The Online Photographer

In Case You Need One More DAM Program

I'm not a software expert*, so don't ask me questions and expect answers, but I wanted to pass along the news that Bridge 2024, Adobe's DAM (digital asset management) application, is reportedly available as a free download—the full, standalone version, without subscription fees ever. Here's the link; the download tab is at the top of the page. But investigate on your own...I haven't verified it because I use the subscription version of Photoshop and got the upgrade that way.

Just passing this along.

—Mike

*Understatement.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

How To REALLY Fix the Menu Problem

I really want someone to switch camera setup to interactive screens online which you then transfer to the camera. That way everything could be explained adequately and systematically. Cameras are just too complicated now for paper manuals and mazes of menus. But that's a different post for a different day.

—Me, yesterday

Okay, here's my idea. I can't believe I haven't written about this before, because it's been in my head for years. But apparently I haven't.

The best way to fix the menu problem would be with an interactive setup/tutorial website that transfers your chosen settings to your camera.

You buy a new camera. The first thing you do when you get it is to plug it in to your computer and go to the dedicated setup website.

The website is takes you through a setup tutorial, in stages. First it ascertains your basic level—new to photography, experienced, or expert. That's to prevent you from having to wade through explanations of plane-of-focus and what tracking is and what ISO means, if you don't need that. If the level you choose is too confusing to you, just revert to the next one down.

Then it runs you through a sensible explanation of the various features available and what they mean and what they allow you to do—most maybe a paragraph long but expandable if you need more information about it—and asks you if you want that feature available. As you go through page after page of the website, it asks you how you want the camera configured, and you make your selections.

You would assign functions to buttons at that time, set up the custom modes the control (PASM) dial, pick the focus mode setups you want to have available to you, and so forth.

Ideally it would let you configure the menus themselves by adding or deleting items, such that the menus contained the things you might need to change on the fly but not everything else. For example, if you always process your JPEGs in post you simply wouldn't need any of the JPEG processing options.

Then you load this "customized firmware" into your camera and a.) you've got every capability you need; b.) it's where you want it, because you put it there; and b.) you know what all of your menu items mean because you chose them and you've read through the explanations of every menu item that exists on your camera.

Note that the interactive website itself would be effectively customizable too, because you'd be asked if you want things as you go along. For me, for instance: do you want to set up flash? Nope. GPS? No thanks. Tethering options, radio control, video? No thank you, no thank you. Makes the interactive website simpler and more streamlined, you see? If you're really a geek (I don't use that term as a perjorative) then you can happily dig as deep as you want and include all sorts of esoterica in your selections.

This just seems logical to me. In my experience, there are virtually no photographers who use, or want, every capability of their digital cameras. Virtually everybody just wants a subset of "everything," whether it's a small subset or a large one. And there are many things that, even if we have them available, we don't need to have access to them in the field, i.e., when we're out photographing—we could come back to the computer and re-configure the camera prior to a specialized shoot or job, for example.

The fewer button-pushes you have to make in the field, the better. Sony realized this when it set up some of its AF options to automatically revert to certain behaviors without having to select them in the menus. (See: Eye-AF.)

But never say never
I'm sure there are lots of reasons why this will "never" happen, but it's not my job to only talk about things that are immediately feasible based on current customs and norms. I look at things from the perspective of the photography enthusiast. That's whose interests I care about.

Mike

Book of Interest this week:

The Education of a Photographer, Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, Allworth Press, 2006, 256 pages. A small but rich gold mine of short essays and interviews by and about photographers. Also available from The Book Depository with free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Is It Okay to Shoot Down a Drone?

There's a great article in the latest New Yorker about ownership. It starts off by relating the case of one William Merideth, who shot down a drone that hovered over his property while his daughter was sunbathing. It discusses all forms of ownership, starting with the idea that property owners also own the air above their property out to where the stars begin and down to the center of the Earth, an ancient legal principle called Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos. Eventually the discussion segues to the online world, where the article makes the case that we're all fast becoming "e-peons." We used the word peon as a put-down in high-school, so I'm familiar with it. It might also be familiar to you if you're a rapper—according to dailyrapfacts, "The slang term 'Peon' or 'Peons' are nouns and adjectives...used by rappers and in the music industry to reference a lame, low class or low status person (someone who is at the bottom of the food chain)."

"The digital and smart devices that surround us are legion, but we do not truly own or control them," writes Joshua A.T. Fairfield, in the book Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom. Having just spent a week wrangling with "my" computer, or rather Apple's computer that's in my house, and pondering again the headache of 3-2-1 backups, I really do wonder how much of what's on "my" computer and how it works is really under my control. Not as much as I like to think, I suspect. A number of years ago Apple sold the writing program I used, and the new owners (after several ownership changes) discontinued it, and before you knew it all those files that I had worked so hard on were un-openable. My work was lost. How that's conceptually different from someone breaking into my house and stealing stacks of paper on which I had written with india ink and a quill pen, I don't know.

I've always been against the idea of self-driving cars, because all I see is a future in which everyone will have to pay a monthly fee to participate in the program of whoever is supplying the guidance and coordinating system. I don't want to pay a monthly fee to drive. "If we do not take back our ownership rights," Fairfield writes in his newest book, Runaway Technology, we will only be able to use "our smart devices, our homes, our cars, and even our own software-enabled medical implants purely at the whim of others."

Are "my" digital pictures really mine? To what extent and to what degree can someone other than me control or limit my access to them? I don't know.

I also have a feeling I don't want to know....

Anyway, good reading. Check it out.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal (Penguin, 2020. Adapted from the popular podcast.)

This link is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Also, TOP is sponsored by:

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob L (partial comment): "I haven't shot down a drone, but I may have practiced casting and hooked the drone hovering over my backyard trying to video the pool next door. Darn accidents, what can I say?(drone rotors and fishing line are not friends....)"

Christopher Crawford: "A peon is a person enslaved by debt. The term originated in Spain's colonies in the 1500s when the King, under pressure from the church, outlawed the enslavement of the natives in Mexico. Peonage replaced slavery. Technically the peon was not a slave, but they depended on a nobleman who rented farmland to them at prices higher than they could pay, forcing them to pay off the debt (which always got larger) with free labor. This system was called Peonage, and a Peon was a person enslaved by it. In some Spanish colonies, African slaves were imported; peonage was less common in those places than it was in places like Mexico where few black slaves were brought in."

Geoff Wittig: "I intermittently try to remember to save a copy of my favorite image files as a TIFF in hopes that I'll be able to open them down the road even if Adobe disappears and Photoshop is dead. Which might strike people as a ludicrous concern, until you think about what happened to Lotus. Back in the day they wrote the spreadsheet software the entire business world used, but then they were crushed by Microsoft and disappeared almost overnight. I suspect (don't know because I'm a spreadsheet illiterate) that countless businesses and financial people lost painstakingly written macros and custom spreadsheets when that happened. So it bothers me to think that I don't really 'own' my own multi-layered Photoshop image files because Adobe might some day just stop supporting them. Kinda like having thousands of slides and having the last bulb for the last slide projector burn out."

mike rosenlof: " I suspect you may get other comments like this, but I don't think it's a good analogy to compare writings lost inside no-longer-supported files formats to theft of paper from your house. I think it's a better comparison would be if you stored your files on eight-inch floppies and now you can't find a reader. For that matter, any floppies, SCSI disks, etc. Technology marches on and doesn't necessarily pull the old baggage with it. You have written about how to make sure one's photos survive. Option no. 1, 'Be famous' if I recall correctly. This is a recurring issue for any creations in the digital realm. Digitally stored material requires active maintenance to ensure the work makes it across generations of technology.

"I readily admit that I don't practice what I preach. I print many photos, but I have a lot of stuff I've written that exists only in digital form. I have good backups, but they're all on SATA spinning disk drives.... P.S. checkout Open Office Writer; it opens several file formats that are no longer current."

James Bullard: "Re The drone question: No, you may not shoot down drones and you don't own the airspace above your property all the way out to the stars. You are however entitled to a certain degree of privacy and drones should not be flown over private property for the purpose of invading your privacy. Legally, in the U.S., all the airspace is controlled by the FAA and drone pilots are obliged to follow FAA rules for flying drones."

Rip Smith: "The problem of technical obsolescence of data is a great argument for printing the best of your photographs and even written pieces."

Dave Sailer: "Not there yet, but some are working on it, like these three, in laptop space. MNT Reform: ...take a look under the hood, customize the documented electronics, and even repair it yourself if you like. The Reform laptop has no built-in surveillance technologies, cameras, or microphones.... Librem 14: The first 14" laptop designed to protect your digital life. Ultra-portable workstation laptop that was designed chip-by-chip, line-by-line, to respect your rights to privacy, security, and freedom. PINEBOOK: Pinebook is a lightweight, low-cost notebook designed and manufactured by the company Pine64...its appearance resembles the MacBook Air...The Pinebook is sold at-cost by pine64 as a community service."

Update: MJ Antes Up and Buys In

Well that was fast! Without even waiting for the 30-day trial period to expire I actually went ahead and bought Capture One 20 for Fuji only (let's call that C1-20F). It's $129 plus tax, which seemed reasonable.

A couple of nice points for Fuji shooters:

• For any given picture you're working on, C1-20F automatically recognizes which Fuji lens you used, and of course it knows the aperture you shot the picture at, too, so it automatically applies specific lens corrections for your lens at that aperture. I believe DxO pioneered this capability, back in days of yore, and I was always fascinated by it and attracted to the idea.
• Moose was talking about noise reduction the other day, and I rather cheekily answered that I like noise. But this is nice: the engineers at Fuji and the software developers at Phase One put their heads together and gave C1-20F default noise corrections for all the different Fuji cameras at every ISO. So C1-20F knows I'm using an X-H1, and if I took a certain picture at ISO 1600, the software knows how much noise reduction such a file taken with my sensor is likely to need, and it goes ahead and applies that as a default. Way cool. (Of course you can customize it from there if you wish or even change the default, to taste.)

It's beginning to seem to me like C1-20 for Fuji should be thought of as an accessory for a Fuji camera. Something that goes along with it and complements it. I may never set noise reduction myself again.  :-)  I'm being tongue in cheek, but in principle I'm perfectly copacetic with deferring to whatever Fujifilm and Phase One agree is appropriate. I'm sure they know better than I do. I never know how the heck much noise reduction to apply when I do it myself.

Another thing I'm sold on is Capture One's level of support. There are plentiful videos and webinars on various topics, and the online User Guide is great, mainly in that it goes into enough detail but not too much. That's a tough balance to get right: so many instructional guides just load you up on useless and semi-useless detail which you then have to wade through (think swamp, muck) to retrieve the information you need. So tiresome*. On the other hand, oversimplified information doesn't have enough content and sometimes doesn't contain what you need. From what I can tell so far, Phase One's Capture One User Guide gets that elusive balance right: enough, but not too much. And, not too much, but enough. Both are critical!

No fingers pointed, but that is gold sez me. Gold.

It's a fair analogy for C1 itself, actually. It's pretty much just for photographers—let's say "camera users"—and doesn't do all the rest of the graphic arts and prepress etc. etc. etc. stuff that Photoshop does. Of course it does support tethering sessions, which is its "legacy" function.

Luma Range
By the way, in case you're wondering what "luminosity masking" is—a couple of people in the Comments were talking about it—it's been in Capture One since v.12, and it's hiding out under the Exposure tool tab:

Exposure Tool Tab in Capture One 20

Look for the words "Luma Range" once you open up a new Layer.

It allows you to selectively apply a mask based on tonal values in an image. Here's an excellent tutorial on it by Kasia Zmokla of Digital Art Classes. (I dig Kasia's accent. Anything that makes tutorials more engaging is good.) The really cool thing about Luma Range masking, as it's called in C1, is that once you set the parameters, you can apply it with zero extra work to other poses taken under the same lighting. That's the real time savings it offers. I'm sure you can do something similar in other image editing programs too if you know how.

Update upshot
So anyway, now my diddling around has ratcheted up and become an order of magnitude more focused, because I've dived happily into C1-20 tutorials and guides and so forth.

Don't know how the fire got lit this time around, but at the moment it seems like a program I can wrap my head around, and that does everything I need it to do. Like I say, one that might be considered an accessory for my Fuji. As always with these things with me, only time will really tell.

Mike

*It's a time-honored tradition in instructional books to include a lot of filler on basic camera or darkroom or digital (or whatever) technique, just to increase the page count and make the product seem like a decent value for money. I hate that. Even camera manuals used to do it! Long, long ago, sort of at the end of my "sponge" period with photography, I read yet another entire instructional book and it hit me: I realized that there had been only about four pages in the entire book that contained information I didn't already know. From then on I kinda had a dim view of instructional books, and approached them with skepticism. The books I liked along the way were the ones that actually had something in them I could learn. Those exist, but as you learn more and more they become relatively few and far between.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Great big thanks to everybody who supports TOP

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

More Diddling With Converters and Editing Programs

Well it's an absolutely delightful morning this morning—it snowed last night, and the snow stuck, and this morning it was coating the branches of the trees and covering everything with white frosting. Brilliant, beautiful clear sunlight crept down the far shore and across the lake lighting everything up. One of my peculiar mental idiosyncrasies is that I think I always have to photograph new snow, but this morning I decided to just enjoy it rather than photograph it. So I walked around outdoors with the doggerels and watched the sun bejewel the treetops and slowly clothe the trees in blazing white and diamonds. Loverly.

Cold out there, though. Oddly, this is climate change—the models predict warmer Autumns (check, in '19) and colder Springs (check, so far); the seasons are shifting. October will be the new September. April is the new March. We should dread this, and yet...it's so pretty out there. I hope the snow doesn't hurt the forsythia blooms.

Working very hard doing very little
I had a supremely unproductive day yesterday continuing to diddle with various raw converters and image editing programs. I worked very hard all day and got nothing at all done, with nothing resolved whatsoever. I was so intensely focused on this non-work that I could barely tear myself away and get to bed two hours late.

An aside: Here is what I would do if I were Fuji. As a marketing experiment, I would make a desirable, mainstream, mid-tier camera model (i.e., not a beginner's camera) available with both an X-Trans sensor and with a Bayer sensor, buyer's choice, and see which one sells better. Just so they'd know. I'm not saying I could guess the outcome of the experiment, but I think it might be valuable marketing knowledge. They might just find they sell more cameras of one than the other, or—who knows—they might find they sell more cameras overall by offering the choice. I mean, what if they did that and the Bayer model sold three times as much as the X-Trans? Or, what if both sold strongly and they made new converts left and right? Even if people continued to buy the X-Trans model and gave the Bayer model the cold shoulder, they'd learn they were on the right track and should stay the course.

But I digress.

What did you do staying at home?
Yesterday I downloaded a trial of the new Capture One Pro 20, which turns out to be the first Capture One I've experimented with in more than five years. I got out PhotoNinja and Affinity Photo, watched a video for Alien Skin Exposure5, explored ACR in comparisons to the others, and discovered that Lightroom comes with my Photoshop CC subscription...who knew? I've always been interested in DxO—I'm a fan of that company, unlike some—but of course DxO doesn't support Fuji, so that's that until I switch to Canon or something. (People who think I switch camera brands all the time should know that the first and last Canon I owned was an EOS RT bought new. If that doesn't date me I don't know what will. I liked it a lot, and have nothing at all against Canon. Just haven't gone in their direction, is all. OG has an R but won't tell us what he thinks of it.) 

My version of PhotoNinja was so old it crashed repeatedly. A short visit to Lightroom was just to remind myself that I'm allergic to its UI (I know how mainstream it is, but I've never cottoned to it). The Exposure5 bundle seems best at arty presets that make photographs look like chalk drawings and so forth, and I'm too much of a standard modernist (that is, photographs should look like photographs) to have any use for all that—I stopped short of downloading the trial version.

No affinity
I own Affinity Photo, but if there was ever an editing application that I have no affinity for, it's Affinity. That program just stops me cold again and again, so absurdly that it makes me laugh—generally, it's either confirming that I'm an idiot, or it's cruelly taunting me by making me look like one. Either way I'm an idiot.

Yesterday I opened up my test image in it, clicked on the magnifying glass, clicked on the image, and the image enlarged. As expected. Clicked again and the image enlarged again. Looked for how to make the image smaller or fit the window again and...couldn't find the control for that! Stopped dead in my tracks! I felt like such an incredible imbecile that I just laughed and decided to keep looking until I found a way to zoom the image back out again. How hard could that be? How could such a simple action be so hard to figure out? I looked and looked, in vain. Any percentage indication, anywhere? No. Any key turn the little "+" on the magnifier icon to a "–"? Not that I could find. Eventually, and I mean eventually, I managed to stumble upon, and open, a kludgey little pane in the lower right with a size slider in it, which was awkward to use and too sensitive. Is that it? How could that possibly be it? There's got to be some shortcut I missed.

It feels like something similar has happened to me half a dozen times with Affinity, seemingly each time gird myself and strap on the armor and wade into battle with it. I get to a certain stage and just get stopped cold by something which, to my small mind at least, ought to be simple. One time I had an image open and was happily making all sorts of changes to it when, all of a sudden, the controls stopped having any effect. The image just sat there looking at me, I sat there looking at it, and every control I clicked on did nothing to anything. What had I done? How could I back out of whatever I had done? I tried everything I could think of, looked up some Help sources that were no help (this is my general experience with image editing programs, by the way—the Help is of no help). Finally frustration boils up, bailure level is achieved, and I bail. I never did figure that one out, but that and other such experiences have left me with a "caution response" to Affinity, similar, say, to the way you feel about a restaurant after something you eat there gives you a bowel-twisting bout of Monty's revenge.

Many paths
It does seem to be the case that trials of the sort I presented yesterday are of little value. I ended up believing that the tools are relatively unimportant and the settings are what matter. (I think at least one commenter said as much.) I had to go back and re-process the test image using X Raw Converter when Guy Couture noted the "worms" in the tree-trunk. Which initially I was going to make fun of, but, on reflection and with a slight application of maturity, I have to admit does look to be a sharpening artifact. Then I had to confront the likelihood that my demonstrations were merely determined by the amount of sharpening applied, and face the vexation of trying to match sharpening levels between different programs that of course apply sharpening in different ways. Stephen Scharf accused me of not knowing the Iridient software well enough to get the best out of it, to which I can only plead nolo contendre—anybody who can figure out that software ought to be working as a programmer.

To paraphrase something Frank McLaughlin of Kodak said long ago about dye transfer, one lifetime is not long enough to master both photography and all the image editors out there. Above this whole subject should hang the Dantean warning All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here.

Which brings me to Capture One 20 (C1-20). I'm loathe to say goodbye to yet another hefty wallop of cash for a big lump of code that's going to sit in my Applications folder and mock me till I'm old, joining the crowd already there, but C1-20 does look to be the joint for Fuji X-Trans. From what I read hither and yon the two companies seem to have put their heads together, and C1-20 is probably the prime candidate to stand up as a challenger to the mighty but aging and overweight champion, Adobe. The controls appear to be flexible and subtle, yet remain somewhere in the vicinity of simple. Results are formidably good. The program does have Fuji's own camera presets baked in. It's responsive. You can click back and forth between fit-in-view and 100%. (I have yet to figure out how to do a "save as," though. It's always something.) Friend Stephen notes that C1's David Grover, one of the software developers for the program, has a series of 20 video tutorials currently available for $29. The YouTube trailer for the series begins with the rubric "Take the leap into Capture One," which is prescient of them, as it's exactly what I'm hesitant about doing. I am not a leaper. I am a toe-dipper-inner.

At least there appears to be a way to simply buy the dang application instead of letting them stick a needle in your vein to drain blood.

Image first
But here's another point I often reach when diddling about with image editing programs. I usually start—and in fact I learned what I know—by looking at the image first and determining what I think it needs. Then I'll go and figure out how to do that. I don't do anything just because I can. Because I've been using Photoshop for so long, I have a basket o' tricks—things I want to do that I know how to do. So what happens when I'm using other programs is that I'll be motoring along doing well enough, and then I'll reach a point where I want to pull one of my usual PS tricks out of the basket and apply it...only, in the new software, I don't know how. Impatience floods in, and I get antsy to pull the image out of whatever it's in and take it to Photoshop so I can have my way with it.

It's not that I'm dubious about my ability to find my way around C1-20 if I work at it; it's that I'm pretty sure the time will come when I will want something in ACR or PSCC and just get impatient to get the job done. That's what usually puts me off of the pretenders, not that Adobe is so great. On the other hand, this is my 26th year with Adobe. Maybe it's getting old and fat, but we've gotten old and fat together. I do wish I could stop donating blood though....

In conclusion: perhaps we are once again in the land of "many paths, similar destination." My idea after all this is that intimate familiarity with an image editor is probably more important than the choice of which image editor to use (same thing that's true of cameras). Blank slate, clean sheet, I'd probably recommend C1-20 for Fujiphiles (ha! You see what I did there). But, familiarity with your software is probably more important than which software you choose. (Well, as long as you have an affinity for it.)

More to come in 29 days, when the C1-20 trial period runs out. At least I should be able to report then whether I took the plunge and plumped for the package or not, which in turn will reflect on how much work I did getting to know it in between today and then. Based on my track record, that's not likely to be much—I do get pulled in all sorts of directions. Then again, I have more time on my hands than usual, what with trying to dodge the dread COVID. We shall see.

Okay, couldn't resist just one—the view out the kitchen window a little earlier

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Everybody needs a little support

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

hugh crawford: "I’m getting flashbacks of long discussions of metol vs. phenidone."

Mike replies: Made me laugh. And the correct answer is, mostly metol (a.k.a. Elon, remember that?) with a dash of hydroquinone for superadditivity.

hugh: "'Compensating developers,' 'develop to exhaustion,' 'adjacency effect,' 'Mackie lines,' 'high acutance'...still having flashbacks....

"When a raw processor has sliders labeled dilution and agitation give me a call (for twice as much money the agitation slider will be two sliders named burst frequency and duration I suppose)."

Steve Rosenblum: "FYI: The David Grover Capture One tutorials on CreativeLive use Capture one 10 which is several versions ago. There is decent starter course for v. 20 on Lynda.com (Now linked in learning). David has produced a number of free intro tutorials on the Capture One YouTube site, and Ted Forbes has a number of C1 videos on his Art of Photography YouTube site."

Michael J. Perini: "Mike, for what it's worth, I think you are doing what you have to do. If you want to know which application works best for the combination of Fuji X-Trans Files and your preferred method of working, you have to try a bunch.

"Auditioning new software is always a pain. Since there will be no application that replicates the way you work now, all you can do is find the one with the most potential, then take the time to learn it. Every application seems to have its own way of making certain simple things hard. Which of course mostly comes from how it differs from our learned habits. Like cameras, software has to be learned well enough so that most operations can become second nature. There is no shortcut.

"I have the same urge to abandon and go back to a familiar workflow, but it is counterproductive. Instead of starting with new pictures, make a Project of 25 favorite X-Trans files that you have already edited to your satisfaction. But besides the 25 Raw files, include a 16b TIFF of your best edit of the picture, and import those as well. Then in each program you try you will have Raw Files, a reference TIFF so you can first try to duplicate your efforts in each program, then try to make the edit better. Save both; compare again. Nothing wrong with working on new files too, but the 25 create a known point of reference on which to base tests. And FYI C1 now has a subscription model that they are pushing. They also seem to have a new version of the stand-alone every year. If you keep the same camera, you do not have to upgrade, but should you buy a new camera, you may need the new version (I would check that if it is important to you). Good Luck."

Adam Lanigan: "With respect to your proposed Fuji experiment, FujiRumors ran a poll a couple years back to see what that crowd thought. It's at the bottom of this long article looking at the differences between the two approaches. Of the 1,995 responses, for future APS-C cameras:

• 50% of respondents would keep Fuji's current approach (Bayer for entry level, X-trans for mid-/high-end)
• 19% would prefer only X-Trans
• 18% would like to see both options offered side-by-side
• 14% would like to see only Bayer

"If these are in any way representative of what these same rabid Fuji fans might do under actual purchase scenarios, one could infer a ~35% lead to X-Trans over Bayer (19% / 14%) (or closer to 38% if we use the non-rounded actual vote tally) given the choice."

Howard F.: "You can download and use for free the Fuji Express version of C1-20. It’s missing many of the features of the paid version but let’s you get familiar with the UI and some of the basic features."

Joe Holmes: "Before you deeply commit to Capture One as a cataloging application, beware. I used Capture One for about two years (after I discovered that my new Nikon D850 image files were not recognized by Apple Aperture), and the frustrations finally became so intolerable that, at the end of 2019, I switched to Lightroom, which I had rejected years ago because its interface felt claustrophobic. I have about 275,000 images occupying about 4 TB of a hard drive, which both Aperture's and Lightroom's catalogs could open within about 10 or 15 seconds. Capture One took three to five minutes to open a catalog of the same size. And every time I’d try to scroll through images, I'd face a spinning beachball lasting a half minute. I finally resorted to dividing the catalog into smaller catalogs just so I could use the application.

"That was the worst of many issues. I made a detailed list of interface frustrations and had it sent to Capture One engineers, but the next revision fixed none of them. I gave up. Lightroom is no Aperture, but it’s way better than Capture One at cataloging my images. (Note that I have only used Aperture, Capture One and Lightroom as cataloging applications, not for image post-production.)

"I miss Aperture."

Stephen S. Mack: "Re 'What did you do staying at home?' Well, yesterday I had a lovely conversation with a spider. She seemed very nice, told me she was a web designer...."

Mike replies: You may go sit in the corner now.

Mark Kinsman: "Visit Photopxl’s (Kevin Raber of Luminous Landscape) YouTube channel or website and watch the vidoes with Kevin and the crew from Phase One on both Capture One 12 and 20 [I didn't find any on 20, just 12 —Ed.]. Drew gives some great tips. Also, Capture One has a ton of free videos on using the software. I'm in process of cleaning up my Lightroom catalog in V6.14 of LR to completely convert to Phase One for all my work. Also, check out sessions vs. using a catalog."

Will Rabinovitch: "You don't need to spend money to get tutorials on Capture One by (the wonderful) David Grover. Just go to https://www.captureone.com/. If you click on 'Learning Hub' you'll see dozens of short tutorials and longer webinars. He's also doing sort of short live webinars on Facebook. There was one today."

Arg: "Hi Mike, I see you have already received too many pieces of advice about using Affinity Photo, but I simply have to chip in with my comments too.

"I 100% totally agree with you—nothing has ever made me feel so stupid, so often, as Affinity Photo. (Well, maybe the first time I bought and started to try to use my MacBook, my first venture away from Windows: for the first few weeks I was wondering 'What Have I Done??') My dumbest moments with Affinity Photo occur when I open an image, carefully spend a lot of time selecting a complicated area that I want to edit, then go and apply the adjustment that I want, and nothing happens! It seems so counter-intuitive that nothing should happen when you do that! So I do it again next time!

"But, regarding your hilarious experience with zooming, you have to remember that Affinity Photo was written from the ground up for Apple: it is not restricted to the way tools need to be restricted to work with Windows. If you want to zoom into or out of an image, even when you have not entered the zoom tool (magnification glass icon), all you have to do is the 'pinch' gesture on the trackpad! Furthermore, a two finger double tap will toggle the view between fit–to-screen, and 100% view. Try it!

"And, if you do choose to use the zoom tool, once you click on the tool you'll find several suggestions written along the bottom of the photo, and some easy control aids appear at the top of the photo. The suggestions definitely include how to zoom in and out: just click-and-hold on the trackpad and slide your finger left to zoom out, right to zoom in. It's almost laughably simple.

"Like you, I keep forgetting, every time I select one of the tools on the left side of the screen, to look at the top and bottom of the photo for the tips and new controls. They are very helpful, I promise!

"Don't give up though, it is genuinely rewarding and powerful piece of gear, and can be used to do fairly simple stuff quickly and efficiently. I keep telling myself that!"

Update: Fuji X Raw Studio vs. Iridient Digital X Transformer

Well, I got curious yesterday, and did a few more comparisons.

[First, a little addendum to yesterday: you don't need a card in the camera when you use X Raw Studio. You're just using the camera as a processing engine. You can attach the empty camera to the computer and then choose files that are already on your computer. The app sends them to the camera for processing and then they come back again. So it's not an "ingester" program for downloading from a card, per se.]

Yesterday, I converted my test file to .DNG using Iridient Digital X Transformer, reputed among aficionados as being one of the best raw converters for Fuji X-Trans files, then opened it in ACR and converted it to Adobe Grayscale. Since I already had the Fuji Acros + Y version made with Fuji X Raw Studio open in another tab, it was easy to toggle back and forth and compare the two.

At first, the Iridient version looked a little better. More detail, harder edges, a little more microcontrast. (If you open these up by clicking on them, they should be at 100% on your monitor. They're 800 x 500 pixels in size. You can open up both and set them next to each other so you can let your eyes go back and forth from one to the other. Again, bear in mind that the blogging software softens the images I post here just slightly.)

Iridient

Fuji

Seemed like a win for Iridient. But then I noticed something—the bare tree branches in the background seemed more smeared and less "rounded" or real in the Iridient rendering:

Iridient

Fuji

Note that the sky is a slightly different value in these. That's the effect of the "virtual yellow filter" changing the spectral response in the Fuji X Raw Studio B&W conversion. (Recall that with B&W panchromatic films, filters lighten their own color and darken their opposite, so yellow filters darken blues.)

If you disagree, I'm okay with that, but to me the lower sample looks more like tree branches. 

We're looking at quite small segments of the overall image. Here's the whole test picture again so you can calibrate to the areas you're looking at: 

One more, of the forsythia blooms at the lower left corner of the frame (these are a little out of register and I forgot to match the contrast, sorry):

Iridient on the left, Fuji X Raw Studio on the right. Again, your mileage may vary, but the Fuji version looks more like bushes and grass to me.

Now, lots of things could be different here. I might not have had the optimal settings in Iridient X Transformer; I did some research but of course different people have different recommendations. I only matched contrast visually, which might be throwing things off (selling stereos, back in another lifetime, people could seldom detect slight differences in loudness but would prefer speakers that were played slightly louder). And of course the B&W conversions are different. And neither image had sharpening or noise reduction applied (although neither seemed to need it). Bottom line, this is not a test, it's a trial. Tests, if they are well-designed experiments, provide data; trials just provide clues, or indications of which fork in the road you might want to investigate further.

Me? Well, I just got a lot more interested in Fuji X Raw Studio and Fuji's JPEGs in general.

ACR?
Lastly, I opened up the same file in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), my first step of choice for lo these many years. I converted it into "B&W Low Contrast," which is a bit funny because the conversion was higher in contrast than the other two. It also adds drama by depressing the midtones somewhat, sort of the opposite of what Fuji's Acros + Y does by default. It looks slick but doesn't give me the feeling of sunlight on a white house.

But it looks good, and of course you can tweak it further to taste.

It's surprising, though, how difficult it is to get anything like an exact match across these three methods of raw conversion plus B&W conversion. All three look quite different—not hugely so, but it's also just not easy to get one to match the other. The defaults are different and the available controls are different.

ACR doesn't do a bad job at all, by comparison with the other two. In one way it seems better than both: its detail rendering is smoother and has better edges and is lacking in hints of artifacts. I don't have the B&W controls I would like for refinements, but then, that's what image editing programs are for. I'm currently exiled from the B&W converter I used to use, Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, but I keep meaning to either re-buy that or go find another one. (I'm reluctant to buy a plug-in for a program I rent for $9.99 a month. Plus 51¢ tax.)

I think I've decided what I'm going to do from now on: a.) switch to the higher quality of JPEG when shooting JPEG + raw, with the "Classic Chrome" profile (which I like best of Fuji's color presets), and b.) use the JPEG as the first resort when preparing a color photograph, rather than going to raw first as I've been doing since Bruce's book came out in 2005; and c.) when I want to make a B&W image, use the camera and Acros + Y in X Raw Studio to do the initial conversion. (Fuji's detail seems to me to mimic lenses that have good large-structure contrast, meaning, a high value on the 5 lp/mm line of MTF charts but not so high on, say, the 40 lp/mm line. That's the look I like. But that is another post.)

My A, B, and C choices are just me and my tastes with this X-H1 camera, though, not a recommendation for anybody else.

Fuji X-H1 / X Raw Studio JPEG with "Acros + Y" preset

800x500 pixel detail from above, unsharpened (pretty!). Should be
100% for you after you click on it.

(Tentative) conclusion: the folks at Fuji really know what they're doing.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Everyone needs a little support.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

rp: "What's shocking to me is how significant the differences are. I thought they'd be barely noticeable, at least for an amateur like me. But the closeups of the trees and bushes look like they were taken with two different cameras."

Fuji X Raw Studio

Apologies to Moose, who dislikes all the posts here about Fuji. Can't help it, though, as that's what I shoot at the moment. This post gets more general at the end, though, so hang in there, Moose.

Odd app
Trying to remain teachable, at the suggestion of a number of commenters yesterday I tried out Fuji's X Raw Studio, an app you can download for free on the support section of the Fuji website. (It used to be called X Raw Converter.)

It's an odd concept—basically, you turn on the proper menu item in your camera and connect the camera to your computer via a USB 3.0 micro cable, and then you can use the camera to convert any raw files you took with that camera. So this isn't a standalone raw converter—it's just an app to access the software you already have inside your camera.

The controls are the same as you get when you do the same thing in-camera, accessed in a pane that looks like this:

When you use the up-down arrows on the right, each one gives you a range of basic options such as this one for White Balance:

These are the same controls you have in the camera menus for setting JPEG output, and the same ones you can use in-camera for converting raw files. The app isn't actually a converter—it uses the converter in the camera, so the results are not just similar to what you get from the camera, but the same. (And that's why you can only use the camera for files shot with that same kind of camera—you can't use your X-T3 for processing raw files you took with your X-Pro2, for instance.)

Once you have a batch of settings the way you like them, you can save them as a named Profile. After you apply a profile you can still change any parameters you wish.

Test image processed using Fuji X Raw Studio,
Acros + Y[ellow filter] setting

Detail of above (should be 100% for you after you click on it. Bear in mind
the TypePad blogging software TOP uses softens all images somewhat.)

There are a few advantages to this arrangement—mainly, that you can see what you're doing much better on the larger display of your computer. You can also batch process, and you can export to TIFF for further post-processing in another image editing program. It's also possible to change JPEG output settings after the fact—for instance, if you shot a picture using the Classic Chrome profile, you can change it to the Velvia profile later if you want to.

Conceptually, to use X Raw Studio is to preserve the manufacturer's intentions for conversions from raw to JPEG, which wouldn't be very significant with most manufacturers' cameras. It might be more so with Fuji, though, because of its dedication to the unusual X-Trans array used in many Fuji cameras. If I had to guess why this odd little app exists, I would probably go with Michael J. Perini, who commented as follows (this is lightly edited):

I have read that at its heart, Fujifilm is still a film company (at least in the emotional sense). They have a rightful pride in the wonderful film stocks they created over the years, and have gone to great effort to preserve them in digital JPEG versions.

They want you to use their JPEGs and thus dragged their feet on full cooperation with makers of third-party raw converters.

In the comments section yesterday, one critique of this approach, if it is indeed Fuji's approach, was articulated by Severian.

X Raw Studio is refreshing in one way—it's very simple. The range of controls is limited; there aren't even any sliders, which in one way makes things easier: having separate options like –1 and –2 for Highlight detail makes it easier to pick the best one. Infinite variables can be slightly crazy-making. It's like using graded papers in the darkroom vs. using VC papers...choosing between grade 2 and grade 3 was easier than deciding whether a dial setting of grade 2.25 was better or worse than a dial setting of 2.35. If indeed the system had the precision to register such a difference consistently at all.

I don't think I'll be using X Raw Studio, though. I can get much the same effect by choosing the settings I want for in-camera JPEGs in the first place. Its controls are fairly crude, and it adds a ponderous middle step for getting the image into ACR, which is my main editor these days, unfortunately with Photoshop still needed for a few tweaks and last refinements.

Software first
The best option for Fuji might be to choose a complete image converter/editor that's optimized for Fuji files, such as Capture One Fujifilm 20 (although I haven't been terribly impressed with the output from that program—though I don't own the latest version), or picking a raw converter that Internet agrees is optimal for X-Trans files, such as Iridient Digital X Transformer, and adding it as an intermediary step (I agree it does a good job on Fuji files, but I find it unappealing to fight my inherent laziness and lack of organization by purposely adding another layer to my already rather lackadaisical workflow. I downloaded it and used it exactly once!).

In terms of camera choice in general, it might be wise to do what a friend back in Waukesha did when he bought a new used car. What he would do is find the best repair shop convenient to where he lived and make friends with the mechanic he wanted to work with, then ask that mechanic what kind of car he liked to work on the most. If the mechanic said Chevys with such-and-such a type of engine, then my friend would find a used Chevy with that type of engine. In a similar spirit, you could do what Barry H. Prager did and choose a camera based on which image editor you like—Barry likes DxO, which doesn't support Fuji, so Fuji is out for him.

That's fair enough. We don't talk about this much, but knowledge of, and experience with, our chosen suite of digital processing tools should be considered a prize possession of ours, alongside our best lenses and other gear. It's neither an easy nor a short process to change to a different program and abandon familiar tools—it takes time and effort. The interruption is "so destabilizing," to quote what Pak Ming Wan said yesterday.

In this spirit, maybe I should have tried to find the best files to feed to ACR (Adobe Camera Raw), the program I use most and like best. I suspect those wouldn't turn out to be Fuji X-Trans files. (Come to think, ACR seems to work great with Panasonic files, IMO. Could that be one reason I like Panasonic? I suppose it's possible.)

It would also be nice if master software experts on the web would review software that way—for instance, publishing articles like "What Kind of Camera Files Does Affinity Photo Work Best With?" and similar. That's not the way such questions are commonly approached, however. For one thing, such an approach would require a huge amount of work, and Internet likes to publish frothy, echoey little opinionations that are rather empty of actual research and experiment. Like or dislike Ctein, he was/is fantastic at actually carrying out experiments with an open mind and presenting original results. For another thing, it's shooting at a moving target...sensors are replaced and image editors are updated all the time, so today's conclusion might not be tomorrow's. For one last difficulty, that approach would be anathema to the software makers themselves—because they want your business regardless of what kind of camera you use, and their answer would naturally be that their software works great with all kinds of files. Which might be, let's just say, optimistic.

Mike
(Thanks to the commenters from yesterday)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support TOP on Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ernest Zarate: "Indeed, working backwards, as your story of your friend’s car purchasing strategy, can often streamline a workflow. What is the end product one desires? What software/program best achieves that final product? What tools work best with that software/program? What strategies/processes are needed to use that tool?

"Many times, we buy the tool first (and often for emotional reasons), then try to find the ancillary items to bridge between tool and final outcome. Sometimes that works seamlessly—many times, though, it becomes a struggle. Sometimes that struggle is so vexing one dumps the tool—and then starts over again."

Malcolm Leader: "I use the Topaz software suite that Ctein wrote about a while back. I have no experience with it on Fuji files but taking my raw files from my Canon 5DsR, that software does magic. I then take those processed files into ACR and I am in love with the results compared to just starting with ACR."

Dr Tom Bell: "I love my X100F...but in fact I loved my X100 and its 12MP Bayer Sensor. I suspect the 24mp Bayer sensor in the X-T200 is also great...and Fuji do great things with Bayer. Personally I stick with Fuji but to be honest I think they would be better offering their cameras with a Bayer sensor as an option. They would draw a bigger crowd. I think I would be a happier bunny."

Aakin: "I think this is why I like Fuji cameras as much as I do, actually. I hate post-processing. And I really like the JPEGs I get out of Fuji cameras. That, combined with how tactile they are, make them very satisfying for me; I can just dump out of camera and be done, and that is exactly how I want to work."

Luke: "Your example photo is so bright! You've pushed the mid-tones way up into...the middle!"

Bruce McL (partial comment): "The hierarchy of profits for camera manufacturers: Lenses Bodies Firmware Software. The hierarchy of needs for photographers, based on time spent fiddling around: Software Bodies Firmware Lenses. I just made that up.  :-)  "

#$%! Fuji

Irascible aside: I've been shooting raw for years, ever since Bruce Fraser's Real World Camera Raw changed my life. However, I think I might be done trying to convert Fuji raw files. The out-of-camera (OoC) JPEGs seem to always look better than the raw conversions, and don't seem to be that much less correctable. Even comparing Capture One conversions, which are supposedly among the best, the OoC JPEGs look better.

There's been an awful lot of argument online over the years as to what the best Fuji raw conversion software is. Maybe the best Fuji raw converter is simply the camera.

Or maybe I'm rusty in more ways than one, and just have more work to do.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jamie Pillers: "To confuse matters even further, you could think about trying Fujifilm's X Raw Converter software. To use it, you plug your camera into the computer; then the software uses the raw processor in the camera to make the conversions. I haven't tried it, but it sounds interesting. Like you, Mike, I've been happy with Fuji's JPEG output for years. But the constant online chatter about 'best RAW converter for Fuji files' has kept nagging at me."

Tim Bradshaw: "I'm not sure why it's surprising that the best raw converter for a camera made by company x is...made by company x. It is really more surprising that sometimes it isn't made by company x. And of course, if company x is sensible, then rather than dealing with the crawling horror of incompatibility involved in making their raw converter work with whatever tangle of partly-broken software people are using this week, they will ship their converter in a powerful, special-purpose computer system every detail of whose hardware and software they control."

Albert Smith: "I am currently shooting with an X-Pro2 and an X-T2 and after fine tuning the multiple parameters within each film simulation, I am enjoying the SOoC JPEGs as the end item for my photography. To be sure, this required multiple shooting sessions in real world conditions to get the highlight and shadow settings the way I like, but I can now cycle through the finder after hitting the Q button and bring up the best simulation for the situation. Both these cameras have identical settings and I entered a narrative into the menu display so that I need only read the top of the Q screen for, 'general color,' 'high contrast color,' 'outdoor B&W,' etc. During three decades of slide shooting, there was no post processing. I use this same approach with the Fujifilm simulations...expose and compose correctly and it's like getting a box of slides back from the lab when I dump the images into the computer."

Happy Birthday Photoshop, and Thank You 'Star Wars'?

Just as I've learned that I might finally have to leave Photoshop for good after 26 years, because Apple (not Adobe!) broke my CS6, I learned that yesterday (well, they think) was Photoshop's 30th Birthday. As near as can be reconstructed, Photoshop 1.0 began shipping on February 19th, 1990.

Here's a very nice article about it, by Jeff Schewe. It even includes a 7-minute demo of PS 1 by Jeff! Fun stuff.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeffrey Schimberg)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Review: Topaz Labs JPEG to RAW AI

Written and illustrated by Ctein

The last of my Topaz Labs reviews concerns a nifty little program with the intriguing title of "JPEG to RAW AI." It is, as they say, a one trick pony, and the trick is in the title. Hand it a JPEG of your choice and it will generate a RAW file (or 16-bit TIFF, if that is your preference).

If you have no interest whatsoever in working with JPEGs, you can skip out on this column and go do something more productive with your time. No worries, it won't be on the final exam. I'll wait...

dum ta dum ta dum hummm...

Okay, the class is a lot smaller; you can all move in closer so I don't have to shout.

So...why would Ctein, the Guy Who Does Everything in RAW, even care about a program like this? One reason is that sometimes it's not my call. Remember that two of the pillars that make CteinCo the multinational powerhouse that it is are custom printing and photo restoration. Sometimes the best file that a client can provide is a JPEG. Sometimes it's a really crappy JPEG and what they want to know is whether I can turn it into a semi-decent photograph.

Another reason is that, umm, "stuff" happens. As in, my camera had a bad hiccup (or I did something dumb—take your pick), reset itself to all its defaults, and I didn't realize I was photographing in JPEG instead of RAW mode.

Also, I know that some of you prefer to photograph in JPEG mode (I don't judge). That's just fine, until you want to manipulate some photo in a way that pushes it outside of its comfort zone. Like, say, punching up a dusky and hazy blue sky and all of a sudden the contouring that wasn't visible in the original high quality JPEG becomes unacceptable banding. Because, eight bits! The dreaded picket-fence histogram. Simply switching the image mode from 8-bit to 16-bit doesn't get you out of that one, because the contouring is baked into the image.

It is true that you can't get something for nothing, but a JPEG isn't nothing, it's just a badly mangled something. Like the aforementioned hazy sky. You know it's not supposed to be contoured, it's supposed to be smooth. That's just common sense. Enter Artificial Common Sense—train a deep-learning network to recognize what the mangling looked like and undo as much of it as possible. Build the rules it invents into a standalone program, and you have JPEG to RAW AI.

It cannot work big miracles. It cannot take a truly crappy JPEG and turn it into a fabulous photograph. But it can work many small miracles and that can be the difference between intolerable and tolerable image quality. Consider this:

(Click to enlarge)

I created this JPEG for illustration purposes from one of my original photographs. I compressed it at Photoshop's lowest quality JPEG setting so that the artifacts would be really obvious even after TOP's TypePad interface gets done with it (fingers firmly crossed).

I handed that JPEG off to JPEG to RAW AI and let it massage it at its automatic settings (there are sliders to manually change the degree of artifact removal and sharpening). In a couple of seconds I had this:

'Nuff said?

Understand that this is an extreme case. I wanted something that would come through clearly when published here. Most of the time the results will be a lot less dramatic. But—most of the time—they'll be visibly better than the original JPEG you ran through JPEG to RAW AI.

Unlike the previously reviewed GigaPixel AI and Sharpen AI, JPEG to RAW AI is not a monstrous resource hog. You should pay attention to the system requirements Topaz Labs puts forth, but I think it will run acceptably on most any system, as you can set processing preferences. You can have it run as a background task, control the amount of graphic memory consumption and even turn off GPU utilization entirely. It won't be fast, but it should do the job.

As is usual for Topaz Labs, JPEG to RAW AI has a 30-day fully-functional free trial. You don't have to spend $99.99 to find out if this particular pony is worth it to you.

Next? As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale, I'll be writing several columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. Indeed, there was jousting, almost from Day One (my Day One, that is). On yeah, dirt will be dished. Stay tuned.

Ctein

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 345th column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

parkylondon: "Many thanks for this series Ctein. They've been very useful and have helped me fine tune my Topaz AI collection. I remember, fondly, our afternoon in The Photographers Gallery in London and look forward to meeting you again one day. Thanks."

More Artificial Common Sense: Topaz Labs GigaPixel AI

Written and illustrated by Ctein

I am, for the most part, not a fan of "sharpening for output" nor of upsampling programs. Sharpening for output has, for me, translated into harsh, unrealistic edges and a degradation of what I would (imprecisely) call photographic quality. It also seems to be fundamentally misapplied—the times when I do need sharpening output are when I'm printing very small, not very large, as the printer rendering algorithms tend to suppress very fine, low-contrast detail.

As for upsampling, I gave that a thorough inspection about a dozen years back in these very pages:

It's Bigger, But Is It Better?

It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part II

It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part III

The takeaway, if all that is seriously longissimus, non legi [too long, didn't read —Ed.] is that the improvements were modest, nothing was superior under all circumstances, and Photoshop's built-in resizing algorithms worked, on average, as well as anything else. For the heck of it, I checked out the notion that upsampling to a printer's native resolution (360 or 720 PPI in the case of Epson; other manufacturers may be different) produced a higher quality print then letting the printer's driver handle this (which it does behind the scenes when you hand it something of a different PPI). It didn't.

In the years since then third-party programs have improved, but so has Photoshop. I haven't been induced to change my practices.

Except—a few years back, I watched a conversation between Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann. Jeff, printing from Lightroom to an Epson 3880 printer, found that files upsampled from their native resolution to 360 or 720 PPI in Lightroom printed out distinctly more sharply than those upsampled by the Epson print driver.

Jeff noted that that didn't mean that another program (or printer) would yield the same results. I use Photoshop, not Lightroom. They are two different products with two different development teams, so they may or may not share the same upsampling code.

But…Jeff is another one of those Great Printing Experts, and 95% of the time we're in agreement (especially around the recommended settings for the Epson 3880 printer to produce the very best quality). I'm not going to ignore his four-year-old results in favor of my twelve, nuh uh. I needed to test out his assertion on my P800 printer, with Photoshop.

Big surprise (not), Jeff turned out to be right. A dozen years ago, I was probably right, but a dozen years is forever in the digital technology world. It pays to occasionally recheck one's beliefs.

Photographs upsampled in Photoshop to my printer's native resolution look distinctly better than those left to the printer's ministrations. Better and cleaner fine detail, more nicely delineated edges.

Not all photographs benefit from this. In particular, for those where some degree of grain/noise is an integral part of the image (sometimes true in my color work, more often true in my black and white infrared), improving the acuteness of a print didn't make it better, as it also enhanced that grain structure, which had been tuned to just where I wanted it. Most of the time, though, I followed Jeff's advice and was much pleased with the improved quality. And I still avoided third-party upsampling programs.

Then Topaz Labs came out with GigaPixel AI, the second of their machine-learning-trained tools. The first had been AI Clear, which had mightily impressed me with its ability to sort out detail from garbage, so I wanted to see what this pony's tricks were like. The samples on their website looked unbelievably good, even taking into account that they were cherry-picked, because advertising.

I downloaded the program and handed it a modest task, taking what was already a very detailed and sharp photograph and upsampling it to my printer's native resolution for a 17x22-inch print (about a 1.5X enlargement) with GigaPixel AI.

GigaPixel AI was effin' amazin'. I'm talking markedly better rendering of fine detail, both at strong edges and in subtle fine gradations, along with finer grain/noise (and less of it). All of this without artifacts or suppression of delicate tonalities! The results looked entirely natural and much better than Photoshop's upsampling. Below are sections from the Photoshop (figure 1) and GigaPixel (figure 2) renderings, at 100% if you click through to the standalone images. [Bear in mind that TOP's TypePad interface softens illustrations somewhat. —Ed.]

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

I looked at 17x22" prints from the non-upsampled, Photoshop-upsampled and GigaPixel AI-upsampled files, and there was a clear improvement with each step. In fact, the difference between Photoshop and GigaPixel was substantially greater than between no upsampling and Photoshop.

GigaPixel doesn't improve the prints from every single one of my photographs. Only about 75% of them. Sometimes the improvement is nothing more than finer grain/noise, where GigaPixel has subdivided blobby grains into smaller discrete ones.

At other times the improvements do look unbelievable. Take a look at figures 3 (Photoshop) and 4 (GigaPixel AI). Look at the improvement in both fine detail and noise, compared to the original file, which you're not even seeing because I can't figure out how to portray it at the same scale without upsampling. It's about what I'd expect going from a 20-megapixel camera to a 30–35 megapixel one.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

GigaPixel AI is a standalone program. It will accept a variety of input formats and will output JPEG, TIFF, or PNG. For fine printing you're going to want the 16-bit TIFF output, of course. I use GigaPixel AI last in my printing workflow, after I've done all my local corrections and pixel fiddling. I duplicate the Photoshop file, save it as a TIFF, and run that through GigaPixel AI. That way I preserve my options for resizing to my printer's native resolution, no matter what size I decide I'm going to print at.

GigaPixel AI occasionally blows up, sometimes globally, sometimes just in one small part of the picture. Not often, but it happens. Machine-learning systems can get very weird notions in their silicon noggins. When it's just some small bit of the photograph that's gone off the rails I resize the Photoshop file to the same dimensions as the GigaPixel TIFF, and paste that TIFF in a new image layer on the file. That makes it easy to do a comparison between the renderings, just switching that layer on and off. Sometimes I throw away the GigaPixel AI rendering or mask it so I can hide the parts where GigaPixel AI went wonky. This is not a frequent occurrence. Most of the time, GigaPixel AI wins with no fiddling.

What's the downside? You may not be able to run GigaPixel AI on your current system. GigaPixel AI demands substantial system requirements. GigaPixel AI performs an insane number of calculations while it does its image analysis. It can commandeer your GPU, if you choose that option, and it'll still take minutes to render an image. I think we're talking millions of calculations per pixel, tens of teraflops total, to upsample a single photograph.

As is typical for Topaz Labs, Gigapixel has a 30-day fully-functional free trial, so you don't have to spend $99.99 to decide if it's worth it to you.

Topaz Labs sends me the stuff for free, but there's no question that I'd pay whatever they charge for this program. It's a four-star wonder.

Ctein

UPDATE Wednesday afternoon: Ctein wrote a reply to several commenters. Because not all the comments he responded to are among the "Featured" ones, I published his reply with the rest of the comments in the Comments section. To get to the full Comments section of this or any post, click on "Comments ([number])" at the bottom of the footer of every post. —Ed.

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 344th column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Michael Elenko: "I was sold on GigaPixel AI somewhat out of desperation earlier this spring. I was curating a group exhibition and during the hanging, one print just didn't meet my standards for sharpness. I learned that the print originated from an iPhone 8, and that a friend of the artist attempted to upscale it to meet our print size requirements by using a Photoshop algorithm. I then got involved, tried other Photoshop algorithms as well as Lightroom's approach (which I usually favor), and was not satisfied. I then remembered reading about GigaPixel AI, downloaded a trial, and used it on the image file. The result was revelatory, and just in time for the exhibition opening. I've since purchased the product and am revisiting old-but-good work from 15 years ago."

Topaz Labs Sharpen AI: Artificial Common Sense

Written by Ctein

Please bear with me, Faithful Readers...this is a photography column. It'll just take me a bit to get us there.

I am irritated by the success that corporate/marketing droids have had in co-opting the term "A.I." That stands for "artificial intelligence," and has, in the past, commonly meant some kind of general intelligence that deals with the real world in all its perplexity. The ultimate goal may be (trans)human level, but it's gradable down—you could have parrot-level AI, or cat-level or even goldfish-level (currently, we've reached the some-but-not-all-insects level of AI).

Now it's been degraded to refer to any system that uses one of the deep learning networks (there are many different flavors of those) to learn how to do a sophisticated task. They're popping up all over, and they do amazing things. But Artificial Intelligence? Nah, I don't think so.

(What are those promoters going to do when we get genuine AI? Call it AIFRTTH—Artificial Intelligence, For Real This Time, Honestly? Maybe that's the first question we should ask real AI, if we ever get it.)

I think there's a better descriptor for what these programs do: Artificial Common Sense. I'm not being flippant. I think it's right and significant, and it lets us take these programs seriously. Believe me, we should be taking them seriously.

Common sense is something that we've thought of as being a fairly sophisticated function, a way of distilling down the otherwise unfathomable complexity and intricacy of the world into something we can manage almost intuitively. "Sophisticated" isn't the same as intelligent; dogs and cats exhibit a great deal of common sense, but down at their level of mentation.

At the human level, common sense isn't necessarily either smart or correct. Everyone here has likely had the experience of getting into an argument with somebody who, backed into a losing corner, utters those fateful words—"but, it's just common sense that...." What then comes out of their mouths is invariably wrong. Common sense is not, in fact, good at dealing with the esoteric. But it's pretty damned good at dealing with everyday life and figuring out what's important and what's ignorable.

At the forefront
Which brings me to photography software. Consider the sorts of manipulation and filter programs we use routinely, like noise reduction, enlargement, and sharpening routines. As humans, we look at a photograph and we can easily figure out what is noise and what is detail, because we just know what the world looks like. Sure, there are the edge cases, where the subject detail is getting so similar to the grain/noise in the photograph that we're not sure if the feature we're looking at is real or an artifact of the media. But by and large, we know the difference. When we sharpen or enlarge a photograph, we want the real detail improved and enhanced, not the grain and the artifacts. When we run noise reduction, we don't want it to degrade the real image detail and tonality. We know and can see the difference because, well, we just know. 'Cause we're smart, sophisticated real-world data processing machines.

Until recently, we could imagine that this kind of discrimination was also a sophisticated function, something that would require a pretty high level of real AI to achieve. Sure, we've got algorithms that do a fair job of brute-force faking it, but it's pretty obvious that they're faking it with frequency filters and threshold discriminators and the like. They don't really understand a photograph, not the way we do.

Now we've got software, based on some deeply learnt neural networks, that appears to be doing the real thing, making the same kind of common sense decisions about a photograph that we make when we look at it. These programs don't work by some programmer handing them a finished set of rules and equations. Instead, they throw problems and solutions at them and say, "Okay, now figure out how to get from A to B." The more cases the networks have to chew on, the cleverer the solutions they invent. After chewing on a few million comparison photographs, they've got some pretty clever ideas.

At the forefront is Topaz Labs. For several years now they've been turning out, in my opinion, the best Photoshop filters that money can buy. Yeah, that's sometimes a matter of taste. For example, I've got at least a half-dozen different noise-reduction programs, because no two of them work the same way and each works better on some kinds of images and noise than the others.

In the past year, Topaz Labs have leapt ahead of everyone else by harnessing these buzzword-AI-tools to develop standalone programs and plug-ins that are beyond good. They are unbelievably good. That's not hyperbole—I look at some of the results and I simply don't know how it's possible for a "dumb" program to achieve them.

This column I'm going to talk about Topaz Sharpen AI, a standalone program currently in version 1.4.0 and on sale for $59.99. (These programs are frequently updated, not to fix bugs or add features, but to incorporate the very latest cleverness that the neural net has figured out as it chews on ever more real-world cases.)

Sharpen AI is already scary clever. The photograph below (figure 1) is the very first photograph I threw at Sharpen AI. I did not cherry-pick it out of hundreds of trials. It sold me on the software.

Figure 1

(Note: Even if you click through to the enlarged versions of the figures, you're not seeing them at 100% and there may be compression artifacts—the limitations of the host publishing software. I've put a full-resolution version up on my website here with no compression artifacts, for any who want to pixel-peep.)

This is a photograph I'd normally throw away—I was on a moving boat and it was late in the day. It's the best of a pretty poor sequence, if I'm being honest. I figured it would be a good test case. The first program I tried was Photoshop's Shake Reduction filter. This algorithm is supposed to analyze the photograph, calculate what's causing the blur, and undo it. It's called deconvolution. The tricky part is coming up with exactly the right point blur function and applying it without generating artifacts. As you can see in figure 2, Shake Reduction still isn't very good at that. In fact, I've yet to find any but the simplest and most minimal cases of subject blur or camera shake where it produced an artistically-usable result.

Figure 2

Then I handed figure 1 off to Sharpen AI, selected the "Stabilize" processing mode and let it rip at its auto-default settings. Two minutes later, I got back figure 3.

Whoooaaa...

Yup, two minutes. Sharpen AI is not only clever but a hard worker. On a Retina iMac with a 4GHz i7 processor, it takes that long using seven threads to process a 20-MP image. That is a heckuvva lot of gigaflops, on the order of 50,000 calculations per pixel. Not your everyday sharpening routine, nosiree. In fact, just updating the preview within the application can take as much as 30 seconds. Not surprisingly I have "auto update" turned off; otherwise every time I moved one of the adjustment sliders the program would want to take another 30 seconds to update the preview. (Almost always, Sharpen's automatic settings produce the best results, so I'm not sure why I bother. I guess I'm just a fiddler.)

Once you've gotten past being awed at the overall improvement, take a close look at the thin twigs and branches along the lower sides and the bottom of the picture. Sharpen AI has brought them back into an amazing focus without any ringing artifacts and while leaving the background largely untouched.

If you look closely at the edges of the birds and the nest in the sky areas, you can see some small artifacts—thin vertical lines that extend a few pixels away from the subjects. These are much more evident on the screen than they would be in a print. In fact, I printed out the full image on 17x22" paper and they were completely invisible. The birds and the nest looked perfectly sharp with no evidence that any enhancements had been run on the original photograph.

Other modes
Sharpen AI has three processing modes—Sharpen, Stabilize, and Focus. You've seen what Stabilize can do. Sharpen does more ordinary sharpening and is recommended for photographs that are otherwise in-focus and un-blurred. The effect is modest, but it's clean. So far, I haven't found an out-of-focus photograph where Focus improves things. Unlike Sharpening, which is understated, Focus seems to go way overboard. Perhaps I haven't found the right image to apply it to, but so far it's been useless.

On every photograph I've tried, Stabilize does the best job, better than Sharpen even on photographs that are in focus and don't have any visible camera shake or subject movement. I haven't reached the point of applying it to every photograph, even the ones that don't look like they need any sharpening, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should try that.

Sharpen AI will process all kinds of original files—TIFF, JPEG, PSD, and even RAW. I don't recommend using it on RAW, though, if you like the rendition of your usual RAW converter. Me, I like what Adobe Camera RAW does and Sharpen's raw converter doesn't produce the same results, in terms of tone, color or geometric correction. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's different, and even though Sharpen will output a new raw file, the new one won't render the same as the original. My recommendation is to make your usual corrections in your preferred RAW converter, generate a 16-bit TIFF from that and put Sharpen to work on the TIFF.

In past years, I've deleted photographs that were artistically appealing but unacceptably blurry, knowing that I'd never be able to pull prints from them that met my technical and aesthetic standards. I'm thinking I may have made a mistake.

Topaz Sharpen AI—recommended without reservation.

Next column (in a couple of weeks) I'll talk about Topaz Labs' Gigapixel, which is absolutely, positively the best upsampling program ever. It does all those image-improvement miracles that other upsampling programs claim to do... and don't.

Ctein

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 343rd column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Aashish Sharma: "I haven't even started reading the article, but I'm writing to let you know how delighted I am to see Ctein back. I have always enjoyed his writing on everything and missed it while he was away. An article by him is even more welcome as it is my birthday! Thanks for writing, Ctein. I'll now go back and read it."

Michael Elenko: "Thank you for this post. I've had this pano HDR I created eight years ago. It was in the mountains, and the mosquitoes were the worst, even getting in my eyeballs. So I could not provide enough stability for the brackets to line up right, plus dusk was coming on, so my shutter speed was too slow for effectiveness. But the shot was special, just too mushy for my standards and a plethora of tried tools. Until I used Sharpen AI at the settings recommend by Ctein. Wowie zowie, this finally looks right. Thank you, I've waited for this."

Joe Holmes: "I tried a demo copy of Sharpen AI on a couple of my images and immediately paid for the software. I find that it can work miracles on certain images, though there are times when it gets everything wrong, when it simply cannot handle an image and leaves crazy artifacts. And then there are times when it does a brilliant job on certain portions of an image but creates bizarre and ugly artifacts on other parts, like the surface of a river or clouds. In those cases I can make the best use of it by bringing a Sharpen AI image into Photoshop as a layer and applying a layer mask to apply the best parts on top of the original image. Even with that extra work, it's worth it, because the results are way better than what I can do with other tools."

Marcelo Guarini: "First, thanks for the initial part of this post, about artificial intelligence. I'm a professor of Electrical Engineering at a university and I am tired of repeating the same to my colleagues, especially those who work in the so-called field of artificial intelligence. I will show them your comments so they can see that I am not the only one with the same opinion. Thanks for the term 'artificial common sense.' Artificial intelligence is too high-flown a term for what deep learning is.

"I have been using Topaz Labs Gigapixel from its inception, and have been very surprised by its excellent results. As you say, 'positively the best upsampling program ever.' Almost every time I open the program to use it, there is an upgrade available. I have been a beholder of its evolution through cumulative training and refinements. Today its results are much better than at the beginning; you can easily see the improvements. It is just a very cool tool. I will try Sharpen AI and will follow your indications regarding the different modes and auto-update.

"Thanks much for your post, and happy to see your reviews again."

Soeren Engelbrecht: "'Since it is often hard to distinguish common sense from equally common nonsense, professional advice is useful.' —Leslie Lamport."

Tom R. Halfhill: "I'm equally uncomfortable with the buzzphrase 'artificial intelligence'—and I write about microprocessors for a living. (I'm a senior technology analyst for Microprocessor Report, the leading newsletter in this field since 1987.) I prefer 'machine learning,' which I think is more accurate and less grandiose, but the 'AI' label is unavoidable because it has become so widespread. Essentially, it's sophisticated pattern matching and sorting. But at a high level, sometimes we don't understand how these neural networks achieve their results. We turn them loose for training on a huge data set, let them chew on it, then evaluate their performance. It's almost a black box, although programmers can delve deeply into the structure to see what's happening. Of course, we don't fully understand how the human brain works, either, so even 'natural intelligence' is mysterious.

"The Topaz Sharpen AI tool is indeed impressive. What I need is a dust-and-scratch removal tool that's equally good. I've scanned tens of thousands of old family photos that need more fixing than I can handle. The automated tools I've tried often can't tell a dust spot from a pearl earring or a scratch from a crease in clothing."

Ken Lunders: "Whoa!! I downloaded Topaz Labs Sharpen AI for a 30-day trial. Well, the trial has ended after less than hour. I'm now $59.99 poorer, but 100% happy with the purchase. I'm delighted to see Ctein providing content here once again."

eliburakian: "Damn, I just spent $300 on the whole Topaz AI suite after reading this and trying out the software. Thanks a lot, now I have some explaining to do to the spouse."

DxO Deal

I'm not supposed to be posting today (still prepping for the big week ahead), but I thought you might like to know (especially given the rumors recently that Adobe is toying with the idea of doubling the price of a Photoshop CC subscription from $10 to $20 a month) that DxO is having a summer promo deal of its PhotoLab 2 Elite Edition software. PhotoLab 2 Elite Edition (i.e., the full version) is a raw converter with specific lens+camera correction modules and some local editing features added to make it into a complete image editor. The normal one-time price is $199 and it's on sale for $89 until June 4th (Tuesday). The promo code is SUMMER-GIFT-BY-DXO. I can't give you a link I'm sure is reliable for everyone; go to DxO and navigate.

I've never used DxO, as it doesn't support Fuji X-Trans. But it might be another option to consider for those of you still looking for an alternative to Adobe.

DxO, a French company located in Boulogne-Billancourt in the Western suburbs of Paris, is famous for its DxOMark Sensor rankings which consider the capabilities of sensors. (There also, Fuji is omitted.) [CORRECTION: DxO (software) and DxOMark Image Labs are no longer the same company. They split in September of 2017. Thanks to O.G. for this, and sorry for the error. —Ed.] Note that at DxOMark only the sensor is considered, so when it ranks a camera highly for "Sports," for example, it means only the low-light capability of the sensor and is not considering any of the other camera capabilities that have to do with sports shooting. DxO was originally famous for its lens modules, which provided software corrections for lens deficiencies tailored to individual lens designs.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Amazon.com • Amazon UK • Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany • B&H Photo • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

School Me on the iPad?

I don't think yesterday was my finest hour. I seem to have irritated some people, and am uncertain why. But if anything I said made you mad, I apologize. (Also not sure why it devolved into a discussion of my opinions about Leica. Usually not a good omen when that happens.)

Anyway, on a new subject...

...If you're a photographer/creative who shows portfolios to clients on an iPad, could I ask you to help school me as to how you set up those portfolios? Can you recommend any apps, or point to any tutorials you like?

(The new iPad. I have an old one.)

I need to lock out the viewer from accessing the rest of the iPad or the back-end of the program when they're looking at the portfolio. I should also mention I'm not adept with software. With programs or apps that are complicated I usually just bog down, stall out, and wander off in a haze. So I'd be looking for methods that are simple, or simple-ish.

To me, fewer features is a feature.

Thanks for any help!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "I don't know why you would have irritated anyone yesterday, but today I'm a little pissed that you used 'school' as a verb."

Mike replies: Why you gotta be hackin' on me too brah? Be easy when you in the heazy.

Murray Davidson: "Concerning school as a verb...it may be a Britishism. Quote: 

1 (formal) to train somebody/yourself/an animal to do something

• school somebody/something/yourself (in something) to school a horse

• She had schooled herself in patience.

• school somebody/something/yourself to do something I have schooled myself to remain calm under pressure.

From Oxford Learner's Dictionaries."

Jack: "I once made a $20,000 sale using an iPad. But it was for Apple not me. iPads had just come out, and I was presenting my photos to a loyal client in a restaurant. They were amazed. They were amazed at the iPad, not my photos. They decided then and there to buy 50 iPads for their sales presentations. So be careful with new gadgets that you don’t sell the gadgets but rather what you have to sell."

Schoolteacherish Mike

Sometimes I feel like referring articles is a bit schoolteacherish, like I'm passing out assignments. That is, of course, not my role, as I'm talking to friends here—my equals and betters.

But really, sometimes articles come along that ya just have to read. One such is "In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?" by Joshua Rothman, in The New Yorker. Pretty much a must-read for photography polymaths like you. (It annoys me that The New Yorker has evidently adopted another QUIRK—awkward "shouting" capital letters intended—to go along with its longstanding brain-dead practice of putting book titles in quotation marks instead of italicizing them like everyone else in the literate world. (Editor Remnick should have left the quaint old original typeface alone and changed that instead.) But at least that one is excused by being a "tradition," going all the way back to Ross or wherever it goes back to. The publication's newest QUIRK, with no tradition whatsoever, is to assign different titles to the same article depending on whether it's online or in the paper magazine—which is confusing and irritating. Anyway, in the printed magazine the same article is titled "Afterimage," in the Nov. 12th, 2018 issue.*)

Years ago I tried to assert that digital imaging should not be called "photography," that the word photography described what we now clumsily know as analog or optical/chemical photography (I usually dislike back-formations), and that the new medium was sufficiently different that we should know it by a different name. I thought "digital imaging" or D.I. served just fine, since that had currency at the time.

I've never changed that opinion, but I learned to back off on it, because people didn't like it—in the early days of digital, any comparison of film vs. digital quickly devolved into a status dispute, and people on Team Digital were immediately and automatically prickly about imagined slights to their standing. They wanted the main word applied to their chosen tech. So "digital photography" it was. As Mad magazine used to say, Yecch.

This article—whatever you want to call it, "Afterimage" or "In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?", really gets at what I was talking about back then. We're on different territory now. It's just that it looked like the same territory at first. It isn't. The changes are far more profound than just the means by which we fix a lens image to make a still picture. Really, D.I. is closer to figurative painting than it is to photography. Sez me.

At the very least, there's a short list of people I think everyone interested in our subject ought to know, and Hany Farid is on the list. If you don't know the name yet, the article will be an overdue introduction.

...Reports due Tuesday. Just kidding!

Mike

*I know, I'm getting to be a grumpy old man. (My friend Dan's joke—he's 65: "Every morning I wake up grumpy. I should just let her sleep.")

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob de Loe: "Superb find Mike. Thank you for sharing. The implications for society are stark and clear in this piece (and they're not good—we have a lot of things to figure out).

"What the article doesn't get to is the implications for 'photography' as an art form. On that front, I'm actually not too worried. Would you expect a painting to be a faithful representation of the real world as seen by the painter? Of course not. That's where photography as an art form is going (if it's not there already). Once people are comfortable with the idea that you can't believe anything you see in a still photo, we can all focus on whether or not the picture gets us to think, engages our emotions, makes us feel something, etc. (which is kind of the point for me). Of course where the wheels will come off the bus is situations where the photographer as artist claims that the picture is a faithful representation of the world, but in reality it isn't. We're there already as everyone hopefully knows based on recent famous 'gotcha' incidents. This will only get worse. Hopefully software will help us sort this out (but as the article points out, that's not guaranteed either)."

robert e: "I agree that different titles for web and print is both annoying and complicating, but I think I understand the reasoning, or at least the motivations to do so. While 'Afterimage' is a perfectly appropriate title in the context of an issue of The New Yorker magazine, it's not very effective in the context-stripping environment of web reading, where attention-deficient people like me peruse long lists of article titles, often from different sources, and often not bothering to click up even the descriptive blurb. On the other hand, 'In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?', while both attention-getting and descriptive, would clash with both the style and layout of the print mag, and not contribute anything to the way most people read it. (Might work as a subtitle.)

"Sure, many people probably do read the web mag as they would the print mag, but the idea, of course, is to try to leverage the openness and reach of the web to expand the steady, paying readership."

rodfrank: "I read an article a couple of years ago about Dr. Farid and his software that that will detect an altered photograph. At that time he extended an offer to analyze a couple of photos. My class at the local university sent two photos. One was unaltered and the other had very little alteration that we thought was well hidden. About a week later we received an email telling us not only which photo was altered but exactly where the alteration was done.We were impressed to say the least."

Adobe Photoshop

Recently I've been trying new photo editors. There are a lot of them out there at this point; the popular one is Lightroom from Adobe. It's the standard, if there is a standard. It's also now available in cloud-based subscription version and called Lightroom CC. I tried it when it came out and didn't like the interface. It doesn't think like I think. I've never owned it or used it.

You tend to stick with what you're used to. I've been using Adobe Photoshop (PS) since 1994, and Adobe Bridge. As you might know, photo processing in PS has mostly migrated to the raw developer app within Photoshop, which is called Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). I usually do most of my editing in ACR and then open the image in Photoshop for any final tweaks or local changes, or for printing. ACR is a beautiful little nested app, simple, efficient, and powerful. There's a version of it in Lightroom, too. ACR is simple enough that I've worked to improve my skills within it.

Photoshop, by contrast, is hopeless. Frank McLaughlin, who was in charge of the Dye Transfer department at Kodak for many years, once famously said that one lifetime wasn't long enough to master both photography and dye transfer. Well, my suspicion is that one lifetime is not long enough to master Photoshop, never mind what else you spend any of your time doing.

I guess that's not true, but that's what it feels like to me.

I've never been any good at it, anyway. It's a fantastically complex program that seemingly offers between ten and 100 ways to do anything. And yet, more often than not, I cannot find one of those ways. Frustratingly, when I do learn something, I tend to forget it again. I have to keep a stack of index cards on the base of my monitor telling me how to do some the many things I periodically need to do but can't remember.

I have a strongly visual memory; for the longest time I felt I could remember if I had ever seen a photograph before. I mean in my entire life. I've disproved this to myself, but I'm still pretty good at it. I'm not, however, good at abstractions. I'm one of those people who were horrible at algebra, but I got the highest grade in geometry my geometry teacher had ever given out. It was simple: it was visual. I never took to chemistry, which is abstract or might as well be. In the supermarket, I recognize things by the look of their labels. I can't remember the names. When products change labels, they essentially disappear for me for a while. When I remember a person, names can take an agonizingly long time to surface. This used to worry me—was I losing my memory?—until I realized that the faces were always coming back to my brain in an instant. With the visuals, my memory is still good.

Not as good as it used to be. When I was young, for example, I could remember how to find things in books without taking notes. It was simple—I just pictured the page where I read something, and then "read" the page number from my memory. So I could recall a passage in a book and go right back to it. I could sometimes "see" the page well enough in my head that I could quote from it in a school paper. I've largely lost that ability in my advancing middle age. (And of course it's impossible with e-books, which are much more abstract than paper books, no matter what you say.)

Photoshop is abstract. You have to remember arbitrary sequences of commands and keystrokes. It's like a giant, three-dimensional, infinitely intricate maze. I understand some people are good at that sort of thing. I'll never be.

As if mastering Photoshop wasn't already a high enough mountain to climb, they keep changing things, and thereby breaking my brain. Arbitrary shuffling of controls, rearrangements of the interface, and changes of the "look" of the interface shoves ignorance back in the way of skills I thought were settled. Suddenly something I knew how to do is lost, like products in the supermarket that got themselves "a new look!" and poof, disappeared. 

The one I like best of the Adobe substitutes so far is Affinity Photo. It's a stand-alone program that costs only $50. You can buy it right in the Mac app store so you get the free updates whenever you check for updates on your computer. (It's also available from the iOS app store and the Windows store.) It was developed specifically for Mac but now offers a Windows version.

Anybody using it?

I'd say "I'll write more about it later," but see the previous post....  :-(

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Robert Roaldi: "I've owned Affinity for several months but only started paying attention to it recently. I never used Photoshop so cannot compare. The online short video tutorials are good, forum help is very useful, and they publish a workbook now for when you don't want to watch a video to figure out one little thing. I love it—easy to use, easy to play with, dedicated to photos not graphics. When I need to process a large batch of pics, something that was easy in Aperture, I now use After Shot Pro 3 (formerly Bibble) because Affinity is really a one pic at a time kind of application and it doesn't have a DAM. But that separation of tasks is fine for me."

Rob Strong: "I’ve long thought of Photoshop as a Hospital. No doctor walks into a hospital and 'knows how to use it.' I’m fairly proficient at the suite of tools I use regularly for work, but there are whole wings and sub-menus full of humming machinery so hyper-specialized that I would only kill the patient (and possibly irradiate myself) if I started flipping switches and pressing buttons."

Steve Jacob: "The problem with Photoshop is that it expects the user to understand the underlying mechanisms, such as colour theory, sharpening, colour spaces, rendering intents, layer blending, etc. It doesn't hide this complexity from the user. The great thing about Photoshop is that it assumes you understand the underlying science and gives you direct access to, and full control of, the functions you need. It doesn't filter them through some inscrutable algorithm that robs you of control in the name of simplification . The first thing I did when I bought my first copy was find a good course. Money well spent."

Mike replies: Yes, that was my problem, personally. No education. I just had a copy on my work computer from the Graphics Department at the magazine and started figuring it out on my own. Gradually I learned how to do a lot of nifty things with it, and I can do what I need to, mostly. But I didn't learn it systematically, because I didn't have time. I just haphazardly asked questions of our graphics people (who didn't have time to spend on me either) and poked around. Those were the days well before online videos, so no help there.

Joe Holmes: "The surprising thing about Photoshop is that designers who started in physical pasteup had a big advantage learning the application, because Photoshop is based on a lot physical paste-up concepts. The whole idea of adjustment layers goes back to physically layering in paste-up. Even 'Unsharp Mask' is named after the physical process of laying a less sharp image on top of the regular image as a mask."

Mike replies: The granddaddy of our TOP print sales was the "Collector Print Program" at Photo Techniques magazine. One of the prints we offered was a Howard Bond print from an 8x10 negative that was physically unsharp masked. I asked Howard how long it took him to get a good mask and he said usually about a day or a day and a half, but that it had taken him a long time to master the process. He hadn't heard of the Photoshop control at the time—it was brand new then—but I wondered how he would take it when he learned that anybody could do in several seconds what had taken him so long to master...of course it's not quite the same.

He is quite a photographer/printmaker. I really admired him.

Bruce Alan Greene: "Photoshop seems like an infinitely complex program, but you don't need to get too complex to use it effectively. One can do 90% or more of what one needs with two concepts: 1. The curve control 2. Adjustment layers. Master these concepts, and it's not too difficult, and you'll be able to accomplish just about anything in Photoshop. And these are the things you can't do in Lightroom.

"Like you, I've tried Lightroom, but...I stick to Photoshop, ACR, and Bridge. Put simply, an adjustment layer is a way to adjust the image without commitment. It's non-destructive and you can turn each adjustment on and off with the 'eyeball' button. They consist of two parts: First is the actual adjustment, 'curves' in our case, and next to it is a mask. Where ever the mask is white the adjustment goes through. Where ever it is black, no adjustment is applied. In this way one can literally paint where on the photograph the adjustment affects. Gray is a partial adjustment.

"Find someone that can walk you through this and you'll never desire another editing software. With the Curves control you'll be able to adjust most normal things with a photograph. White balance, color, gamma. Almost everything. And any other software that you'll want to learn, you'll also want to learn this technique, so there's no getting around it anyway. Good luck Mike!"

[Bruce is an accomplished Hollywood cinematographer. —Ed.]

Alan: " I own and occasionally use Affinity Photo...it's an okay program, but in my opinion things that should be easy are exceedingly difficult and drive me nuts! For example, to simply copy a layer mask from one layer to another is mindbogglingly difficult, 'Blend If' uses curves and, for me, it's difficult to get smooth transitions. These are just a couple of examples...I could go on.

"How about products such as ON1's Photo Raw 2019? DxO PhotoLab 2 is nowadays a fairly complete editor, albeit no layers. There is a very powerful editor by two brothers in Germany called PhotoLine. The only real difficulty with this software is getting your head around their terminology and where stuff is in the menus. That said, there is functionality in this program that I actually like better than PS. Anyway, good luck with your search!"

manmadewilderness: "The visual memory. You've eerily come close to describing me, so I suppose the condition must not be that unusual. Algebra: no; geometry: yes. Chemistry: evaporated except for the teacher's face. Mechanical drawing: a natural fit. Photoshop: hopeless; Affinity: manageable. And you buy it once instead of paying the unending Adobe tax. Many of the same commands, but I've hardly used much beyond the basic development process—which is pretty similar to ACR. Also a goodly number of online tutorials, both written and video."

Ed Hawco: "OMG, thank you for validating how I feel about Photoshop. I work in the software industry—specifically, I explain (in writing) how to use software applications—and I cannot parse anything in Photoshop. It is the most hulking behemoth of confusion and complications I have ever touched. (Second place is Salesforce, which happily has nothing to do with Photography.) I've been using Lightroom for years, and I find it pretty intuitive to my way of thinking. It reminds me somewhat of actual darkroom work, where you dodge and burn by swiping or blocking light, unlike in PS where you create masks and layers and all that stuff that just makes my head explode.

"I also have Affinity but I only use it occasionally, and completely outside of my LR workflow, such as if I want to do a quick touch-up of an iPhone shot."

Andrew (partial comment): "I am contemplating my next software move as PhotoNinja seems to be almost dead and Picture Window Pro 8 is still in early beta, and was never a great raw developer. This shows the challenge of picking the small guys: you never know when they will give up the ghost."

Mike replies: Indeed. Apple Aperture even—big company, but a little guy in that space.

Grant: "Thanks to TOP, I have been a longtime user of LightZone. However, my photo gear changed and I had to look for new software. I have tried just about everything out there, with the exception of Capture One. I didn't get the results I wanted with Affinity, plus it locked me out when I changed some hardware on my computer. I eventually settled on ON 1 Photo Raw. The software gives me pleasing results, has not been difficult to adapt to, can be installed on up to five computers and has a huge range of tutorials. It also has good integration with Lightroom and Photoshop. That's a feature I will never be using; I'm just repeating what I read. I'm a Windows and Linux user, but I believe Mac users would have the same experience as me."

Michael Houghton: "I've used Affinity Photo since the Mac beta. Adobe haven’t had my money for over three years. It is excellent; in a few small (and not-small, if you’re an automation type) ways, it is less than Photoshop. But in many ways it is more. Better layer blend ranges. Proper live filter layers. Really effective layer group masking. Parameterised macros. The ability to apply Lab curves to RGB images. Good LUT support including inferring LUTs from image pairs. A built-in frequency separation tool. A really quite usable focus stacker. The ability to save full history with a document. In lots of ways it is a refinement of the core principles of Photoshop-type editors. I would recommend everyone at least tries it so they know what’s out there as an alternative.

"Oh and it’s already on the iPad. It is very much a one-photo-at-a-time thing, though it does have effective batch support. For bulk raw processing I am generally a DxO user, but I'd switch if I needed to."

Paul Judice: "I have very fond memories of Frank McLaughlin. When I first started in the dye transfer business, Frank was incredibly generous with advice and helped me network among other dye transfer lab people to get further technical help. Some of the most successful and talented dye transfer printers would take my calls and help me with questions about masking or custom developers or modifying dyes. Once I asked Bob DeSantis why he was freely sharing his secrets with a competitor. I'll never forget his response: 'kid, if you can take my business, you deserve it.'

"Today I work in a retouching studio that uses Photoshop, although I myself don't work with it in any significant way. I can barely find the toolbar. What I've noticed is that the professional camaraderie from the dye transfer days is gone. Competitors guard their techniques and have strict policies about layered files leaving the studio. I even had a client ask me if my grain layer was copyrighted."

Clayton: "A few days ago there was some mild criticism of Apple here, and they lost a zillion dollars of market value. I would expect they will start paying attention soon."

A Mystery Solved

There's a Fuji X-H1 on the way here for a short trial, so I'm getting up to speed on some of the background.

For some time now, I've had to sort of slot it in the "Shrug" file whenever anyone slags Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for converting Fuji X-Trans raw files. People say things like, "Are you using ACR? Then you're not seeing what Fuji can do. You have to use Iridient" (or Capture One or whatever), or "it's well known that Adobe doesn't do well with X-Trans files." And yet they always seemed good enough to me. Worms?! What worms? Can't do greens? My greens look fine. Not sharp? Maybe it's my eyes. I'd field the criticisms and just think, all right, whatever, maybe they just care more than I do.

Turns out there might be a reason for that after all. According to this article at FujiRumors, "it is curious to note that 2 products from the same company, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, behave differently when it comes to X-Trans RAW sharpening. Out of the box, Photoshop works very well, Lightroom not so."

So is that it? I don't even have Lightroom; don't know anything about it. I use Photoshop. Have since about '94. Or should I say I use .2% of Photoshop, which is the percentage of it I've mastered! No love for Photoshop. Do love ACR. But I process raw files in ACR and finish in Photoshop.

X-T2 JPEG (our blog software softens images somewhat,
so consider this just an allegorical illustration)

There's a good reason why a lot of people prefer to use out-of-camera JPEGs with Fuji—they look great, they're easy to work with, they have no artifacts, they're sharp, and they have great color.

Who knows, maybe the best raw converter for Fuji X-Trans files is inside the camera.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Tim Bradshaw: "Given that Fuji designed and built the sensor, the electronics that support it, the file format and, in fact, the entire system, it would be mildly astonishing if their converter was not the best one."

Allan Jackson: "I recently had occasion to create HDRs in Lightroom and they looked a bit soft. I repeated the process using Photoshop and they were much better. You'd think the two would be using the same process."

Christopher: "I've found Thomas Fitzgerald's work to be the most useful (and sane) when it comes to processing Fuji X-Trans files. Here's a good post about the 'worm' artifacts that you hear about. His guidebooks on Capture One and X Transformer are easy to use and very effective. I do notice a difference vs the JPEGs when using his methods. Usually, though, I'm happy enough with the JPEG and don't spend too much time fiddling with raw files."

Rob de Loe: "This is the proverbial can of worms.... There used to be a big gap between what Lightroom could do and what Iridient X Transformer could do with a Fuji X-Trans III file. The 'worms' and other problems were real and easy to replicate. Since Lightroom 7, that gap has closed up considerably. I still send my Fuji RAFs to IXT and then bring them into Lightroom as DNGs. It's a small extra step that squeezes a bit more out of my files. However, Lightroom has come a really long way. But you do need to approach sharpening and noise reduction differently than you would with a Bayer sensor file. Fuji JPEGs are certainly very nice, and if you're not printing (or you're just making small prints) they're perfectly fine. But I wouldn't take advice from Ken Rockwell on whether or not to work in raw. The list of benefits for raw over JPEG is very long. (Caveat: I'm not shooting weddings or high school football games where I need to process a gazillion files in a short time; it would be JPEG all the way if that were the case.)"

Stanleyk: "I stopped worrying about raw files about a year ago. I just use the JPEG files. They are fantastic and I don't waste a lot of time in front of the computer. Plus, for me having limitations as in I am now shooting Classic Chrome or Acros R is refreshing. You can also use Fuji's X Raw Studio. It just uses your camera to process the raw files. The benefit is you can see them on your monitor and try various simulations. I like it but I still just shoot JPEG and forget it. Some days I will only shoot B/W, other days I will only shoot Chrome. I am a print person and the JPEGs make fantastic 12x18-inch prints."

Hugh Crawford: "This wormieness of which so much is spoken, can someone point to an example? A Google search doesn't turn up an illustration or description. Is it similar to a ringing, think resonance not finger, artifact in a convolution filter?"

Mike replies: Here's an example from 1:00 in the linked video (a detail from the screengrab):

Khosrow: "Now that there is the free Capture One Express for Fujifilm, you can try and see for yourself. To my eyes, Capture One has better colors and highlight recovery than Lightroom out of the box. It also does much better sharpening. All by default. But the major issue for me, which was occasional water color effect in foliage rendering, does not occur in Capture One."

Rumors of DxO's Demise Exaggerated?

The latest news from DxO, the French software maker, is that the company is merely reorganizing under Chapter 11 protection and will not abandon its customers. So what does that mean?

Well, there's probably no way of knowing. "Bankruptcy" seems to mean a variety of things for different companies in different circumstances. I've been trying to follow the bankruptcy proceedings of our local supermarket chain (it's the only store in our town, and would drastically affect quality of life here if it closed), and the more I read about it the less I can tell you about whether our store is safe or endangered.

However, DxO made the following announcement today:

We are very confident that this procedure, which should not last for more than a few more weeks, will not affect our customers in any way. In fact, we are pleased to announce the following upcoming product releases:

• In June, we will release a free update (version 1.2) of our flagship software, DxO PhotoLab. Recently awarded the TIPA 2018 Award for Best Image Processing Software, this latest version of DxO PhotoLab will include improved local correction features, and will add support for 7 cameras, including the Canon EOS 2000D and the Sony A7 III. This release will also be an opportunity for us to reiterate our commitment to the “perpetual license” model (as opposed to a subscription model) that allows our customers to update their products according to their needs, rather than in a constrained manner.

• In June, we will release the new version of the Nik Software Collection, which DxO acquired from Google at the end of 2017. Much awaited by the Nik software community, this first “by DxO” version focuses on fixing bugs that up until now could disrupt the user experience, as well as on ensuring full compatibility with the latest Mac OS and PC platforms.

Encouraging as these statements are, it's worth noting that news about corporate restructuring from the corporations themselves could be strategic and might not necessarily be reliable. But at the moment, at least, things certainly look less than dire.

Also worth noting is that according to Wikipedia, DxOMark is a separate company.

If anyone knows more about this, feel free to jump in. Also, if there are any users of DxO PhotoLab out there, let us know what you think of it.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

adamct: "For what it's worth, in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the assets of the debtor are sold to satisfy the debts. That would effectively mean the end of DxO as an independent entity. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the debtor strikes a deal with its creditors to try and restructure the debt. This is why the debtor in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is often referred to as the 'debtor in possession'—the debtor gets to hold onto their business and assets while they try to repay the restructured debt.

"But as Mike says, this can mean wildly different things in practice. Sometimes debtors are able to reorganize, pay off the negotiated debt amount, and move on with a successful and stable business. Other times, the reorganization is a failure and the debtor ultimately winds up in Chapter 7. The third option is that the debtor just manages to hold on, repeatedly restructuring its debt, never getting rid of it, not fully failing, but really not all that successful, either.

"Fingers crossed that this is just the first step toward making DxO more stable and setting the framework for future growth and success."

Ilkka: "I am not a lawyer and I am not French, but I believe there is no 'Chapter 11' in France. But when an American newspaper or other news organization reports about it, they may well use the common US term. It just means tbat the company is reorganising under some sort of protection from banks and other creditors."

ScotInDortmund: "French law has a similar provision to Chapter 11, protecting the company while negotiations with creditors proceed. —Ron Preedy."

[See Ben Marks' comment in the Comments Section for more background about bankruptcy and reorganization. —Ed.]

Bahi: "I use both Lightroom and Capture One heavily (and provide support and training for users of both). Despite that, I still have a soft spot for DxO's PhotoLab and its predecessor, DxO Optics Pro) and continue to happily pay for PhotoLab. (Sadly, only one person has ever asked me for training on DxO products in about a decade.)

"DxO's converters have an interesting and overlooked feature that makes me hope for the survival of DxO—and it's not the much lauded Prime noise reduction, which can be useful but gives results that look impressive in some ways but often seem a little unnatural to me.

"The feature I like is the method used by DxO to correct heavy barrel distortion in mirrorless lenses. I use it for the 17mm Olympus ƒ/1.8 but it applies to many mirrorless zooms and wide-angle primes.

"Even quite expensive lenses rely on software corrections, perhaps to help keep lenses smaller and lighter. For Micro 4/3 cameras, these lenses carry their lens-correction profiles internally. The camera embeds the profiles in the raw files. The distortion is usually corrected automatically by the camera for JPEGs.

"Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw [ACR], of course), Capture One (C1), and the in-camera corrections will all give you automatically corrected images when they read the raw files. However, the results will have substantially narrower fields of view than the results from DxO PhotoLab. That can be a big deal.

"The DxO correction algorithm presumably uses some kind of image stretching to achieve its corrections—I don't know. It's perfectly good, with no visible artifacts to my eye; straight lines do indeed come out straight and the results are sharp and detailed. The great thing it is that the odd hand or foot at the edge of the frame will be included in DxO's output but cropped out by Lightroom and C1. This has saved otherwise good pictures that were taken at events or on the street, where you have little control of your position.

"Photolab's interface feels a little clunky and slow but it's also clear that the output quality can be very impressive and that the software has been built by people who care about image quality. For me, though, the killer feature is its clever lens correction.

"I was pleased to read the article, Mike–I'm hoping for DxO's survival and am also hoping that diehard fans of Nik Silver Efex 2 (I'm not among them) will pay the upgrade cost to keep the company in business."

huw Morgan: "I think it's a little ironic that a bankrupt company is touting its software licensing model while Adobe records record profits after adopting a subscriber model. I'll put up with the minor annoyances of a subscription model if it's the price that has to be paid to keep my vendor solvent."

Richard Barbour: "DxO PhotoLab is my primary raw converter these days since jumping off the Adobe subscription bandwagon. It's good for what it does but of course isn't Photoshop, so I find myself often invoking the 'export to application (Photoshop CS6)' function to finish processing a photo. PhotoLab is hard to beat if you want to keep up with the latest camera updates, want a very good default rendering of your raw files (with numerous presets to give one-click satisfaction) and excellent global editing capability. The imported Nik functionality is also useful for local edits, although not quite as well implemented and integrated as one would like. I'm hoping they will fix that in the upcoming release. I also hope DxO is able to solve the current crisis and continue to be a good processing alternative."

We Hear from Adobe

We got comments from both Eric Chan and Thomas Knoll for the "If It Ain't Broke..." post by Carl Weese, and Eric provided some useful links. Check it out....

Mike the Ed.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

If It Ain't Broke....

Written by Carl Weese

Not long ago Mike mentioned how annoying it can be when software manufacturers include changes in an update that disrupt our accustomed workflow. I’ve just encountered one of these situations and thought it might be useful to recount what happened and what I’ve done—so far—to cope with the changes.

As background, while I still shoot large format film and work on scans in Photoshop, with digital capture I do almost everything in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), the raw file development module of Photoshop Creative Cloud (PSCC). After a recent update of PSCC, the first time opened a capture from Bridge into ACR I saw that the main, or “Basic” panel of buttons and sliders was significantly changed. The top of the panel now begins with a Treatment line, with radio buttons for Color and Black & White. The next line is Profile, with a dropdown and an expansion option that turns out to offer a large number of profile choices. The pane where we used to do the b&w/monochrome conversion now has only the set of sliders for Black & White Mix. (I’m currently reading a book that quotes frequently from books and correspondence of late 18th century authors, and I’m amused to find that their use of Capitalization is almost as extravagant as Adobe’s.) Next I noticed that the very useful-if-you-don’t-overdo-it Dehaze tool has been promoted from the fx pane to the Basic panel.

Then I hit a snag. I’d just shot a session that I planned for B&W. Over years of working with ACR I’ve saved quite a lot of User Presets. Things like half a dozen frequently-used white balance settings, four different levels of vignette (lens falloff) corrections, something as simple as a setting that only invoked the monochrome/grayscale conversion of the HSL pane. I selected all the captures in the session, then went to the top menu for Edit > Develop Settings…expecting to see all of my custom presents. They were gone. Copy, paste, previous conversion, and ACR defaults were the only options. Those aren’t exactly difficult to use, but they’re nowhere near as convenient as having my own set of User Presets available.

So I headed to the Presets pane, and found a whole new set of dropdown menus: Color, Creative, B&W, Curve, Grain, Sharpening, Vignetting, and then finally, User Presets. I applied my grayscale preset to a single file, dropped back to Bridge, selected the rest of the session captures, then went to Edit > Develop Settings > Previous Conversion.

Later, I began to work with some new captures. There were just a few so I brought six into ACR, selected all and hit the new Black & White button at the top of the Basic panel. Yuk! The conversions were harsh and ugly. They were a terrible tonal representation of the color image before conversion. Hmm. The second line in the panel, Profile, read out Adobe Monochrome. I dropped back to Bridge and brought up one of the files I’d converted earlier, and found that the Profile read Adobe Standard B&W. What’s going on?

Back to the new files, up into ACR, and I opened the long list of Profile drop downs. Under B&W there were seventeen options. Most were harsh and ugly, but a few looked more promising. The last five clearly imitated classic pan film filter effects, B&W Yellow Filter, B&W Orange Filter, etc. Then I noticed that one of the dropdown options was Legacy, and sure enough, when I opened it, there was Adobe Standard B&W. Apparently, calling up my grayscale User Preset located this option under the hood and provided the grayscale conversion I’d been used to. It really is the Legacy conversion that used to be the default. Rummaging around a bit, I found that I could make Adobe Standard B&W a Favorite, and I could cut Adobe Monochrome from the Favorite list (if not consign it to an inner circle of Hell), making Adobe Standard B&W effectively the default if I hit the Black & White button up in the first line of the Basic panel.

On a more positive note, I was disconcerted when I first found the new and improved User Presets drop down, because, as I moved the cursor down the list of presets, the image in the Preview window jumped all over the place. Each Preset was being immediately previewed. Once I’d gotten the mono conversion issue at least preliminarily settled, I went back to look at this again, and have to say that I like it. Mousing over my set of saved White Balance settings and seeing the Preview image show the effect without actually committing to it is really quite cool. Same for my set of vignette correction settings. Not to mention my often used highlight recovery settings. I’m going to save more of those at a finer grade of distinctions because it is now so easy to preview their effect by just mousing down the list of User Presets before selecting one of them.

There’s some validity to, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and changes like these can be annoying, especially if what’s going on is pretty opaque, but sometimes there’s really good stuff to be found in what the anonymous elves stick us with in each upgrade. I’m old enough that being forced to learn new stuff is supposed to be good for me, so I’m not all that annoyed.

Carl

Carl Weese, who lives in rural Connecticut with his artist wife Tina, has been teaching the esoteric art of fine platinum printing in group workshops and private tutoring sessions since the 1990s. He has had several Pt/Pd print sales on TOP.

©2018 by Carl Weese, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob de Loe: "Under the new model Adobe is following we are going to have to get used to frequent major changes like this. I actually like the new Profiles approach. I compared the Adobe Monochrome profile to the one I developed using the old camera profiles, and I prefer Adobe Monochrome. It brings out just a touch more separation between tones at the start, meaning that it gives me a bit more headroom to make adjustments using the other tools. My only worry was that Adobe will 'tweak' the Profiles in future versions, meaning that in a few years an image I open in Lightroom will be different than it is today because the foundational profile was changed behind the scenes. It's been suggested to me when I raised this elsewhere that Adobe won't do this; instead they'll preserve Adobe Monochrome as it is, and make a new version with a new name. This is the approach they use with Process Versions (so I have some hope that this may be how they do it)."

Eric Chan: "Here is some more information about the new Profiles feature in Camera Raw (also applicable to Lightroom). And here's a video that provides an overview of the feature as presented in Camera Raw. Rob, we are definitely sensitive to preserving the appearance of your existing (already-edited) images. If we find ways to improve the quality of the profiles, we would be creating new or additional profiles (instead of changing the appearance of existing profiles). Cheers, Eric Chan, Camera Raw Engineer."

Thomas Knoll: "Mark presets as Favorites to have them appear in the Bridge menu. It is now common to have hundreds or more presets installed, and we needed a way to keep the menu usable."

[Thomas Knoll of Adobe Systems is the original creator of Photoshop. —Ed.]

Carl replies: Marking presets as Favorites to have them appear in the Bridge menu works nicely. There are only a few user presets I frequently want to apply to large groups of files, so it was easy to add them back to the Bridge menu as Favorites and have them back again.

Howard: "Let me recommend an enlightening book that will help with these changes: Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, M.D."