I find the crop tool to be unwieldly for my common use case, namely processing a large number of photographs from shooting sports.
I shoot a lot of basketball and (American) football games for my alma mater. My workflow is to import the typically ~2000 photos into KPhotoAlbum, review them and select the ones I want (typically 300 or so), and create a directory with symlinks to the selected files. These are essentially all JPEG; RAW would simply consume too much space and slow the camera (Canon 7DmkII) too much. The postprocessing I do is limited to cropping and rotating, if my camera was not level (typically it isn't perfectly level, as I'm shooting handheld bursts). I gave up on noise reduction last year; the 7DmkII is good enough even at ISO 6400, and additional NR really slows things down. The difficulty is that to crop the frame (always freehand) requires the following motions: 1) Position the mouse near one corner of the image (say, top left), which may be nowhere near where I want to crop. 2) Click and move the top and left edges (via the top left corner) to the desired spot. 3) Move the mouse to the bottom right of the image, which again might not be near where I want to crop. 4) Click and move the bottom and right edges to the desired spot. With RawTherapee I simply place the mouse at the desired top left spot, click and drag it to the bottom right, and I'm done. The extra motions with Darktable, especially since they have to start far from what may be my point of interest, are awkward and cost maybe 5 seconds per image. With 300 images, that's an extra 25 minutes; this past Wednesday I shot two games that totaled 700 images, so the extra time would have been an hour. I'd prefer to use Darktable for this purpose, since it's otherwise a lot faster. RawTherapee takes maybe 3 seconds or so to export an image; Darktable is more like 1 second, not to mention that the rotate function is easier in Darktable (right mouse drag). But the current behavior of the cropping tool is simply too awkward (I tried it for one set and it really did take a lot more time). I tried looking at the code (in src/iop/clipping.c), but it wasn't obvious to me what would need to change to do this. I understand that dragging inside the frame is used to move the crop box, but that's rarely something I need to do. I have at least two more games this season to shoot, and if we make it to the later rounds of the tournament, I'm going to have a lot more photos (less selective about what I keep). Perhaps what I really need is a very minimalist program that lets me set the crop and rotate and do nothing else, but I haven't found such (on Linux). Thoughts, anyone? -- Robert Krawitz <r...@alum.mit.edu> *** MIT Engineers A Proud Tradition http://mitathletics.com *** Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton ___________________________________________________________________________ darktable developer mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-dev+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org
