I have been using Lightroom for six years. Before that Aperature for three years. Over the past year, ACDPro, Capture One, Luminar, CyberShot and a few others (looking to replace Lightroom, selected dt).
It just hit me based on Aurélien's email. Every commercial product has the interface organized in the order they effects are processed. In learning dt, I have found I rework modules constantly and never paid attention to why. Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/ghei36> From: Aurélien Pierre Sent: Tuesday, October 9, 3:03 AM Subject: Re: [darktable-dev] Darkroom UI refactoring To: darktable-dev@lists.darktable.org But even if we keep the actual disposition, don't you think it's weird that : in/out color profiles are stored in the color tabs, whereas they are "basic" in the sense they are needed from technical requirements and always on, signal-processing modules are mixed with creative ones you get sharpen in enhancements and high-pass in effects, but they do exactly the same thing same for local-contrast and wavelet equalizer same for the crop/flip and the perspective correction. I mean, even with my own workflow set apart, I just think it would make sense to separate technical and creative modules completely. And by technical, I mean everything related to image reconstruction and normalization (things you would do in Matlab). Especially since the technical modules mostly come early in the pipe, it would make sense to have them grouped explicitely so that you set them first. Because late modules like levels and tonecurves depend on the exposure and tonemapping set earlier in the pipe, so if you begin with the curves and end with the tonemapping, you will have to redo the curves. Not funny. Same with unbreak color profile and contrast/lightness/saturation. In both cases, they perform a gamma correction, but the former does it in RGB before the input color profile, while the later does it in Lab much later in the pipe, and they are both specialized on different issues : don't try to get creative with the unbreak color profile, it should be used to put the average lightness at 50 % L(ab), nothing else. Let the UI reflect that, because I have used dt for 7 years, and it's only now that I look at the code that I understand what's going on. To be efficient, there are things you need to fix first, for example before the ICC input profile is applied, and in RGB. A regular user doesn't stand a chance to figure out what comes first when the unbreak color profile module is hidden between creative color modules. And that's just an example. If you don't follow at least roughly the pixelpipe order, you will end up passing 2-5 times on each module, whereas it could be done in 2 passes in a reproductible way, fixing first, tweaking after. What I would like is to draw a path between critical milestones, that is between the technical requirements that should be met : having your tonal range mapped between 16 % and 96 % L(ab) before you apply any input profile, otherwise you mess up the saturation and shift the colors linearize the tones (beat up the contrast) early and add contrast late in the pipe, having the contrast fixed in RGB as much as possible to avoid de/over-saturation, fix the color after you fix the contrast and lightness, especially if you work in Lab modules normalize the histogram just at the end … The main problem I have with the current disposition is low-level stuff comes last in the UI. Le 08/10/2018 à 22:07, Jason Polak a écrit : I've been thinking a little more about this idea, and while some modules might be better moved to other tabs (or a new set of tabs) like perhaps 'color reconstruction', the current setup still seems to make more sense in some ways too. For example: 1. I prefer the idea of the 'effects' tab (like watermark and framing) to be separate from other things like perspective correction or spot removal. Those things that are sometimes useful or interesting like split toning seem to be genuinely different than correcting spots. 2. I don't think the base tab should have tonemap in it. It is a more advanced tone module that belongs more in a separate tone group. One of the arguments made in this thread is that there have been many usability requests in the past, and therefore that there is a huge demand to improve the software. These requests only imply that there is a subset of people who have trouble using darktable. Changing darktable to be more aligned with their style might make darktable easier to use for them, but in turn it might make it more cumbersome to use for others. Now, I'm not saying that these ideas are bad, but because people who want darktable to change are going to be naturally more vocal than people who like it as it is, we need to be careful that we don't make it worse for many users by changing the UI for a few. For example, Aurelien's modifications are designed with a certain workflow in mind. But for a different type of workflow, the new design might actually be worse. For example, I like the idea of having the modules grouped by what they do, not what order they come in during the workflow. That's just the way my mind works. I suspect that some people will prefer a more chronological ordering, and some people will prefer an ordering based on their similarities in algorithm. darktable isn't exactly like that now because of the basic tab, but aside from the basic tab, it mostly is like that. Another thing we have to be careful with is the 'simplified' scheme where a simplified panel is presented but where more advanced modifications can be made if necessary. If this ever were to happen (like a Lightroom style panel), there should be an option to disable it and hide it completely because it would just get in my way. It does sound like a good idea for some people, but again, that's just a mindset and style of doing things that doesn't apply to everyone. I prefer for example to see exactly what is going on and get into the details right away. I also like the way the modules currently are displayed. I have most of the modules activated (though not on a single picture) and I just have the 'one open at at time' option, and I find the interface intuitive in terms of switching and editing settings. Again, if others think differently about how that works I would love there to be a setting for them too, but the point is, drastic modifications at this point should probably be an option unless it is crystal clear that it benefits everyone. Part of the appeal of darktable at least to me is that it just lays all of its options plain and clear without trying to force a specific editing style on the user. I would hate for darktable to become muddled like lightroom with a 'clarity' slider or other sliders with ambiguous labels that do things under the hood without my knowledge of exactly what they are doing. Or even worse, something like https://skylum.com/luminar, which aims to make the defaults something 95% of people will be happy with....takes the fun out of raw editing in my opinion - I am one of those that enjoys raw editing almost as much as photography itself. Can the UI of darktable be improved? I am sure there are some improvements to be made (like the middle-mouse click for new module that was recently introdced - thanks devs!). On the other hand, I am sure a lot of people (including myself) already find darktable to be pretty intuitive and snappy to use, and we should be cautious of making changes to it lest it upset the greatness it has achieved so far. Jason On 2018-10-08 12:59 AM, Dominik Markiewicz wrote: Hi, I've also my workflow, but it's a bit different then yours (crop is one of basic corrections for me, I almost never do noise removal as a one of first steps). I'm not a big fan of arbitrary change here. Agree with Jochen that custom tabs could be quite nice. To achieve something similar I just enable modules, add them as `favorite` and save this as a preset. Then add shortcuts for each of presets and I can easily switch between my groups of modules. Regards, Dominik ___________________________________________________________________________ darktable developer mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org<mailto:darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org> ___________________________________________________________________________ darktable developer mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org ___________________________________________________________________________ darktable developer mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org
