ART newbie: How to reuse the same mask I painted in one tool in one or more other tools?

[sophisticatedDreamer]

Hi all and please excuse my ignorance:

I painted a mask over a beautiful bird sitting on an branch.
I used some fine contrast to be applied only to this masked bird - it works as expected.

My question:

Now I want to reuse this same mask elsewhere ... but I don't see / find a way how to refer to it. How can I achieve the intended reuse?

NB: I used to use darktable for years but find it's GUI and tools behaviour much less than comfortable. Thus I currently investigate ART .... having already left RawTherapee behind due to the lack of advanced selective retouching options.

[agriggio]

Hi, yes it's possible. You just have to give a name to the mask, and then it will appear in subsequent tools as a "Liked mask". "Subsequent" here means that the tool / region follows the one in which you originally defined the mask in the processing pipeline (the order is the same as you see on the screen, from top to bottom).

Here's a quick video that shows how to do it:

out.mp4

[sophisticatedDreamer]

Thank you so much for your fast reply and the short video. It led me one step further!

Is there a chance that in future development these masks can be reused "everywhere"? In darktable, we can re-use a mask created in any tool of choice also in all(!) other tools.

Example:

My bird was fine tuned in [Local editing] > [Texture Boost / Sharpening] and re-used in ... > [Local Contrast] which appears below. But when I now decide to tweak [Local editing] > [Color/Tone Correction] I cannot re-use that same mask .... though it is also placed below the [Local editing] tab.

This behaviour implies the need to create a mask always in the top tool, even when I do not intend to use it at all. But later I may realize it would be good to use it now ... but then I can't re-use a mask created below.

[agriggio]

Hi,
you are right, you can only reuse masks in tools that appear later in the pipeline. This is not something that can be relaxed easily, and I have no plans of changing it in the near future, sorry. However, you can copy/paste a mask from a tool to another freely. The masks might not be identical (because the result of parametric masks depend on where they are applied in the pipeline), but should be close enough to give you a reasonable starting point.
If this is still not enough, I'm afraid ART is not the right tool, sorry.

HTH

[sophisticatedDreamer]

Hi again -

I have been using painted masks, not parametric ones. I'm aware of parametric mask seriously depend on a single image and it's particular parameter settings. For painted masks copy/past to and from clipboard is absolutely okay,

Thanks!