The truth about image editing

What people think an image editing software is:

What it really is:

What people think an image editing software does:

What an image editing software really does:
https://youtu.be/Y4W60wBKamg?t=1135

How people think they should learn image editing:

How they really should:
https://youtu.be/xYZOoM3tCrQ?t=30

How people think they should edit images:

How they really should:

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So we neee drivable pianos? I support that

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Or musical cars.

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I like the idea of someone driving beautifully. Not fast but beautiful and soulstirring driving :smiley:

Saying that I don’t own a car despite all sorts of letters on my licence.

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That would be cool, while you’re at it could you make it fly?

I can’t, but that guy might :

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Musical road - Wikipedia ???

Out-of-tune roads ?

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Not all photo editors ought to be six-manual organ consoles with thousands of stops…

You can achieve great results with four strings and a bow.

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Hm, to me Darktable often looks like it’s trying to be a car more than an instrument simply because I can’t use my Wacom tablet and raster masking with a brush in Darktable.
Lightroom gives much more artistic feeling in that regard and finer control.

In real-life, yes, because you have direct contact with the strings. In virtual-life, the only contact you have is provided through an interface, which can be enabling or disabling, so it’s more like remote playing four strings that are in another country. Therefore, anything not provided by the UI is unreachable.

Jackson Pollock did dripping by drilling holes in a can, pouring paint in that, and moving that apparatus over a medium laying on the ground. Drilling holes in a can is easy. Yet that’s an unusual way of painting.

I try to imagine what if Pollock was my age, born with digital, and doing mostly if not only digital because of affordable cost. How do you do a dripping equivalent in software ? Would he learn to code to program this filter himself ? Would he go to some software engineering firm, trying to get his project done, but then, how do you explain what dripping is to a team of engineers ? Would he have gave up entirely ?

Software is mostly an interface for tools that operate in virtuality. You can’t touch virtuality, even though the tool it contains only emulate reality in a less constrained framework.

That’s a technical (and driver) limitation rather than a design choice. It still lets you interpret your raw. Mixing non-destructive and rasterized workflow in the same app without putting your computer on its knees is very difficult (provided you want the whole to be reasonably real-time to emulate real-life drawing feedback).

Wacom tablets have excellent Linux support, mine included.

That’s too bad as that’s probably the only giant feature that DT still lacks from it’s competitors. Could the task of painting a raster mask be exported to some other app like Gimp or Krita and have a mask be imported back in Darktable?

No, they don’t. Some features are not wired, and getting input event from Wacom through Xorg is not reliable (right click emulation works when it wants). Add here the notorious lack of palm rejection for touch+pen tablet, that also applies to regular touchpads. On Linux, Wacom tablets are merely expensive mouses with pressure support.

darktable uses Gtk (on CPU) for GUI and CPU or GPU for pipeline processing. So GUI and pipeline have to live in completely different threads.

Connecting pipeline with GUI like that needs thread locks, where each thread waits for the other to complete certain tasks (aka lags), and memory copies between RAM and video RAM, which are the biggest bottleneck in OpenCL. By the way, the tone EQ in dt has that kind of interactive connection, and it’s the reason why there is no OpenCL kernel in there.

So that would require us to ditch Gtk and rewrite either darktable as a video game, where everything happens and stays in GPU (that’s what vkdt does, essentially) or as a text processor, where everything is closely tied to GUI/CPU (essentially what Krita and Gimp do, that’s slow as hell and doesn’t play nicely with non-destructive convolution filters).

The general rule of thumbs is this : if it was easy, it would have already been done.

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I have completely opposite experience, and thank heavens for that. I think I would throw my machine trough the window if I couldn’t get the tablet to work right b/c it is pretty pricey xD

Yeah, I know :disappointed_relieved:

Don’t threaten me with a good time!

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We can also take the middle road: a piano.

Organs need tons of manuals with different stops set for each manual because the keys are binary and incapable of expressiveness.

A piano exposes a shocking amount of tone control with far fewer control points, because each control is more versatile.

That’s a simplification.

Piano keys are hit with a controlled velocity and force, that alter the sound volume and timbre.

If you are to play a piano that lies in virtual reality that’s at least 2 GUI parameters on top of “which key to press”, “what pedal to press”, “how much the lid is open”, and “what you could possibly insert in your piano to modify its sound”.

That all falls-back to your hands, being incredibly complete tools capable of action and feedback at once, having built-in dampers and lovely variability, but only for hardware tasks, versus a virtual world where everything you do IRL without even thinking about it needs to be decomposed in elementary tasks and turned into as many parameters. So it’s back to step one. A virtual piano is already an organ.

This forum, its community and software is already a playground to me but I wouldn’t mind some dark crystal table fan fiction or tabletop fun.

In truth, image editing is different for different people depending on what your goals are and how much you want to learn and from whom or which resources. Expectation and experiences define your trajectory.

I like this one:

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Well then you’ll be able to spend quite a bit of time here then Button it. – Present&Correct