Omitting a Branch from recalculations

[tomczak]

When making a shooting target, the workspace is fairly long and complicated, and thus slow updating on my old laptop. I can temporarily turn off individual transformations in the branches, starting from the bottom for efficiency, but then I need to turn them all again one by one (this time starting from the top for the same reason) after I'm done with the changes in more than one transformation that I don't want to propagate down right away.

Would it make sense to be able to turn on and off the whole branch in one go?

[tomczak]

If the above is a viable idea, perhaps this could also work at the splitter level turning on and off all the branches under it in one go?

[jsachs]

I was planning to add this as an extra button in the image browser to act on all currently selected images. The multiple selection commands permit selecting entire branches or parts of branches.

[davidh]

Maciejs's suggestion reminds me of a similar one I made long time ago, or at least I think I made it.

Since than I have often been thinking about an alternate solution based on a simple Stop transformation. Something like Bypass transformation with the difference that when placed in a tree, any recalculation would stop there simulating there are no more transformations to follow.

It would solve a frequent situation when you need to make some adjustments just to a small section of neighbouring tranformations, mostly 2, before letting the recalculation proceed to the final result.

For exmple:
I create a step Warp (or some geometry),
then follows Paint with Soft Light, Color Burn, possibly Copy with a mask, etc.
Then follow other transformations.
Now I just need to edit the Geometry and also Paint until I am satisfied. The rest of the tree can wait.

I realize it can be achieved by bypassing the downstream transformation , still even the bypassed tree is probed by the refreshing process searching for a non-bypased transformations. If the tree is long and branched, it still takes some unnecessary waiting.

This would also make possible to skip refreshing a branch by placing the Stop transformation just behind a branch splitter.

[tomczak]

Perhaps adding a toggle to the Bypass Transformation: passing input to output as it does now when active, or passing nothing? as output to prevent the downstream transformations from recalculating could act as a Stop?

But then what happens if the Bypass is used as intended (i.e. it's output is used as ouxiliary input somewhere else in another branch) - would the other branch recalculate, give an error, or stay frozen when Bypass has no output, assuming it's possible?

Bypassing selected transformations in bulk with a toggle button (or two) seems even more flexible.

[jsachs]

It looks like I already implement this feature. There are buttons in the right image browser tool bar to bypass or un-bypass all selected images. You select images using the left tool bar or by Ctrl or Shift clicking on thumbnails.

[tomczak]

You have indeed - works great and the selection of toggling options makes it easy to choose and bypass any chunks of the workflow easily. Thanks!

[tomczak]

If I select all transformations, then bypass them all (except for the top transformations in branches), shuffle and adjust the transformations a bit (there are recalculations, which is great), and then un-bypass them all (to recalculate everything) - PWP seem to recalculate a branched workflow twice - not sure but it seems to go down the chain of dependencies than back up, recalculating each way. If it's true, does it have a purpose?

[jsachs]

Sounds like the code either has a problem or is not fully optimized. Will take a look when I get home.

[jsachs]

Do you have an example workspace that can reproduce this issue -- all I need is the workspace script and a description of which images you are bypassing. I took a quick look at the code and it looks like although the recalc order may appear random, it should only recalc transformations once at most.