawTherapee, a main stumbling block is that
(a) the crop function and the display of guides are interlocked (i.e. one can’t see composition guides without activating the crop function);
(b) the crop function is not context-aware of the (portrait or landscape) orientation of a picture.
I.e. when activating the crop function with Rule of Thirds guides for a landscape-orientation image, without actually cropping the image, and copying those settings to a portrait-orientation picture, the latter picture will get vertically cropped.
I see two possible solutions:
(a) Decouple of the display of composition guides from the crop function (for example, by moving it from the crop dialogue to a button next to the clipped highlight indication button above the image window).
(b) Make the crop function context-/orientation aware, so that for example a 60% vertical crop and 90% horizontal crop of a landscape-orientation image turns into 60% horizontal crop and 90% vertical crop of a portrait-orientation image. (This is how, for example, DxO PhotoLab behaves.)
Perhaps even combine (a) and (b)…
I’m not sure this is a good idea. This would entail changing the aspect ratio if you copy from a 3:2 image to a 4:3 (m43 or medium format digital) image, and I think that’s not intended behavior.
In Filmulator I explicitly made the aspect ratio and orientation stay the same.
Then maybe it’s a better idea to decouple guides from the crop function.
At the moment, it’s simply not possible to turn on composition guides in RawTherapee for all images in a project without messing up the crop of some of them…
They’re useful for checking whether you want to apply crop in the first place - whether or not things can be improved in the composition by cropping. Now it’s the other way around: you need to activate the crop function first even when you’re not sure whether crop adjustments will be necessary at all.
Plus, when you pre-activate the crop function on all images to see the composition guides by default, this will mess up the crop of at least all pictures in one of the two possible orientations portrait/landscape.
If you apply that pp3 to one image and then copy the crop parameters to an image with a different orientation, the latter image gets cropped again - same problem as initially described.
EDIT: What I see is that RawTherapee automatically adds X, Y, W and H as static parameters in the “Crop” section of the PP3 file, based on the geometry of the image to which it was applied. This is why copying those crop parameters to an image with a different orientation fails.
Here’s the respective section from the PP3 file:
[Crop]
Enabled=true
X=0
Y=0
W=4000
H=6000
FixedRatio=true
Ratio=As Image
Orientation=As Image
Guide=Harmonic means
If you’re working with dynamic profiles, you could either hard-code the crop section into them (but then lose the flexibility of changing the type of guide), or you save it as a separate profile, which means that every new project will involve manually applying the cropguide pp3 as a partial application of a processing profile with only “crop” checked. This is a rather tedious workflow on the long run.
On top of that, there’s no easy way of switching the type of crop guide with this workflow. You could theoretically save a number of different customized cropguide pp3s (one for Rule of Thirds, one for Harmonic Means, one for Rule of Diagonals etc.), but then switching the guide view in the middle of a project becomes a rather risky/error-prone process once you’ve already applied custom manual crops to a number of images and risk destroying those crops by globally applying a different cropguide pp3…
So, personally, I just think that guide overlay display and cropping are two different functions and interface semantics, and that their integration - while elegant if you only need guides as a temporary help while cropping - creates all kind of practical issues.
Thanks so much, this solved the issue! Indeed, applying the guides via the batch editor works as I had intended (and is non-destructive for the other crop settings). Hadn’t thought of that!
That’s the problem I reported more than two years ago. I use a micro 4/3 camera so I often need to crop the image to get what I see in the viewfinder: the difference can be rather large.
I created a lot of pp3 files with the crop needed by various focal lengths and lenses, and I use dynamic profiles to automatically enable the correct one.
The crops are in landscape orientation so if I open a portrait image the crop is wrong: I get an almost square crop at the top of the image.
I opened an issue but at the moment it is still open.
