Here are some news on our masks implementation. The last weeks have seen quite some changes, some user visible, some under the hood.
1) gradient shapes You can now add linear gradient shapes to a drawn mask. A gradient shape causes a gradual decay of opacity over an image. Position, orientation and steepness of the gradient can be chosen to your liking. On the GUI side a solid line indicates the location where opacity is just 50%. You can shift the line and use handles to rotate it. Dotted lines indicate the transition area in which the opacity gradually changes from 0% to 100%. You can use the scroll-wheel to adjust the size of that area and thereby the steepness of the linear gradient. Of course you can combine gradients with other shapes and further gradients for even more fancy selections. 2) restricted edit mode You enter restricted edit mode by CONTROL-Click on the "show mask and edit" icon. In restricted edit mode position and size of a shape are protected. You can still work on single nodes or segments of a path or on feathering. The main aim of this mode is easy finetuning of a mask. If you edit an existing mask in restricted mode you can better zoom and pan the image without the risk of destroying your selection by accidental shifting or resizing whole shapes. 3) performance optimization A change not directly visible to users. The previous implementation would render all shapes with full resolution of the input image, combine the rendered shapes still in full resolution and only scale down the final mask. The final mask and all intermediate steps had to be kept in memory. Needless to say that this consumes a lot of CPU cycles and has a marked memory footprint even for the smallest thumbnails to be processed. The new implementation now from the beginning renders all shapes with just the needed resolution and within the required region of interest. This speeds up mask generation during interactive work from several 10 milliseconds to just a few milliseconds per shape. Memory overhead is kept at a minimum. Especially for path shapes the mask generating algorithm has been changed significantly. Please report potential bugs. 4) combine parametric and drawn mask Sometimes users want to generate a parametric mask and finetune it with drawn shapes - this tends to be a complex issue. darktable offers an enormous flexibility when combining mask elements. To start with here are two recommended approaches. The first one is called "exclusive": you start with all pixels selected (mask display gives solid yellow) and step by step remove parts of the image from the mask - either by adjusting the gradient mask sliders or by adding shapes to the drawn mask. To follow this approach select the "exclusive" mode for mask combination and make sure that all polarities (of the indiviual parametric mask channels and of the drawn mask!) are set to positive (+). The second approach is called "inclusive": you start with all pixels deselected, i.e. with an empty mask. You now add areas of the image to the mask by adjusting the parametric sliders or by directly drawing shapes. This requires the "inclusive" combination mode and all polarities to be set to negative (-). Happy masking Ulrich ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ darktable-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-devel
