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:
- code the change yourself and file a pull request on GitHub;
- file an issue on GitHub and collaborate with one of the devs to work towards a solution;
- start a discussion here (but if you want to make a point, bring good arguments and suggestions);
- file an issue and expect others to make the necessary changes, maybe, sometimes, ever;
- don’t say anything at all;
- openly criticize without actually being constructive about a possible change;
- something worse than that…
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).