Hello
First of all, please excuse my bad English, moreover my health is very degraded (that’s a euphemism) and I will soon be 75 years old…
First of all I am a total autodidact, I never learned C++ or any other language, except for the rudiments of Fortan IV in 1970 in engineering school, I never needed to program throughout my career and it is in retirement that I set myself a challenge…
To come to “LA” and all the questions in this post, or elsewhere, why no layers, for no “clipping a la carte”, why no mask at the origin 2014… It is that there was no need. I got into photography in 2006 with a D200 and I found Capture NX2 and its U-points, I found the concept interesting and my idea was to do something similar, but in my way. that’s when I got the idea of the deltaE and the transitions.
Generally speaking, whether it’s for “LA” or other RT modules that I initiated, I didn’t copy on anything (or very few), when I do I quote the author, for example IPOL for “original Retinex” and the use of Laplacian, or some algorithms taken from ART to Alberto Griggio @agriggio , etc.
Moreover my code is very bad, fortunately there were corrections, improvements, optimizations brought by Ingo @heckflosse , @floessie , Lawrence37 and others…I would also like to thank all those who helped to test and improve different modules, especially @Wayne_Sutton , @Jade_NL , @XavAL , Sébastien @sguyader , Andy’s videos @Andy_Astbury1 ,paul matthisse , @arturoisilvia and others whose contribution I do not forget (excuse me, but it’s been now up to 10 years for some modules - Ciecam, wavelet, etc.)
Fortunately I had from 2018 or so, the skills of Pierre @Pandagrapher who improved things noticeably at the GUI level.
The various modules of LA were created, as the needs and my intuition. I pass you the not very pleasant remarks (it is still an euphemism) of some on “LA”, it was really necessary to believe in it to continue.
To continue the support, which I had at the beginning (which would have allowed shapes other than ellipses, and rectangle) left RT for another project, so I found myself without real GUI help especially for the rotation of shapes, polygons … and this is not limited to a GUI problem (the most difficult is the code for LA that follows).
To come to the masks, that I was asked to add (I think) in 2018, I was inspired by a module made by Alberto at the time the 3 curves L,C,H, everything else is my invention …
As for the layers, it may be a question of semantics, but each Rt-spot is the equivalent of a layer (the assimilation stops there) and you can stack as many as you want.
Of course for those who are used to Photoshop and Darktable, it’s another world…but it works sometimes less well or better.
Of course everything could be better, of course if there were no ego conflicts, of course if we could release 5.9 (imagine since 2015, the volume of work and code), everything would be better.
For my part I do not attach any importance to the work I have done, you can improve it, change it, as much as you want. If someone wants to improve this or that part, he is free to do so… (beware of the many interactions)
But in summary Rawtherapee is a very good product, at least equal to others, which currently suffers from a problem of publication (5.9) and communication, which gives it a bad reputation in the media.
When it comes to merging Darktable and Rawtherapee projects, it is a pure utopia, for various reasons…
Thanks for reading.
See also, for others reasons
SoftwareRawTherapee
jacques