Perhaps this is camera specific, but I find the white balance sliders in RawTherapee way too sensitive. Both the color temp, but also (and most particularly) the tint sliders have far too big a range. At least for my Fuji X files (and Canon files for that matter), I find that I move the tint slider just a few pixels to the left or right and it is the equivalant of moving it all the way left or right to the range extremes in every other raw developer I have used (e.g. Lightroom, Aperture). Consequently, I find it practically impossible to fine tune the white balance in my photos - because of the UI. If I go a pixel too far in either direction my tint goes completely green or completely pink.
Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Who do I complain to?
There are plus and minus buttons that you can use to fine tune. You can hold CTRL while you move the slider to slow it down. You can type a value into the box.
Nobody, ever. You explain your problem then politely ask for a fix.
Been using Rawtherapee for years, and just now learned about CTR + Drag. Thanks. I was going to suggest the other two options you raised, but you beat me to it.
There is also the option to click-and-hold. After a short period of time the slider changes appearance slightly and you will have fine grained control.
As for the reason why the slider range is so big: some camera’s do wonky stuff with the tint, and some scenes (like underwater images or IR images) really do have an ‘off the scale’ tint. This is a way to accommodate for that. Perhaps not ideal, but any suggestion to improve is welcome (there may already be an issue on the GitHub tracker for that).
Thanks for the tip [paperdigits], I couldn’t get Ctrl+drag to work as suggested, but did get click and hold as suggested by [Thanatomanic] (https://discuss.pixls.us/u/Thanatomanic) below to slow it down (the slider look changes to a outline).
Yes, obviously politeness is the order of the day. Complaint to me means ‘problem to solve’, to others may seem ‘whining’ or something else.
[Thanatomanic] Thanks, with click and hold, the slider is much more like other programs in terms of sensitivity. Thanks also for the reasoning behind why the slider is so large.
Perhaps the UI here is trying to cover 100% of the use cases, but doing the 80% in a non-optimal way? I would have never thought to read the manual on how to change white balance (I’ve been playng with white balance for 15 years in various programs) . Rather than let the slider give the user the whole range to start there may be other ways to solve. The thing to solve here I think is to give most users a positive experience at first use, and through normal operation.
A few suggestions:
Reverse the ‘Ctrl+click / hold+click’ behavior. Perhaps give the slider a more limited range by default. I think this mostly applies to the Tint slider:
The current tint slider has a range from 0 to 10
What about making the default range more like 0.3 to 5. Then by Ctrl+click, or hold+click, the full range of 0-10 appears, and allowing the user to use the more full range.
A user preference to customize what the range of the tint slider should be (e.g. for my cameras I could set it to 0.3 to 5). Others may want more range, because of the use cases as mentioned like underwater images, or fluro lighting etc. In those scenarios, those users could also set their preference to whatever makes sense to them. Perhaps the default is 0-10 (for everyone), or 0.3 to 5 optimized out of the box for ‘most users’. Either works.
Limit the tint slider to a narrower range by default, and have a checkbox next to it to ‘expand range’.
Any of these work, there may be other better ideas. I think #2 is most respectful that there are lots of different users out there, and users can set things up to their taste.
To be clear, I guess the hold+click works, but to me it doesn’t seem optimal for the 80% use case whereby (I assume) 80% of folks have to i) understand they can ctrl+click/hold+click ii) have to ctrl+click/hold+click for every image to do white balance changes.
Ctrl+drag does not work for me either. My favourite besides moving the slider for course settings is Shift-mouse wheel when the cursor is on the slider button. That allows very sensible movements.
