Personal view of a beginner-level user: I am not asking for an ‘easy’ interface: I’d like easier help! When I run to the manual, it is practical information that I want, not science.
Being FOSS, this is probably up to the community to provide, and the internet already provides quite a lot of help.
If I understand you correctly, the concept sort of exists already in the Local Adjustments tab (in dev). You can add tools (modules) to an RT-spot at will and set each tool to one of three levels of complexity: Basic, Standard & Advanced. The default complexity level is set in the Preferences module but it can be changed on a per-module basis as you are editing.
If ACR gives you exactly what you want, why not just use that? Pick the right tool for you.
I think you’re correct in that the “single” slider solution probably will not come to RT, as nobody is really interested in developing a LR/ACR clone.
Is there a link that describes this?
I believe that RT could do RAW processing better than ACR/LR, even with single slider modules.
I like this idea as a good compromise between immediately exposing all the (advanced) options and only having simple magical sliders.
This is true for nearly all tools in any piece of software: if you want to use it, you have find it and enable it. I will concede that it can be awkward to have to manually enable a tool before you see the effect of the sliders. I have put a request to change this in the GitHub tracker a while ago, but it hasn’t gotten any traction so far.
Agreed that a GUI is in desperate need: GUI for adding tools to Favorites tab · Issue #5256 · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub
Amen to this. RawTherapee does not pretend to want to be a replacement for ACR. It is a very different piece of software, with similar goals, but taking a very different approach. Consider the pro’s and con’s of both RT and ACR: if the balance tips to either one, it may be better for you to leave the other piece of software alone.
More in general though, speaking as one of the current devs of RT (but a recent one), I believe we try to provide a good experience for anyone who wants to develop RAW files. If you value high speed, high quality, high flexibility in choosing your own approach to processing, extensive (though sometimes technical) documentation and definitely some state-of-the-art original ideas implemented in a fully open-source and exposed fashion, then you’re at the right address. It takes some willingness to learn, there are definitely a lot of idiosyncrasies, RT may not have too many automagical sliders, but that’s the point: we are constantly in development and we want you to be in control.
I do recognize the flip-side of this. If you do put in effort to learn, you still might get frustrated either because you find no good resources to learn, or things are still confusing you even after experimenting, or even after learning how to use a tool, you find the experience excruciatingly annoying, or actually any other reason you would rather uninstall the software.
If so, never fear, the devs are here 
There are multiple ways to approach this, in descending order of desirability:
Bottom line: I think the current thread is doing a nice job to explain that there is a need for a simpler interface to the many tools in RawTherapee. It can definitely be done. Please keep the suggestions coming as to how that should work, and how that could help you speed up your processing pipeline.
P.S. @nullnull @stuntflyer do you know about processing profiles in RT? A preset can often take away a lot of the pain of having to find different settings on different tabs. You can even setup dynamic profiles that apply different presets based on the properties of your photo (e.g. different noise reduction levels for shots taken at different ISO’s).
Thanks for your open minded response. .Yes, I use processing profiles all the time and they go a long way towards completion of the edits.
That’s good to hear as I was hesitant to post the subject for fear that my suggestions would be opposed intensely.
It’s briefly mentioned in the introduction to Local Adjustments in Rawpedia but that’s all.
Hmm, how difficult for me (I’m experienced professionally in java, c#, python, but c++ only a little, no previous experience in rawtherapee development) it would be to implement this feature ? I’m not commiting yet to do it, but just wondering.
Intuition is that it is not completely rewrite of all parts - just mangling with the gui code and adding another tab (plenty of copy/paste and edit) which make changes in other tabs.
I wonder how many users feels this way. I myself indeed use RawTherapee as an ACR/LR replacement. I just made a poll in another topic to ask users in the forum if they use RT as an ACR/LR replacement and I’m curious what will be the feedback from the community.
It does not of course prove anything, but maybe there are more people using RT this way.
Keep in mind that using RT as an ACR replacement is distinct from replacing ACR with RT. RT wasn’t written with the former in mind. It’s its own software, with its own ways.
Folks come here, refugees from the Adobe subscription hellscape, looking for doing things the ways with which they became familiar in those products. Well, my limited experience with those products is that they are build to shield photographers from the things I feel they really need to understand, the real dynamics of tone and color. Well, RT is going to be harder in that respect, as it requires you to know a bit more about tone and color in digital image processing, but clearing that hurdle will leave you more informed about that.
Don’t get me wrong, I feel there’s a viable purpose for doing things the way LR and ACR do in terms of productivity, especially in a professional situation. Thing is, when one encounters one of the various corner cases in a challenging image and the oh-so-comforting visceral slider responses don’t satisfy…
BTW, I self-taught C/C++ right after learning Java, and I think your C# familiarity will also help. Once you’ve learned one or two imperative programming languages, the rest look strikingly similar. Especially in the C syntax family… @anon41087856 went from frustrated photographer to darktable dev in a few short years, and his background IIRC is engineering of one of the physical flavors…
I kind of get what you mean. But if this is a truly community-built and supported effort, it’s on the users to contribute where they can. The documentation for RT is well done, if a bit concise. What we need are examples of how RT can be used in a real world example. I think that’s where we come in. I don’t know a line of code from a hole in the ground, but I do know how to record my screen and make a YouTube video. It’s on the rest of us to create those tutorials to help others. That also frees up the developers to work on the next release.
This was me almost two years ago. I was really expecting RT to mimic LR a lot more than it did. And I certainly didn’t expect the learning curve to be so steep. I stuck with it, though. Except for the allure of the selective brush tool in LR, I don’t see myself ever going back.
Yes, I agree. I’m nowhere near at the point where I can help others yet, except sometimes I am able to point out that, actually, they may be able to do what they need with one or two tools and not to be scared off by the rest.
Ultimately, probably the only way to make advanced functions simple is not to provide them, and that is not the right way.
Maybe one day, in the far off-future, there might be a split between user manual and reference manual. I am not one of those people that thinks everything should be dumbed down to my level. Far from it.
I honestly think the RT and dt gui’s are fine. Sure there are some crazy complex features and the documentation often goes way over my head on said features but both tools are phenomenal.
If I was to have any gripes about the GUI of RT since that is what this thread seems to be about it would be that it is GTK and some of the modules are a little weird to figure out how to use, due to the use of wavelet type curves that documents don’t tend to explain how to adjust.
GTK tends to sometimes behave weirdly on Windows it is much better in its native environment but for some reason I can’t switch to Linux because the distro’s do not like my computers audio. New Ubuntu’s just freeze before installation due to the intel audio driver. Other distros I just can’t seem to find a driver for this particular intel chipset and I need audio… Note this is mainly a GTK3 thing GTK2 was always fine on Windows.
Maybe this would be a good time to change all that. Powerful is good, but scary is not so good. Photo editing is supposed to be fun, not intimidating, I think.
Scary is a mindset, and simplifying the GUI is not the answer to accessing the basic features. Instead, we need to be asking, “What are the barriers to learning RawTherapee?” The biggest I see is that, like anything else, there is a learning curve. For those of you who started out on LR, was it intuitive the first time you opened it? What did it take to learn the program? I’m guessing that most of you went looking for some tutorials on YouTube, then slowly developed a workflow that worked for you. I’m not seeing a lot of those for RT, although there are a few out there.
We set up an expectation that we’re able to transfer that knowledge directly to RawTherapee. I would contend that the same amount of learning needs to take place. In fact, if you used LR for very long, there’s probably some un-learning that will need to happen.
I would agree that every software has a learning curve. When that learning curve gets in the way of productivity then it becomes frustrating to use. Comparing RT to LR with regard to learning curve is like apples to oranges.
If the complex modules like Wavelets, etc. must remain as they are in order to function properly then so be it. However, take one look at the Exposure tab which is the first tab. I submit that it is correctly named, but should not be the first tab. The first tab, whatever its name, should contain those modules similar to LR/ACR. Not a clone at all since modules with similar names work differently in RT. Elements of the Exposure tab should be included as well though in a more simplified way.
Neither one of us are going to change the other’s mind about the subject.
I’ll just say that if I can learn RT, anyone can. Simplifying the layout won’t solve anything.
I know how to get the work done when I use RT. Simplifying and creating a tab for basic edits while reorganizing the layout in a more efficient way would make things easier for me. Of course that might not hold true for others like yourself and I fully understand that.