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Any ideas?
Hi folks,
I'm thinking of the next steps with dlRaw...
Actually, it will finally become an open source photo editor, so bitmaps may be opened as well and exchange with Gimp is possible. It will be just an editor, since I think there are very good photo managers around (and I don't want to mess with them 
). However you can tag and rate your picture and digikam and F-Spot will understand this.
So, during the last months I've learned more about programming and now I think I'm fit enough for the bigger changes. But of course the next steps might lead in a lot of different directions, and I want to choose the best one possible... Therefore I think it's good to have a clear vision how the final program should work and what features it will have. And since there are many opinions around I would like to ask for users (your!) insight on what you expect from a photo editor.
So the main questions are:
- What filters do you think are essential (useful on many photos) and are still missing?
- How would you like to handle the many controls and options (400+ and growing)?
- Do you have any ideas to improve the workflow or the usability?
- Which other problems do you see?
Here is a short list of already planned things (no special order):
- Plain and intuitive user interface.
- Preset menu.
- Again better denoising and denoising by color and by luminance.
- Heal and spot repair (although this will take some time).
- Better demosaicing (waiting for perfectRAW to go opensource like announced).
- Feedback of currently active filters.
- CA correction like fulla does.
- Perspective correction.
- Bug hunting and optimising
If you want to test the workflow yourself just check the 20091024 preview http://www.mm-log.com/dlraw/download (besides some filters, bitmap opening and the theme it is basically the same...)
For those who haven't tried any of the preview versions, here is a small video on youtube showing the workflow with my current dev version.
I'm looking forward to your insights and inspiration 
greets mike
Comments
More ideas
Hi, thank you for your answer. I agree with you. I notice that you are speaking about presets in your post. Having been using Bibble 5 for five months, I think that presets are indeed a very useful feature since they allow the user to switch between very different settings (which may be quite useful with settings that work together, for instance several curves, or when you want to achieve some special effect like simulating some film, etc.) I think that the user should be able to create presets by selecting the settings he/she wants to include. Of course some default presets are very useful also : people generally use the same workspace, they all have their own taste concerning sharpening, etc.
By the way, it is quite convenient with Bibble 5 to have different batch queues. For instance, I have different shortkeys for sending on my Desktop folders the current picture as some Jpeg (100% quality), as some Jpeg with 640x480 (quality 80%) scaling for posting to my blog, as some Jpeg 1200x900 (quality 92%) for sending pictures of the children to the family, as some Jpeg (100% quality) with a relevent colorspace for printing the picture, etc.
Another idea, probably very easy to implement: it could be great to add in the "eyecandy" tab a feature for using abstract profiles; they help to achieve some special effect (sepia tones, grayscale conversion, etc.) and many various settings (including curves) can fit in one "abstract profile". If you want I can send some sepia abstract profile ICC file in order to let you see how it works (I think however that you can find them at the following URL: http://personal.mkfc.se/mk_guest_fc/FTPRoot/Personal/Library/ColorSync/P... and you can try them with the cctiff command from Argyll) I am currently trying to build abtract profiles for simulating old films.
Best regards, TB.
Hi Thomas, thank you for your
Hi Thomas,
thank you for your comments.
Creating presets right from the gui needs some more work, and it's not very high priority, since it is possible with an editor for example (as a workaround for the moment). It just consumes much time to do this, and there are more urgend parts...
Every queue can be realized as a preset, so this is not a problem, or do I misunderstand you.
I didn't know about profiles for simulating filters. The idea is quite nice, however, a filter will be "hardcoded" in one profile. So wouldn't it be more versatile to make a preset for the individual filter and have the possibility to edit it afterwards... Where is the benefit of using such a profile?
greets mike
Hi Thomas, thanks for your
Hi Thomas,
thanks for your comment.
I'm not a big fan of an additional pipe. I don't see what these packages should offer. If there are certain workflows which are useful on many photos I implement them directly, giving the opportunity to optimize them for the internal structure. So, if you know good workflows with one of these packages please let me know. Furthermore, although it'll be targeted towards power users, a command line is not to easy to handle for many people.
It's different with the pfstmo operators. I will check them carefully when I have more time, since not every operator is useful on a single image (for several images there is Luminance HDR) and they have to meet some conditions to fit in here. However, the DRC algorithm from Ben is working fine inside dlRaw.
Have fun with it.
greets mike
Ideas
Hi, I just compiled dlraw and I am now beginning to explore it. Here are some ideas of things that could be added. All have to do with external tools integration.
Very few raw workflows under Linux have support for plugins. A commercial product like Bibble has; maybe it could be a good thing, but I am aware it may need some work. A quicker solution could be: the ability to pipe the picture to some external process/script/tool as some PNM picture. Tools that could be used are ImageMagick, G'mic, netpbm, pfstools, etc. At least, a field where the user could type some ImageMagick command line options would be great (this feature could be very interesting with a combobox for choosing the exact stage in the workflow where this external pipe could be launched).
The second thing I often use could be achieved with the precedent idea, but some other people could find more convenient to have it fully integrated to dlRaw. I am thinking to the pfstmo operators from the pfstools ( http://pfstools.sourceforge.net/man_pages.html ) which can really help for standard digital photography (not only for HDR effects, see for instance http://www.frank-durr.de/tonemapping_comparison.html ). Thank you, TB.
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