There was a thread in which a user wanted to know why they weren’t getting the contrast they wanted from the selective tone sliders. It would be nice if, when both selective tone and tone curve tools are both active, the tone curve shows what’s going to be done to the image. The curve is much more versatile, so having it active would both work as an interactive tutorial for users unfamiliar - and would make clear what the selective tone sliders were doing.
I don’t use both tools together, but there could be some confusion over how they interact, maybe think about combining the two into a single tool in a future version. Might be a UI win…
I think that is the job of a histogram, to reflect what overall changes have been made. Tone curve can be implicated along the tone slider, I think Adobe made it like that and that is certainly a way to do it. If DXO were to do it, I would prefer they tweak the usability of the tone curve first, because implementation of curves in PhotoLab is not that good at the moment. If they can tweak that first I would not mind what you suggested and what Adobe is doing. But leaving it as separate set of tonal adjustment is fine too. Personally I rearly see the need to use curves since there are so many other methods in PhotoLab, but I understand that people still want the familiarity of curves.
Absolutely not – they are different tools → see here …
or not - because you also might want to know what other “tone controls” are doing ( and some of them might be not global but depend on local situation in the frame - like of what is in the pixels around the pixel being adjusted )
this is not implemented in UI in raw converters ( may be there are exceptions of course ) for a reason … ACR/LR is a prime example
PS: a REAL UI “win” is to make that tool with a bigger window so that a control point on a curve can be positioned more precisely, allow numerical adjustment of the control points by directly entering coordinates , allow people to create and use presets for curve directly in the tool ( think like C1 does ) , allow to switch and operate in alternative coordinates (not RGB - but HSL/HSV, may be round trip to CIE LAB, CIE LCH for curve operation etc )
I’d be happy if it could be detached into it’s own window and handle-dragged larger, moved to a different piece of screen real estate. Also, if they could add a picker that lets you click on the image and put a handle on the curve. I used this a lot in earlier versions of PS to do ‘manual’ color correction (find areas in H,M,S that should be neutral, drag the RGB curves to make them the same-ish, or a la DaVinci, leave shadows blueish). It was pretty fiddly, mostly automated by the color ‘this is neutral’ picker - although that doesn’t let me correct HML points. But I can see uses for it other than color correction (but probably not much use as long as that tool stays small).
Did I miss this picker somehow? I don’t see it on the tool - don’t see it in the manual.
Back to my original point: it’s be nice to teach users that were just using the sliders to use the curve. They’d have more control.
Oh, while I’m at it, pick a handle on the curve, nudge it up and down with cursor (or WASD, or ‘+’ and ‘-’) keys.
The problem is that the Selective Tonality sliders do not apply corrections in the same linear fashion that the Tone Curve does. See this post and others on the same subject…
I don’t use the sliders - unless I’m in a desperate hurry to get JPEGs to someone - but agreed on them not being linear and being unclear as to what exactly they’re doing. My thought was to gently guide users to the curve.
Also, seeing as it looks like I might have your attention, a picker and keyboard input to a selected handle on the curve would be very much appreciated - as would some way to make the tool bigger.
Interesting thought - and yes it could be educational. But does any other app do this? Capture One doesn’t, for instance. I tend to use all tone tools selectively & improvisationally, diving from one to another whilst watching their effect on the image. Though I have a basic scheme that relates to their function and will often not use curves at all. The PL curves panel does suffer by not being re-sizeable beyond its current limits, as mentioned. For all operations I find using an A5 tablet more fluent than a mouse …
Also, as said, during adjustments one monitors the histogram in partnership with the live image, and that seems like visual feedback enough …
it suffers from many faults, fixed small size only the one of them… you can can’t for example add / change points on curve using directly numeric inputs right in the tool, you can’t save curve presets like in C1 directly from the tool, etc, etc