[Digikam-users] Suggestion for a Showfoto

[Lawrence Plug]

I'm another mostly-lurker on this list, and a new one,  but am a daily
user of digikam. I like the mockup a great deal. It would improve
showfoto's usability and appearance quite a bit. I'll offer up one
suggestion for a modification to the mockup, which I would prefer
slightly.

Rather than have the tools selected from a dropdown menu, an alternative
would be to have the tools within tabs stacked vertically, which then
individually drop down to show their respective sliders etc when
selected.  This is the way that rawtherapee, for example, organizes
tools. I find it very convenient (I use rawtherapee for ORFs). The tools
are stacked in the order that they would generally be used (WB and
exposure at the top, noise reduction near the bottom), and more than one
tool can be opened at a time.

The advantage of this is that all the related tools are visible (visual
cue to user), and because several can be open at one time, it is
possible to see their settings even when not adjusting that particular
tool. I find this useful. The commonly used tools i just leave open,
others are nearly always closed.

The tools would be grouped into broader categories of transform tools,
filters etc.. exactly as shown in the mockup.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to open and close a tool with a keystroke.
eg. ctrl-s drops down (or up) sharpening. 

On a related note (perhaps I should open a different thread) it would be
FANTASTIC if showfoto would operate nondestructively on RAWs, like
rawtherapee does, rather than the converted images. Perhaps this is
already in the pipeline.

cheers
Lawrence


** screenshot of the rawtherapee layout, with white balance and
sharpening tools open.
http://ljplug.smugmug.com/photos/277201951_u8QY4-X2.jpg



On Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:54:03 -0400, "Scott Chevalley"
<avalon at osguru.org> said:
> 
> 
> Marcel Wiesweg wrote:
> >> Hi! I have made mockups (2) of the Showfoto. This PDF is my suggestion for
> >> faster (=better) workflow when editing multiple photographs.
> >> Hopefully this would open some discussion about the Showfoto's GUI and
> >> questions about can it be polished even more? I think that digiKam already
> >> has great GUI and professional options for photo management, now it's
> >> editor needs polishing ;-)
> >>
> > 
> > Taking the main point (as it appears to me):
> > Moving from separate dialogs to integrating the settings in the sidebar and 
> > the preview in the main area.
> > 
> > This is an interesting idea, generally in KDE and other software there is a 
> > move away from modal dialogs towards non-modal solutions like the one 
> > suggested here. It is a valid point; the dialog is modal, so the window in 
> > the background cannot be used anyway. It would be interesting to hear the 
> > opinion of the people here on this list, as well as the opinion of a 
> > usability expert.
> > 
> > Technically, such a change requires a larger amount of work. The main window 
> > need to be adapted, the base classes of the current image plugin dialogs need 
> > to be refitted into the new framework, and (at least with trivial changes) 
> > each image plugin need to be ported.
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Digikam-users mailing list
> > Digikam-users at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users
> 
> As a mostly-lurker on the list, I just thought I'd throw my 2 cents in
> and say that I like the mockup.  I think it follows more closely the
> flow that other image/raw editors take, so would be easier for users to
> get up to speed.
> 
> I also see how being able to switch between images to apply the current
> tool to each is much better than the modal dialog method.
> 
> The only additional suggestion would be to somehow speed up the preview
> of the modification, because some of the tools take a long time to do
> what they do and try to do it for even the most miniscule change in
> parameters.
> 
> Scott
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