Am 28.02.2015 03:06, schrieb Hajo Schatz: >> On 27 Feb, 2015, at 22:19, Christian Mandel <c.man...@gmx.net> >> wrote: >> >> Am 27.02.2015 13:43, schrieb Gonçalo Marrafa: >>> Do you guys think DT would benefit from a collage/triptych tool? >>> I think it would be rather easy to implement, and extremely >>> useful. We can create them in GIMP but with DT we could easily >>> change something in our processing and have it automatically >>> updated without having to redo it in GIMP. >>> >>> What are your thoughts on this? >> >> From a user's perspective (read: my perspective) it would be >> extremely useful. If it could work in combination with the new >> printing functionality I would save many additional steps in about >> 70% of my editing purposes. > > Personally, I find anything else than maybe, maybe, an n-up printing > overkill for DT. To me DT is a tool to develop RAWs, not a > full-fledged editor like Gimp. A flexible way to create collages > would IMHO bloat the user interface unnecessarily; I prefer the Unix > credo of having one tool for one job, piping them together gives > flexibility...
Of course the main devs are the ones to decide what is darktable's purpose, but I disagree wrt several aspects: 1. The unix philosophy works for "little" programs that act on text data or similar data, but not if you have to use (a) lossy (jpg) or huge (tiff) intermediate file formats (you lose image quality with every step or need a lot extra processing time and storage) or (b) if the user interaction for subsequent steps is immense (Piping data between command line programs and reusing the command line if something was wrong is something totally different to the image processing pipeline I described in my first post. This part of the unix philosophy is working for many cases, but not for every case, therefore, we should not blindly obtrude it to every task but make a decision dependent on the tasks nature.). 2. DT is already a full featured solution for (i) taking pictures (tethered shooting), (ii) organizing pictures (lighttable), (iii) developing pictures (darkroom), and (iv) publishing pictures (upload to services such as flickr), and several additional tasks such as geo tagging, slideshow etc. It is simply not just a tool to develop raws (UFRaw is such a tool). IMO the collage functionality fits into category iv and would not change the program's intention. The collage functionality would not bring it closer to a layered editing solution such as gimp since they differ on a very fundamental level (even if technically one may have to use layers to implement the collage functionality, it would not be revealed to the user). 3. It would not bloat the UI since it could be just one more module on the lighttable view which could stay collapsed all the time if unused or it could be implemented as special export such as flickr and facebook etc. The collages could be represented by special xmp files which show up as additional images in lighttable view but only if you have already generated a collage and such a xmp is present in the collection. I personally don't use gimp for collages for several reasons: (i) resizing an image is always directly performed on pixel data which means I cannot revert a wrong resizing operation what is often the case during collage making, it is (ii) hard (not impossible) to work with real world units, e.g. to fill a certain page size, and (iii) such a size decision cannot be reverted, e.g. for printing the collage on a2 instead of a4 because the customer changed his mind, since you decide on overall pixel size beforehand. Inkscape is very handy regarding these points but you never know what happens to your pixel data and how it deals with color profiles etc. Up to v0.91 images were resampled/reencoded on import and the output png's color space is probably limited to sRGB. So IMO a collage solution within darktable would be very handy and if I read the OP correct there's already someone who stepped up to implement this functionality, why not let him proceed and those that find it useful enjoy the new functionality, those who don't can just ignore it since it would be hardly visible to them as explained above. I hope I'm not alone with my opinion. Best regards Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list Darktable-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
