The problem with no releases....

Projects here do share notes due to friendliness and the open-source spirit, but combining feature-complete software in an intimate manner is not conducive to new developments. We can see that in the commercial world where more competition is almost always a good thing.

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Partial profiles seem to be buggy in general right now. I can’t seem to paste a partial profile that only consists of one tool (e.g. RGB curves or crop) without undoing all changes in the other tools. They all seem to switch back to neutral.

Of course that could be done, but the result will be something new and completely different.
but until now no one started actions on this so it’s facing the same issue: you need devs to do this.
There’s no lack of suggestions, there’s a lack on the doing side

I agree that it is easy for me to suggest and to expect others to just implement what is suggested. I wish I had the ability to code and actually contribute and not just suggest. Darktable and Rawtherapee are two great programs and I hope they both continue to get the support of generous developers and maintainers to keep these programs free to use.

Uli,
Have you considered the processing profile button?

https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Sidecar_Files_-_Processing_Profiles#Partial_Processing_Profiles_and_Fill_Modes

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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

Use Local Adjustment without multiple “Excluding Spots” when fine tuning local edits

SoftwareRawTherapee

jacques

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Ugh, of course that was the problem. Totally forgot about that one, thanks. I guess I just accepted that partial profiles are buggy at the moment and didn’t even try to look for solutions.

So it’s only in combination with local adjustments.

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@jdc, I am thankful for all the work that you have done and find LA great to work with. Although added features would be nice, I see no reason why I can’t complete my workflow with the current release as is.

Mike

Hello, continuation of my previous message.
As we can’t put more than 10 people “@”, I add some people, sorry to the others for my omissions, I know that you are numerous to have supported me

@Lawrence37 , @paulmatth , @afre , @Entropy512, @chaimav , @Thanatomanic @paperdigits @nosle , @ilias_giarimis , etc.
Jacques

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I am glad you have been encouraged. I do try my best to uplift people’s spirits here. :slight_smile:

Also keep in mind that different development teams may have very different views regarding certain aspects of the design.

That’s why ART now exists, for example - Alberto and the RT team often chat about things and pull code from each other, but Alberto also has vastly different views on certain features than the RT team does. (The first thing he did when creating ART was to remove certain features to simplify the UI and improve maintainability.)

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Isn’t ART built on LibRAW?

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That was one of Alberto’s major rearchitectures after the fork - removing RT’s heavily modified dcraw derivative and replacing it with libraw. I don’t know about more prominent RT contributors who have more say, but it is IMO one that I agree with Alberto on regarding the approach. I really don’t want to FORC3 myself to deal with Dave Coffin’s for loop macros any more when trying to track down camera-specific glitches. It’s something I’m thinking of looking into as a post-5.9 task.

If there was a situation where someone from the RT team vetoed an effort to replace the current stuff with libraw, I’m unaware of it.

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:laughing:

There was some discussion about moving away from dcraw (Replace dcraw with actively maintained raw decoding engine (e.g. LibRaw) · Issue #4462 · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub). Switching to LibRaw makes sense to me. It’s also based on dcraw and Alberto has already done the work to integrate it into ART. I can’t imagine the switch being more work than updating the current dcraw code in RawTherapee.

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Art doesn’t run very well on my Mac system, and some of the RT tools that were dropped were, in my opinion, very wrongly dropped!

But, opening up CR3 files for instance shows full exif due to Libraw - Libraw makes so much more sense in todays fast changing world of new sensors/cameras every 45 seconds!

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Yeah, I’ve briefly looked through Alberto’s work.

It’s one of the examples of why I’m not a fan of merging updates from mainline into a pull request vs. rebasing them - once merged, commits wind up interspersed in history with unrelated stuff, making it harder to find the relevant ones.

Bitbucket has relevant commits going back at least to 2/25/2021, but also a HUGE number of non-relevant commits. Identifying the relevant ones becomes extremely difficult.

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The trouble with developer releases is that they’re so strongly implied to be for, well, developers, and that users who aren’t developers should avoid them in favor of the last stable release. In fact, Rawpedia says

“Stable Releases - RawTherapee can be downloaded from our website or through your package manager. The latest release provides a stable version suitable for most users” (emphasis added)

and

“Development Builds - Use a development build if you want to test the newest features and latest changes, and if you are willing to risk potential buggy behavior and do not care that functionality may change between versions.”

To me as a non-developer user, that warning about developer builds screams “DANGER: Blinkenlights program! Fur die ‘Experten’ only! Handle with Builder’s Gloves! Avoid for your production work unless you are desperate, and maybe not even then!” So I stick to v5.8 that came out back in Feb 2020. I suspect that many other users or potential users are put off by this too.

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Development builds are where fixes get tested. Release builds contain the caught and uncaught bugs the developers have decided can be thusly tagged with a minor version number. You’re either testing bug fixes or catching new bugs. The ‘stability’ refers to the stability of the various features’ gui and application programming interfaces used by RT, not any relative lack of bugs compared with the dev branch. The only time I will ever run a release build is to test it for release, then I hop back on to the fix testing bandwagon.

True, yes… except when so much time passes between stable releases that the feature set of the dev release becomes a virtual necessity, or at least a strongly desired thing. I think that’s kind of the situation here. I’m not a pro, but dev RT is by far good enough for me to consider it ‘functionally stable’.

Here’s my take on 5.8 vs. 5.8 Dev.