Hi Harry and Georg,
OK, I see. I'll try to include a set of controls in the DBE interface to allow changing sample colors. I'm not sure if this will be available in the upcoming version (1.3) though, but I'll try.
Regarding the ScreenTransferFunction interface, I agree completely. In fact I have planned to improve this interface in two ways. One is in its size, which is excessive. The STF window should steal much less screen space IMO.
The other improvement to STF is related to what you say about difficulties in tweaking clipping and midtones balance points when they get too "compressed" to the left side of the sliders. To fix this problem, my idea is basically what Georg says: a user-selectable scaling factor. I'll add a new "zoom" control to STF, which will work as a horizontal-only zoom very similar to the zoom feature of HistogramTransformation. In this way you'll be able to work with a small range of values instead of the whole [0,1].
Now let's take a look at your Christmas list
- In Curves Transform, would it be possible to have separate scale factors for X and Y axis? And maybe a histogram similar to the one in Histogram transform?
Separate zoom factors would be relatively easy to implement; the HistogramTransformation interface already uses them. The reason I didn't include this feature in CurvesTransformation is to help keeping this interface as simple and uncluttered as possible. If you think this is an important feature, it definitely can be done with minor code changes.
Regarding a histogram plot on CurvesTransformation, of course that could be done. This means a view selector and a Track View check button, just as HistogramTransformation, and drawing the histograms as a background for the entire viewport, including dynamic zooming. A good amount of work indeed, so don't expect to see it implemented in the short term. Thanks for the feature suggestion though.
- I would also like to see that processes always default to the current view. For example, I usually want to apply Histogram transform to the current window, so the view selector should default to it.
They already do that! If you click on the Apply button of an interface's control bar (square, blue), or equivalently press F5 when the interface has focus, an instance of the process is generated and applied to the current view.
A completely different thing is the view selected on a view selector. By definition, view selectors are independent objects. This is powerful because, for example, you can have a main view selected on HistogramTransformation to see/predict its histograms, while you actually apply the histogram transformation to a small preview of the same window and see how it changes.
I think Track View buttons actually do what you are expecting. For example, on HistogramTransformation, enabling Track View implicitly links the view selector to the current view. Note also that the HistogramTransformation interface is a very special case because it directly depends on image data (histograms, hence pixels), so we must be extremely careful not to violate PixInsight's object oriented design rules by introducing unnecessary dependencies. HistogramTransformation is in fact as much dependent on images as I want to see an (static, not dynamic) interface in PixInsight. The other similar case is the Statistics tool.
Thanks for giving us this wonderful tool!
Please leaders do not think these are complaints
Thank you for your support, and for helping me in improving PixInsight. I am always interested in knowing what you think, including of course any complaints you may have. This is the only way to grow.
