Scarab Labs

Greetings!

Excellent work with Scarab Darkroom. I must say, I'm really jazzed about your program because I have used Raw Shooter Essentials for 4 years and would miss a simple, accurate, program when I upgrade to a new camera. Your camera support is fantastic, the colors look good, and I'm pleased that you seem very open to feedback. I have always had a lot of ideas and am nearly obsessive about how things should look and work.

Interface Suggestions:

Scroll Wheel: How difficult would it be to have the scroll wheel assigned to different tasks based on the location of the mouse? I could go nuts with this one! The wheel now zooms in or out on the selected picture in the main window no matter where the mouse is. It would be fantastic if the scroll wheel scrolled through thumb nails when the mouse was in the bottom panel. It would also be great if the scroll wheel was able to control the sliders when hovering over adjustments in the right panel. It may be hard to see what the scroll wheel will affect. To remedy this, it would be ultra cool if the area affected could take on a slightly different view. It could be as simple as having the label of the adjustment slider turn color or become bold or having a small light (beetle) light up in different areas that are scrollable. This would be a interface breakthrough imo. I could do all basic adjustments and navigation without clicking.

Multi-File Selection: It is intuitive to copy changes with the icons at the top of the adjustment tab. I then feel that it would be handy to be able to select more than one shot in the bottom panel with crtl + click and shift + click for range short cuts. I see your already working on batch processes. Sweet!

Thumbnail Animations Selection: It is really cool how the thumbnail gets larger when you move over it. I've noticed that the selected file name turns to white. It is sometimes hard at a glance to see what thumbnail is selected. It would be cool if the selected file stayed large or there was a frame around the thumbnail as well to make it stand out more from the rest.

Tabs:

Directory Tab: One great things about Scarab is that it remembers my last visit. One of my pet peeves about these directory structures is that there is usually a whole lot of folders I have to click through and the tree becomes rather unwieldy when expanded—so remembering my last locations is a must. However, I think it would be a huge plus if parts of the directory tree could be hidden or if there could be different views of the directory. Ideally, I'd like to have a view where I could only see “my pictures” directory rather than the directory of the whole computer. I could see this being done really smoothly and thus creating lots of room on the directory tab for other things such as: output location other than default “converted folder”, conversion progress, save options... I'd also like to be able to append or prepend certain tags to the converted files and this could go on this tab. All of these options could be grouped in collapsible pallets as on the adjustments tab.

Adjustments Tab: This is pretty refined already. A few small things is that the “pick neutral gray dropper seems larger than it needs to be and takes up space. I also think there should be a second “hand” icon next to it. It took me a while to find the other hand down near the size settings after using the gray dropper. I don't think redundancy here would be bad. On my screen, the “pick neutral gray” dropper and the “as shot” icons are skewed to the left rather than centered. It seems that the icons for Copy, paste, reset, reapply are centered. All icons should be about the same size and consistent in formatting in my opinion. Also, all icons should have tool tips. Only some of them do on my machine. Additional suggestions—I'd like to see the histogram in it's own collapsible pallet like the others. On my screen it cuts of pallets unnaturally. The metadata on the histogram is great and makes the metadata tab unnecessary. I'd also like to see a “Tools” pallet for things like the crop tool. Right now, it's location is rather orphan.

Metadata Tab: Not needed in my opinion. You have that covered on the histogram quite well.

Other things:

Program Logo. A simpler one or two color logo would be more becoming. The “less is more” concept applies here I think. The Scarab logo looks decent large, but small as an icon, it's a jumble. The “info” bug on the adjustment tab also seems like a strange location. Maybe top right?

Crop tool: I'm sure you have plans for this. Readjusting placement after the crop would be useful imo.
Double click to select crop seems to work for other programs. A crop tool with the option for “thirds” grid lines would also be cool imo. Other tools I'd like to see are “Straighten,” “Denoise” slider or tool. I know these would take time to develop.

Thanks for providing a means for feedback with this forum. I'm am pleased with your work and look forward to seeing you succeed with a very friendly, fast, and intuitive program.

Best,
Seth

Hi!

Thanks for the extensive feedback! I was a Rawshooter user myself.

Mouse wheel - yes, a few people have requested this and I have in fact already done most of the work with it. The standard Windows behaviour is that it applies to whatever UI element is selected (was last used). I don't use Windows controls, but my own OpenGL based UI system, so it doesn't work like that automatically. I think in Lightroom it works slightly differently than in Windows, and that might also be disturbing to some. The problem with the Windows method is that I'd need to somehow highlight the active UI element as you say (this actually happens with standard Windows controls) and eg. with the image window this wouldn't be visible. But I will add this feature in one form or other.

Metadata tab - there will probably be more information here. Maybe also the possibility to edit.

About the histogram having its own expander box, the problem is that one would want to see the histogram while doing adjustments. This would mean that you'd constanly need to close and open these expanders to keep the histogram visible. But another issue with the current arrangement is netbooks with their really small resolution screens, so I'm still considering this.

The cropping tool - yes, I also feel it's a bit unfortunatelly placed. I also still need to figure out where I'll put extra options for it, and for other similar tools like straighten.
Btw. there is a straighten "tool", at the bottom next to the 90 degree rotate buttons. I might actually move the crop button down there too. One idea is to have another horizontal stripe appear with options for these - where one can eg. numerically enter size or angle.

Denoise tool - this will be in the pro version.

About the dropper icon - I came to its position after a bit of playing around with it. But I'll try making it smaller and align it with the other icons and see how it looks. Actually I don't know why I didn't do it that way. I don't think a hand icon next to it would be logical, you can actually switch back to the previous mode by clicking on it again.

Multifile selection - I already played with this idea myself. But one would also expect to see all the thumbnails updated correctly. There is some technical difficulty with this, so it's not likely to happen in the near future. But maybe it's something for v2.0.

Actual thumbnail staying big - good point, I'll try this and see how it looks.

The logo - I don't think a few colours logo is a requirement for the things I do and it's more distinctive like this. I really like this logo and it probably won't change, unless maybe if the project gets bought up by some company.

I will probably play with rearranging the user interface and I'll keep people's suggestions in mind.

Regards,
Kornel

Excellent response Kornel,

I am excited to see your progress and I can see from your response that you have many things planned. Sweet action!

In particular, I'll be curious to see your innovation with the crop function, mouse wheel, and metadata tab. Good on the dropper. Good on the organizational refinement. And I'll check out the straighten tool.

Any comment on trimming down the tree in on the Directory tab so that it focuses on the picture directory file structure without all the other mess? It would open up so much room on that tab for other things.

Denoise--pro version--nice! What's do you think your timeline will be like? Cost? I'll tell you right now I was about to buy Raw Shooter Pro as soon as it came out, even as a poor student. As you know there are lots of options for RAW development already, and yet I believe that someone with a passion for intuitive usability, great color, and compatibility still has something to offer. RawShooter did.

Ok, props on the Logo. I do like it big, but still think it gets lost when small because of the blend of colors (like on my task bar and browser tab). "...unless maybe if the project gets bought up by some company." Ahhhh! Don't say that! Let Scarab live on where RawShooter did not. Ok, so maybe if they cut you a sweet deal, but really. Gerrrr...

About adjustments. This is probably not possible, but I was thinking that it would be just so cool if I could use a combination of short cut keys and mouse control to make adjustments. Let me explain. Say you could hold the 'c' key on the keyboard + click and drag anywhere on my picture to up the contrast. Hold 'e' for exposure brightness and click and drag up or down anywhere on the picture. Once these controls became intuitive, I could collapse the right tabs frame and make all adjustments with the picture full screen. So maybe v2 level stuff, but this would be the slick snot! I think it could be amazing! Same system could work with toggle buttons next to the the commands for those who don't like keyboards. Toggle "contrast" on then click on the picture and drag up or down to change contrast. I think people would adjust to this method very quickly. Right now, people are just used to sliders, but that doesn't make them the most efficient way to adjust settings. Is something like this possible or not so much?

Thanks for taking user feedback into consideration. It's great to get involved with sharing my perspective on design. This is a unique opportunity because most programs are not designed within ear shot of the budding community of general users. I wish you great success.

Cheers,
Seth

Hi Seth,

Sorry for the slow reply.

"Denoise--pro version--nice! What's do you think your timeline will be like? Cost? I'll tell you right now I was about to buy Raw Shooter Pro as soon as it came out, even as a poor student. As you know there are lots of options for RAW development already, and yet I believe that someone with a passion for intuitive usability, great color, and compatibility still has something to offer. RawShooter did. "

- I'm working on the noise filter at the moment and I'm already getting results comparable to Noise Ninja. I'll make this available as a Photoshop plugin next month (hopefully). I've set Photokina 2010 (September) as the deadline for the Pro version of Scarab Darkroom, but if I estimate optimistically, it can be finished much sooner.
I haven't decided on the pricing yet. I definitely have to price it much lower than Lightroom or Bibble.

"Ok, props on the Logo. I do like it big, but still think it gets lost when small because of the blend of colors (like on my task bar and browser tab). "...unless maybe if the project gets bought up by some company." Ahhhh! Don't say that! Let Scarab live on where RawShooter did not. Ok, so maybe if they cut you a sweet deal, but really. Gerrrr..."

- Yes, the logo doesn't look so good in small, but I consider that a minor flaw. Also there is no 32x32 version of the icon right now, so Windows scales up the 16x16 icon if it wants to display it in that size, I'll fix that.
I also wouln't like to see my project killed off, I've put enormous amounts work into it and it has grown dear to me.

"Any comment on trimming down the tree in on the Directory tab so that it focuses on the picture directory file structure without all the other mess? It would open up so much room on that tab for other things"

- Maybe as one of the refinements for v2.0.

I like the hotkey idea. But I have some bug with full screen mode at the moment, so that's disabled for now.

Regards,
Kornel