The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

Challenge: DR compression

Lars

Active member
Peter - I'm not so sure about that integration. LR is a separate product from CS, built by a separate, small, innovative team. CS OTOH is all massive legacy code, some 80 million lines of it is what I heard.

The problem with integration of separate products at that scale is that for anything shared, each product team has - must have - a veto right to safeguard the quality of its own legacy product. So while low-level shared components can boost productivity, at a higher level - like using LR as file browser for all of CS - sharing and integration effectively stalls innovation.

Also, from a market perspective there is little benefit as LR caters to a different market than CS. Yes many of us photographers use CS, but it's not really made for us. LR is, we just need to pull in PS for editing once in a while. Then when we put on our publishing hat it's of course a different situation, but that is a role that all photographers do not have.

If I was product manager for LR I would fiercely defend its independence from CS. Bridge can remain a file browser for CS users, but hands off my photo workflow app!
 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member
Lars, how do you estimate the schedule for finishing this Joey project of yours in a first version ?
I could use something like that on top of Capture One Pro 3.7.7 for my M8 DNG files.
 

Lars

Active member
bondo, Thanks for the interest, it's still a bit left before I can even call anything a beta.... let's put it this way, by the time of my first release your Capture One won't be 3.7.7 anymore.

However you are definitely in the target group - let me ask you this: what would you be looking for in a photo editing software that you cannot find today? Always interesting to get some input. :)

Lars
 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member
Thanks Lars
Right now my biggest concern is that my M8 seems to be clipping the highlights rather abrupt. I suspect it may have something to do with the 8 bit DNG files :(
I simply don't get it why they are not at least 12 bit ... ?? Oh well.
Anyway, this means that I often need to underexpose by something like a whole stop. And afterwards it would be nice to have access to a feature like "D-lighting" (known from RAW converters like Nikon Capture 4.4.2, and even from Nikon PictureProject 1.6 that comes free with the cheaper Nikon DSLR models).
So actually a feature for dealing exactly with the topic of this thread would be a major feature, in my opinion. And especially for my present purpose with the M8.
But in general I would say that features helping the user to provide the images with some extra "pop and bang", i.e. doing the best possible to contrast, color saturation and sharpness and whatever make them "jump out of the screen or paper". This "pop" character was my main reason for selling my Canon gear and buying into Nikon and now Leica.
There is a great member on the Nikon board of the FM forum, Raymond Francois, who is very skilled in postprocessing. Recently he was so kind to show the other board members some of his tricks. The example might be a bit exaggerated in order to make even PP-dummies like me understand. But believe me, he has shown countless excellent results. That was why he was asked to reveal some of his tricks. Go take a look for yourself. But I don't want to buy CS3 just for this "smartfilters blending mode to softlight"
feature (which I can't find in my old Photoshop 7 ?). Anyway, go take a look for yourself.
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic2/571651
 

Lars

Active member
If only you are done by the time Capture One 4.0 hits the shelves :D
No promises :D

About the recipe at the link you posted... Seems like a typical Photoshop mess, with excellent results. This is not unusual, you have this guy who spends countless hours on Photoshop, then cooks up recipes, which others copy while sometimes not understanding what they are doing or why (hell sometimes the recipe author is clueless, then of course he has to write another PS cookbook and the confusion is total ;)).

I've been there myself, have gone through my sins, eventually learnt something.

The idea with Joey is to use concepts that are closer to how you think, visually and logically. For example, if you want to soften the rock in the foreground you select the mid-toned warm yellow of the rock, then add a softening. To change the softening just change it at any time.

How well this will work will of course depend on if I can write a good UI for it. That takes time, lots of it. But it's getting there.

BTW the clipping of your M8 images could perhaps just be a question of overexposure? Perhaps (maybe this is what you mean) with only 8 bits Leica didnt allow for enough overexposure headroom to be coded into the raw file.

BTW2 8 bits that must be gamma coded. 8 bit linear leads to horrible blocking in shadows. Other raw formats are linear, perhaps Leica did some thinking to save storage space? with 8 bit gamma 2 coding over 16 bit linear, what you throw away is intermediate values in highlights whereas in the deep shadows you still have a decent resolution. But more bits is of course better.

OTOH a raw is often edited aggressively by applying curves so I doubt 8 bit gamma is sufficient for much more than a straight development. But I have no experience from M8 DNG files so I cannot say.

Lars
 
Last edited:
M

Mitch Alland

Guest
LightZone almost gonzo?

Lars:

A bit alarmed to hear that LightZone is almost on its last legs. Is that so?

I was a beta tester for LZ2 about a year ago, but, then, stopped getting responses to e-mail that I sent, which now makes sense if most of the people are gone.

The trouble is that I've now organized my workflow to use LZ exclusively with my GRD2 and GX100 cameras, as well as th D-Lux-3. While Silkypix has somewhat better RAW conversion, as does Raw Developer, I find that I can make up the difference (for B&W) with further processing in LZ.

What I like about LZ is, first, the vector-based selection facility (Regions), which is much more powerful and easy-to-use than Photoshop — I don't even need a pen tablet to use it; second, the Tone Picker and Relight tools; and, third, the ability to save stacks of tools as Styles that can then be applied to other pictures.

Obviously there are some flakey things that need to be fixed in LZ, but the idea of using an orphaned product — if it is indeed orphaned — is problematic because, as operating systems evolve, one is eventually stuck with something unusable. And learning new PP software is also time-consuming and painful. I suppose, for the time being, I should continue using LZ. Any advice?

—Mitch/Huahin
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
 

Lars

Active member
Mitch,

Stick with a workflow you are happy with, for a few years at least.

In general, from a photographer's perspective, no image making processes are permanent.

In the wet darkroom, papers come and go, chemicals age, water pH changes over the years. The only thing permanent is the prints you already made.

The digital darkroom is similar - while you have a workflow today that creates a certain interpretation of a raw file, odds are you won't be able use the same workflow (computer, OS, software, printer) twenty years from now. The only thing permanent is your prints (hopefully), you can always make new interpretations of your raws but it won't be the same.

For this reason, it's important to save and archive the final digital output of the important final images. A tif or even high-quality jpeg will be great for recreating a similar print. For this reason I try to always save my output as a tif and then print the tif.

Another advice is to keep the raw conversion software separate from the editing software. Over time, as you buy new cameras, raw converter makers have to respond by updating their software. This is problematic for smaller shops like Lightcrafts. If you depend upon your workflow software to support all your future cameras then you are building a dependency upon the software maker.

Maggie,

LightZone is a fine product and I hope it survives. In the long run any commercial product depends on a positive cash flow, and LZ has not been the commercial success we hoped for. That can still change.

Nothing wrong with builiding a workflow around a software, just don't depend upon it being around in ten years even if it might. I think it's fair to see the lifespan of a workflow as being 3-5 years (incidentally the same as pro-level digital cameras these days).

Lars
 

Steen

Senior Subscriber Member
(...) - let me ask you this: what would you be looking for in a photo editing software that you cannot find today? Always interesting to get some input. :)

Lars
Lars, are you familiar with the so-called "U Point Technology" with Color Control Points (plus Black, White and Neutral Control Points) in Nikons RAW converter Capture NX ? Otherwise I would recommend you to look into that piece of software, just for inspiration. It's the most elegant solution for partial editing without layers I have seen so far.
http://nikonimaging.com/global/products/software/capturenx/nxsp/u_point.htm
 
Last edited:

Lars

Active member
Thanks for the tip, Steen. Already covered.

BTW U-points are still adjustment layers internally, they just don't show you the list of layers. And they are a bit limited in functionality.

Here is a before-after sample from Joey - no PS-style masks just two simple editing steps. The goal was to increase the amount of fog and let the fog move closer. Possibly the effect could have been faded to add some slight transparency to the fog. Joey even lets you move a slider to see the fog move in real time. Total time for editing less than a minute.

The original image is a 6x17 scan at 25,000 pixels wide. Blur radius is maybe 10% of image width or 2500 pixels if you like. Still fast hehe.

Now if I could ever get this darn product finished... The devil is in the details that's for sure.
 
Last edited:

Mitchell

New member
Lars,

Joey seems very interesting. My only comment is that the HDR solutions I've seen so far seem unsubtle, but perhaps it's just a matter of the taste of the person processing.

Is Joey going to work on a Mac, I hope?

Best,

Mitchell
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
On HDR you should all look very closely into a new tool called "Enfuse" It is a LR plug-in that does an excellent job of the blend during the raw conversion --- no halos or seams. Here is some discussion and examples as well as the downloads: http://timothyarmes.com/lrenfuse.php

Cheers,
 

Lars

Active member
Hi Mitchell,

Please don't get too hung up on the "HDR" moniker just yet... for many photographers (including me) HDR a foul word associated with overdone digital processing, ugly contrast mask halos etcetera. It seems to me that parts of the HDR crowd are more visually impaired techno geeks than photographic artists, at least to some degree. Just because you can do an HDR merge doesn't mean you should! So I'm not going to use that term. Rather I'm trying to get away from the whole 8-bit 0 to 255 thinking (or 16 bits or whatever) and approach the image math more from a photographic point of view (pun intended). What that will mean in the end remains to be seen.

Hmm Mac... touchy subject - even more so in these parts of the wood... As a sole developer of a new commercial product I had to make a choice of platform to develop for. Common wisdom and experience says that everything else being equal, developing a rich-UI commercial app for Mac plus Windows is about 5-10x the effort of developing for a single platform. After considering several (technical and strategic) criteria I came to the conclusion that making a pro photo editor for Windows makes more sense than making one for MacOS. Then down the road when funding looks good it's time to make a Mac port.

The good news is that by the time I'm finished (hopefully this year :)) running a windows app virtually in a window on OSX will be a no-brainer. So in a way time is working for Mac users in this context.

Lars
 

Mitchell

New member
Lars,

Thanks for your reply.
I like your dune image, and it's encouraging to see you took the uncommon approach with it of going away from all the hot colors to more simplicity.

Good luck with Joey!

Best,

Mitchell
 
Top