Panel background changes color erratically when scrolling

[ghost]

RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2701-gb8d5a3d_20210102.AppImage running on Ubuntu 18.04

In the Advanced, Local Adjustments, Transform and RAW tabs, some of the panel colors change from medium grey #565656 to light grey #636363 on mouseover, further reducing the contrast and readability. Scrolling the affected area out of sight and back again resets all or part of the panel to the medium grey color. The easiest way to observe it is by scrolling the Post-Resize sharpening panel in the Transform tab in and out of sight. The behavior does not occur in any of the first three tabs (Exposure, Detail, Color) where all the panels are consistently #565656. The behavior has been tested on two different machines both running updated Ubuntu 18.04

[Thanatomanic]

Can you provide screenshots of this behavior? There is no hover CSS style defined for the panel backgrounds, so I'm not sure what is going on.

[ghost]

The problem is that activating the screenshot tool and moving the mouse towards the panel immediately makes it change state. I did manage to take this with my phone but it's not very clear.

[heckflosse]

The problem is that activating the screenshot tool and moving the mouse towards the panel immediately makes it change state.

Use the PrintScreen Key instead?

[ghost]

Thanks, that worked :-) The edge sharpness is #636363 and Denoise & Refine is #565656. If I mouse over it, it becomes #636363

[Thanatomanic]

Hmmmm @pseudopanax I just built RT on Linux Mint in VM and encounter no such problems. @TechXavAL @afr-e @soupygit is any of you using Linux and able to reproduce this?

[TechXavAL]

This is what I see (Linux Mint 20, not VM, RT commit cc7f1ecda):

Following the comments in this thread, I honestly don't know if what I see in my computer is the expected behavior (colors). Maybe too many borders? I have to say they don't bother me, but it seems that the capture from @pseudopanax is more simple or cleaner.

Hope it helps

[Thanatomanic]

@TechXavAL Do you see changing (background) colors when hovering over the GUI elements other than the titles of the (sub)modules?

[TechXavAL]

No. Apart from when hovering the module titles, no color change anywhere else

[ghost]

I should have added that you have to scroll the panels upwards, out of sight, and then back down again to observe the change in colour from light to medium. Then, when you mouseover the medium gray, it changes back to the light gray colour. This does not occur in any of the first three tabs, which are medium gray and stay that way, no matter what you do. The RawTherapee-legacy theme is also completely stable as are all the TooWaBlue/Grey themes.

[Thanatomanic]

@pseudopanax Even when reducing the window size to a very minimal height and much scrolling with panels expanded or not, I cannot reproduce. I would very much like to see a screencast of this behavior, and I hope someone else can confirm it.

[ghost]

Here is a screencast.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/65723152/103660507-f5df1700-4f6d-11eb-9fa3-a880f09b6951.mp4

[ghost]

@Thanatomanic Scrolling through the different menus I have found a third panel color #6E6E6E (Local adjustments>Blur/Grain & Denoise>Denoise). If you look at the bottom of the attached image you can see a staggered view of the three background panel colors.

[afr-e]

I don't have this issue on Windows 10, but I do notice my fans ramping up and down, and hover transitions sometimes slightly slower. Edit: the theme feels a bit overdone to me. I know we have been enthusiastic about improving it lately.

[ChasingShadows]

@pseudopanax which theme are you using?

[Thanatomanic]

@pseudopanax the theme should definitely not do this if everything is working properly. I believe the AppImage contains the proper CSS files, but just to be sure, can you try the latest AppImage from here and try again?

[ghost]

@pseudopanax which theme are you using?

I am using the new RawTherapee theme in the dev builds (as opposed to the existing RT theme in v5.8 which has been renamed RawTherapee-legacy in dev).

[ghost]

@Thanatomanic

can you try the latest AppImage from here and try again?

Exactly the same behaviour using RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2713-g0362578_20210109.AppImage I also observed the same behavior when I built the last commit prior to merge. The test was again carried out on two separate machines both running updated Ubuntu 18.04

A few observations which may help to narrow down the problem:

1. The first three tabs are OK and use a background panel color of #565656 (this is the color I prefer).
2. In the Advanced tab, the problem occurs in the Retinex/Settings panel, the Ciecam/Image Adjustments panel and in all of the Wavelet Levels panels. The color changes in these cases from #565656 to #636363
3. In the Local Adjustments tab, The whole tab exhibits the problem with a third background color #6E6E6E appearing in the Blur/Grain Denoise tool. This latter is particularly bad as all three colours can appear simultaneously in various parts depending on the mouse movement. EDIT: I forgot to add that in the Transform tab, the problem is in all panels from Lens Geometry/Rotate onwards

[ghost]

@Thanatomanic , I fired up a 3rd identical machine (Dell Optiplex 3020) running fully updated Win 10 this time to see if there were any issues. The results are interesting:

1. As observed in similar tests with Win10, the erratic behaviour does not occur
2. The use of the different shades of gray is inconsistent across the different tabs.
3. The first three tabs use #484848 & #565656
4. The following tabs use either #484848/#565656 or #565656/#636363 . In the case of Local Adjustments>Blur/Grain & Denoise #636363 has been replaced by #6E6E6E
5. The erratic behaviour under Ubuntu corresponds exactly to the tabs mentioned in 4 above. It may be that the correlation is fortuitous but in the interests of consistency and readability, I think that it would be worth aligning all the panel colors with the first 3 tabs. The combination of lighter colored body text along with the lighter gray panel backgrounds make these parts of the interface hard to read and the inconsistency in panel backgrounds does not look very professional. EDIT: the test was run with the following build RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2713-g036257859_20210109_win64.zip

[TechXavAL]

@pseudopanax

This is how I see it in Mint (Ubuntu):

Note: in the image where it says «First nested» it should say «First level nested», and «Second nested» should say «Second level nested»

Here the behaviour is not inconsistent, but really consistent all along the program. May you confirm that you don't see the same?

If we see the same, then we can discuss if making any subsequent group of controls having a lighter background (that is, going from darker to lighter background the deeper the controls are nested) is adequate or not.

[Thanatomanic]

I use color: rgba(...) for the CSS rules that define the background color of nested panels. There might be a strange incompatibility with the alpha channel that is not being rendered properly on @pseudopanax' machine. That is pretty much the only thing I can imagine that has an influence here.

As for the inconsistent (sub)panel colors in general, imo this is due to inconsistent use of nested GUI elements, not inconsistent CSS. This is something that needs to be fixed separately.

[ghost]

I use color: rgba(...) for the CSS rules that define the background color of nested panels. There might be a strange incompatibility with the alpha channel that is not being rendered properly on @pseudopanax' machine. That is pretty much the only thing I can imagine that has an influence here.

Edit: This would have to be specific to the Ubuntu desktop as I have tried it on two separate installations. I know virtually next to nothing about CSS so this is just a wild guess but could there be a conflict somewhere in the default background color definitions?

As for the inconsistent (sub)panel colors in general, imo this is due to inconsistent use of nested GUI elements, not inconsistent CSS. This is something that needs to be fixed separately.

Whatever the cause, the impression you get is that the panels in Wavelets and Local adjustments (and parts of Transform) are lighter. The subtleties of the nesting are lost given the size of the panels and the number of sliders.

[ghost]

For information, I have just tested the last available Appimage ( RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2735-g8bb06c2_20210121.AppImage ) on a clean install of Ubuntu 20.04 and can confirm that the problem is identical to that experienced with Ubuntu 18.04 As it stands the modified GUI does not appear to be fit for purpose on either of the current LTS versions of Ubuntu.

[Thanatomanic]

@pseudopanax Unfortunately I still cannot reproduce on my freshly installed Ubuntu 20.04 within VirtualBox on Windows 10.

[TechXavAL]

@Thanatomanic

Not the same behavior, but maybe somehow related?

I have just downloaded the latest appimage (RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2735-g8bb06c2_20210121.AppImage, same as the one @pseudopanax has tried), and I've run it in a native linux box (Linux Mint 20.1, which uses the same codebase as Ubuntu 20.04, so mostly the same, but not exactly the same).

Even if I can't see a problem with those shades of grey, I can see a pretty noticeable difference between the appimage and my locally compiled version:

(this is how I see it when compiling it «at home»)

(this is how the appimage looks)

The appimage render is more compressed, the sliders are thinner, and the slider knobs have a stronger shadow on the lower area. The text seems to be a bit smaller, too.

Perhaps those differences and the ones pointed out by @pseudopanax are caused by an external library, which is not exactly the same among different distros, including the appimage?

Just a thought

[ghost]

Perhaps those differences and the ones pointed out by @pseudopanax are caused by an external library

On my machine, the colour-change problem is the same on both the AppImage and a locally compiled version

I can see a pretty noticeable difference between the appimage and my locally compiled version:

I can't see any noticeable difference between the two versions on my machine. However, switching between the new version of the GUI and the legacy version shows that the new version takes up more screen space and is not as elegant.

[ghost]

[ghost]

For information, I borrowed a third machine running Ubuntu 18.04 (a Lenovo Thinkpad T420 laptop) and ran the Appimage RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2854-g1c9d1f5_20210510.AppImage The behaviour was the same as previously reported using two different Dell desktops running Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 respectively. The problem is slightly less distracting on the laptop because the screen contrast is lower than on the desktop monitor but it is still noticeable.

[Thanatomanic]

@pseudopanax I just tested again with the RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2856-g3cb6e88_20210512.AppImage on a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 installation in my VM. When running the AppImage you have the choice to integrate it with the system. I tested both options, but I cannot reproduce any glitches in the GUI.

I don't know anything else to try to help you out. It's weird you can reproduce it on two other machines, and I have not. Maybe it's something about the VM, but I can hardly imagine...

[ghost]

I don't know anything else to try to help you out

I'm not sure that this problem is specific to me given that it has been reproduced on several machines. To recap: -It has been reproduced on 3 different PCs: 2 Dell Optiplex 3020 (one running Ubuntu fully updated 18.04, one with 20.04) (tests on a 3rd Dell Optiplex running Win10 to see if it was somehow hardware/firmware related did not show any anomalies). 1 Lenovo Thinkpad T420 running Ubuntu 18.04

-The problem exists only with the new RT GUI. The legacy GUI and all the TooWaaBoo interfaces behave perfectly normally. It has also been tested both with the nightly Appimage builds and with locally compiled versions.

Because it may not be immediately apparent to anybody trying to reproduce the problem, here is a specific case that may help:

-The problem does not exist in any of the first 3 tabs but tends to appear when there are several layers of nested panels. e.g. in Local Adjustments.

-to reproduce: -open Local Adjustments, add a spot and add Blur/Grain & Denoise. -expand the Denoise section -pull the scroll bar downwards to reveal the rest of the Denoise panel. -at this stage, you should see that only half of the panel is a light grey colour and that the other half is a dark grey. -what happens next depends on whether the whole of the Denoise panel is visible or not. -if it is completely visible, then swiping the mouse cursor quickly from the very bottom of the panel upwards and past the Denoise label will make the whole panel change to the light grey color. This only works if you can swipe the panel completely from bottom to top, otherwise, the behaviour is more erratic and you will see the colour change under certain cursors but not over the complete panel.

There are other scenarios and other tabs that produce the same effect (e.g the Raw tab with everything expanded) but this one seems to be the easiest to produce.

Needless to say that the flickering colour changes make this version of the GUI practically impossible to use.

[Thanatomanic]

Just to be clear, I wasn't dismissing your bug. It's just that when I cannot reproduce, I cannot find a fix either, except to roll back all css changes.

@Beep6581 What do you reckon?