Lay of the rawproc Land

When started, rawproc will present you with a window containing four panes:


  1. Display: The right-hand window, contains the image being manipulated. There is also a thumbnail window in the top-left corner; if the image size is greater than the display panel, the thumbnail will also contain a viewport rectangle that can be dragged to pan the display image. You can toggle the thumb visibility by double-clicking in the thumb. For the display image, you can zoom in or out of the image in 5% increments using the mousewheel, or toggle 100%/fit-to-display by double-clicking the image. The min/max zoom is presently 10%/500%.

    Display pane keyboard commands:

    For color management, display.cms enables/disables transform of the image from the checked tool to the display profile before rendering in the display pane. The internal working image has to have an attached profile, and an appropriate profile has to be entered in display.cms.displayprofile. If your system has multiple displays, their individual profiles can be specified in display.cms.displayprofile.n properties, where n is the display number (rawproc starts with 0, keep this in mind for systems that enumerate their displays starting with 1). rawproc will use the profile for the display in which it resides, and will switch profiles when it is moved to another display. The profile number being used for display is indicated in parentheses, appended to the CMS status displayed in the status bar at the bottom.

  2. Commands: The top-left-hand window, contains the list of tools applied to the image. This list of tools is usually referred to as the "toolchain". You can select a tool to mess with by left-clicking it. Right-clicking a tool brings up a pop-up menu from which you can display EXIF and image data, delete the tool, or if the tool is a group, break the group in to the toolchain or extract the last tool in the group and make it a tool in the toolchain. The checkbox beside each tool is to select that tool result for display; this can be done separate from selecting the tool to mess with its parameters. This is extremely useful to compare the results of different tools, as the display is switched from image to image without having to reprocess, at the expense of memory.

    Command pane keyboard commands:

  3. Histogram: Standard RGB histogram of the image produced by the tool selected for display. It can be zoomed in with the mouse thumbwheel, and panned by dragging with the mouse. Double-clicking the histogram restores the original scale and origin. The default scale is 256 bins; this can be changed with the histogram.scale parameter in the Properties list, for instance, to set 65536 for sixteen-bit scaling. Note that the default of 256 supports the curve tool, which works on a 0-255 range. if you change the histogram tool scaling, the curve tool will still work internally at 0.0-255.0.

    Histogram pane keyboard commands:

  4. Parameters: The bottom-left-hand window, contains the tools for changing the tool selected in the Commands pane. These are mostly sliders that you can manipulate with either a mouse or a touchscreen implement (stylus, or your finger). Most tools have a reset button.

    Tool panes that have integer or float parameters use a special text entry widget that responds to mousewheel input. Integer widgets have a blue background; float widges have a green background. The number in either can be modified with the keyboard; click in the widget to set the focus and show an edit cursor. Press Enter after changing the number to suit. Mousewheel rotation will increment/decrement the number, up to increment, down to decrement. The increment for integers is 1, for floats it's the smallest number in the precision. The increment can be changed by holding the Shift or Control keys while rotating the wheel; Shift multiplies the increment x10, Control multiplies it by 100. The blue/green background can be changed with the app.integerctrl.backgroundcolor and app.floatctrl.backgroundcolor properties.

Keyboard commands won't route to a particular pane until you click the mouse somewhere in the pane.

You can drag the Commands and Parameters windows from their initial positions and dock them to various sides of the rawproc window, or you can let them float like independent windows. This is particularly useful for the crop and rotate tools; you can make the Parameters window bigger to more easily work these tools.

Running, rawproc looks like this:

There is also a status bar that will display useful feedback as you work with images, the display color management status, and the display zoom percent.