digiKam Image Editor Usability Improvements… (screencast)

I am currently working with Andi Clemens to improve some important usability issues in Image Editor and Showfoto.

In April, Risto Saukonpää, the designer (and photographer) who re-designed digikam.org website and digiKam logo (updates coming about those) provided a great mockup and ideas for Showfoto how to speed-up workflow during image editing.

Well, i'm happy to say that work is in progress in KDE3 branch. I have written a new API for editor named Editor Tool and it will be used for all image plugins. The goal is to remove all independent plugin dialogs and have them as embedded plugins on editor window itself. Preview is stacked over canvas and settings placed as a dedicated tab in right sidebar. The API will plug and unplug all tools automaticlally when changing between them.

Currently only two editor tools have been fully ported to Editor Tool API: Raw Import and Adjust Curves. There is a video of these tools in action below:

See the full screen video (ogg - 10Mb)

Of course, the plan is to port all plugins as well. In future there will be no more dialogs in editor... The new API is already ported to KDE4 and the RawImport tool is working fine too. First we will port all plugins on KDE3 branch to a new API, before backporting the code to KDE4 branch.

Andi is working with new widgets used in image plugins, so we are able to reset each values independently in tools settings. This includes all combo boxes, double input and integer input widgets.