Fade white balance and color enhance in Gimp 2.10.8

wh · **Joined:** Mar 20, 2019 **Posts:** 2

GIMP Version: 2.10.8
Operating System: Linux
OS Version: Ubuntu 18.04
GIMP Experience: Basic Level

I have been restoring old photos with gimp 2.8.22. My favourite tools have been color-auto-white balance and color-auto-color enhance, but since they often produce too white or too saturated results, I have used edit-fade command with a slide bar to select just the right amount of white balance or color enhance. Now I installed gimp 2.10.8. (in hope of getting one bug fixed), but I can't find the old slide bar fading for these tools. There is edit-fade but the dialogue is totally different. Is it still possible to do the old way of fading with a slide bar and see the results immediately? Or is the only way to install the old gimp back?

racer-x · **Joined:** Apr 15, 2017 **Posts:** 1837

You could simply duplicate your image layer, apply your auto adjustments to that layer, then use your opacity slider to fine tune. You can also play with blending modes.

ofnuts · **Joined:** Oct 25, 2010 **Posts:** 4812

wh wrote:

GIMP Version: 2.10.8
Operating System: Linux
OS Version: Ubuntu 18.04
GIMP Experience: Basic Level

I have been restoring old photos with gimp 2.8.22. My favourite tools have been color-auto-white balance and color-auto-color enhance, but since they often produce too white or too saturated results, I have used edit-fade command with a slide bar to select just the right amount of white balance or color enhance. Now I installed gimp 2.10.8. (in hope of getting one bug fixed), but I can't find the old slide bar fading for these tools. There is edit-fade but the dialogue is totally different. Is it still possible to do the old way of fading with a slide bar and see the results immediately? Or is the only way to install the old gimp back?

Functionality is the same if you use the "Normal" mode. The old fade was just blending the initial/final layers with a varying opacity. However, I just found a problem with it, that may or may not apply to you.

This said, your technique has problems, because all the global color/level changes entail some amount of color loss, which is related to the amount of change. So going full-scale and then fading may make you lose more colors than necessary. This is however somewhat less visible in high-precision processing as you can do in Gimp 2.10.

Edit: so, anyway, Edit>Fade will be a thing of the past:

Quote:

This commit completely removes the "Edit -> Fade..." feature,
because...

- The main reason is that "fade" requires us to keep two buffers,
instead of one, for each fadeable undo step, doubling (or worse,
since the extra buffer might have higher precision than the
drawable) the space consumed by these steps. This has notable
impact when editing large images. This overhead is incurred even
when not actually using "fade", and since it seems to be very
rarely used, this is too wasteful.

- "Fade" is broken in 2.10: when comitting a filter, we copy the
cached parts of the result into the apply buffer. However, the
result cache sits after the mode node, while the apply buffer
should contain the result of the filter *before* the mode node,
which can lead to wrong results in the general case.

- The same behavior can be trivially achieved "manually", by
duplicating the layer, editing the duplicate, and changing its
opacity/mode.

- If we really want this feature, now that most filters are GEGL
ops, it makes more sense to just add opacity/mode options to the
filter tool, instead of having this be a separate step.

rich2005 · **Joined:** Mar 04, 2011 **Posts:** 2615

ofnuts wrote:

However, I just found a problem with it, that may or may not apply to you.

Probably will not apply. The dimming does not happen on my kubuntu installation, so I think it is a KDE desktop effect - Dialogue Box Parent

ofnuts · **Joined:** Oct 25, 2010 **Posts:** 4812

rich2005 wrote:

ofnuts wrote:

The dimming does not happen on my kubuntu installation, so I think it is a KDE desktop effect - Dialogue Box Parent

Will look into this, but then why is this the only Gimp dialog where this happens?

OTOH see the edit to my post...

Edit: Indeed a matter of "Dim parent" setting.

sallyanne · **Posted:** Sun Mar 24, 2019 1:54 pm **(#6)**

You are probably better off using levels and adjusting the white balance yourself than using auto wh

wh · **Joined:** Mar 20, 2019 **Posts:** 2

Thank you for your answers! It turned out that for my amateur use it was fastest solution to install the old gimp back. The newer gimp was also very slow to run, which was frustrating.