Article – Page 2

Lightzone Raw Processor

Added this at the last minute. If I’m reading the history right, it was a failed commercial product released into the wild.

Like DarkTable, LightZone is based onÂ a set of modules that perform different functions, which can be stacked in any order (and instantiated multiple times). It also has the blending mode options available.

LightZone has “regions and masks”, which can be applied to all tools, allowing you to do local adjustments. There is also a specific clone tool, and a red-eye fixer. Regions/masks are all vector, though, you can’t enhance them with bitmap editing, which makes them not up to anything beyond the simplest masking (a bit beyond what an old-style split neutral density filter could handle, but only a bit).

The “zonemapper” function, and the “relighting tool”, look particularly interesting.

Specific Issues

Responsiveness

When I select a photo in the filmstrip, it appears in the editing window quite quickly. Ah, but switching from browsing to editing mode is slow.

Unchecking, for example, the raw processing filter, it flicks back to the previous state quite promptly.Â But when I then click it on again, it appears to perform the noise reduction again, complete with on-screen progress bar.Â Something much faster is needed; flicking back and forth bewteen two versions of a photo is perhaps the most important performance metric in such a processor, since that’s the primary way of deciding if a setting is right.

The “orig” icon in the toolbar does seem to be a little faster in flicking back and forth, but only between the full stack and the original.

ZoneMapper / RAW Tone Curve

This lets you mark points in the source value space and drag them to where they should be placed in the destination value space. So it’s equivalent to the standard curves tool, but gives you a different displayÂ to work with. It’s also mated with the Zones info panel, and will show you where the zone you’re about to drag appears in the photo.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to go from a point in the image to a zone. Using the zone display at the top, picking a zone will highlight at low res where it is in the image, but that results in clumsy searching. I want to be able to click in the image and have that place me on the right zone (and similarly for tone curve).

Also, I’d like a curves presentation option for this adjustment.

Ratings

It’s not picking up the existing ratings on my ORF files. Hmmm; also NEF files, which is inexcusable. When I set a rating via LightZone, it appears briefly over the thumbnail (sometimes tenths of a second, sometimes seconds), and then disappears again, not to reappear.Â It also doesn’t show in the metadata panel to the right. Looks like ratings are completely broken.

The rating doesn’t appear on the editing screen, either.

Screen Layout

It seems to be fixated on putting the thumbnail strip (filmstrip) across the bottom of the screen, where it steals irreplaceable vertical space (which, since the advent of the “widescreen” monitor, is always the limiting factor in photo viewing size).

I don’t seem to be able to get rid of the left column, which is tabbed between is styles list and a history tool. Again, wasting screen space like this is very bad, there’s never enough screen space even with dual monitors one of which is 26″. Also I can’t tear it or the other panels off and put them on the secondary monitor, it doesn’t look like.

Noise Reduction

The noise reduction isn’t impressive. Also there are two tools, a “color noise” slider in the “RAW Adjustments” filter, plus a “Noise Reduction” filter. Since I can hardly detect an effect from the one in the RAW Adjustments filter, I’m ignoring that one.

Relighting

The “depth” slider definitely does something, but I can’t figure out what, and the official name and description don’t help me much in finding it. Also it’s a bit weird that the range of the slider is from 8 to 64.

Crop Tool

The crop tool gives me a 3×3 grid while adjusting the cropping. That’s one of the more popular choices, but I’ve been playing with 5×5 and can’t seem to change to that. And some people don’t like a grid at all. This should be settable. (Some people also like more complex things, “golden rectangle” and “golden spiral” and the like.)

Example Images

Derby

The noise reduction isn’t much good.Â It’s either essentially ineffective, or quite artificial looking (with frequent missed dots), depending on how I set the sliders.

Huh; turns out the “Relight” filter has much more interesting effects if it’s not disabled.Â Who would have expected that?Â I was briefly wondering if I’d gone blind, when so many controls had no visible effects even with extreme movements.

The “detail” slider in “Relighting” is interacting quite nastily with noise in this image (which is ISO 6400).

Throwing away a lot of the blacks and using that space for the midtones seems to have been the winning option for this photo in this processor (using the zonemapper).

Dr. Mike

This is a JPEG original. So the noise problems are worse. Again, I get a mix of plastic and noise tuned up into spikes.

I’m also badly missing any sort of conventional brightness / contrast / white point / black point control, to move the whole image around.Â Luminosity in the “Hue/Saturation” filter helps some.

And the program crashed as I tried to switch back to browser mode to pick the next photo to work on.

Minnehaha

LightZone does seem to be happy to open Fuji S2 raw files, either directly or as converted to DNG.

I’m getting pretty decent results from stacking Zone Mapper tools here.

Naomi

Purple Flower

Doc Smith Books

Tux Cat

Aftershot Pro Raw Processor

This is what I’ve been using for a while now (I also keep Bibble Pro around). The latest upgrade doesn’t include support for Noise Ninja integration, and thus is not useful to me.Â Rumor has it that the fault for this lies with Picturecode for refusing to renew the license, not with Corel. Picturecode is now competing directly in this market themselves, with Photo Ninja.

Fuji S2 RAF files are not recognized. Neither are DNG files. And there are no hits for “dng” searching the online help.

Here’s the main editor screen:

Specific Issues

Color Management

Aftershot Pro has lost the “working space” setting that Bibble 5 has under “color management”. I can’t tell what the working space is any more.

Straighten

I nearly always use the “draw the line” tool, which is very easy to use.

Example Images

Derby

Dr. Mike

Minnehaha

The Fuji S2 RAF raw files (and DNG conversions of them) are not supported in Aftershot Pro.

Naomi

Purple Flower

Smith Books

Tux Cat

The Fuji S2 RAF raw files are not supported, even if converted to DNG.

Capture One Raw Processor

Capture One Pro comes down to us from the medium-format digital world. It was also apparently very widely used in early digital production houses, that went digital using the Kodak digital SLR adaptations of Nikon and Canon bodies. Places doing catalog shots in volume, say, didn’t need the resolution of film, and benefited a lot from the workflow and lack of lab fees.

Specific Issues

Adjustment Layers

They’re easier to draw than in Bibble, but still much harder to work with than Photoshop. I did successfully darken the background of a derby picture using layers.

Histogram

Lines for each color plus a gray region for luminance makes it easy to see all four, and not too gaudy.

No option for logarithmic histogram.

Cropping

The crop tool lets me set grid guide specs.

Focus Mask / Focus Tool

The tool is just a magnified preview window. This is very useful, actually, but the name makes it sound like a bigger deal.

The focus mask shows where the system thinks the image is in focus. This looks good on studio shots in their video; in practical use with my field shots at high ISO it mostly shows that fishnet stockings have higher contrast than faces, I think.

And there does not appear to be a keyboard shortcut for the focus mask. Ah; you can set a keyboard shortcut for any menu command, including that one, there just isn’t one by default.

Curve

The curve tool doesn’t seem to have a way to move the points chosen around using cursor keys, only by dragging.

Screen Layout

This one does have a way to put the film strip or mini-browser or whatever the name is at the side instead of the bottom of the screen (vertical screen real estate being one of the hard limits most people contend with in photo editing).

Example Images

Â Derby

Dr. Mike

The noise reduction tools are severely inadequate for this sort of image. Setting everything to absolute max definitely isn’t good enough (nowhere near as good as Photo Ninja’s Noise Ninja 3 can produce).Â I suspect that the heritage of this tool, studio cameras and lately medium-format ones at that, has left noise reduction as a fairly low priority. Huh; or perhaps there’s something wrong with the preview, the rendered image looks overdone (the one shown here is about half of all the noise reduction settings).

Minnehaha

I made some use of masking here, to be able to bring up the shadowed ice on the face without blowing the sunlit water at the top any further.

c1 ddb 20050328 010-024-full — Click image for full-res version

Naomi

Purple Flower

Doc Smith Books

Tux Cat

Darktable Raw Processor

Darktable is a Unix-only free software product.Â So it’s not available for Windows. My evaluation was done using an Ubuntu Linux installation on a virtual machine.Â I assigned the VM 4GB of RAM and all 4 CPUs. Darktable makes heavy use of OpenCL (API to access the compute power of graphics cards for general use), which was not installed on my VM. So for a number of reasons I’m pretty sure the responsiveness seen in my tests would be considerably inferior to what one would see on a native Linux installation.

Darktable doesn’t seem to pick up lens or exposure information from the Olympus EPL-2. Images from the Fuji S2 are completely broken, the icy falls picture is mostly diagonal magenta stripes. Tried DNG later, better for EPL-2, not usable (but a visible image) for S2.

Darktable works in LAB space internally, using 4x32bit floating point numbers. (Why four? LAB is still a three-component model, just not the usual three.)

The user manual is notably good, which in my experience is rare for such specialized Open Source software.

Darktable’s basic setup is a stack of processing modules.Â You can, if you need to, alter the order of modules in the stack. You can also put modules into the stack multiple times, with different parameters.

Many modules support turning on “blending modes”, which mix the output with the input (using one of the myriad modes that GIMP and Photoshop love so much). “Off” means just use the output of the module, which is what some modules are best for. Using blending modes lets you get really lost really quickly, but I think this is something that would reward practice and study, and is very powerful. Mostly the modes blends just one aspect of the imput and output images (like lightness, or chroma, or hue), passing the other through.

If that’s not exciting enough, there’s also “conditional blending”. Module presets can be related to camera, lens, ISO, and exposure setting information. So, theoretically there’s a huge amount of power and control available here. I can say that ordinary editing doesn’t seem to need to call on it, which means you don’t have to hit that learning curve on day one.

There’s a rather interesting specialized bit of UI for slider-controlled number boxes.Â The mouse wheel works over the slider (which is a small target). Works semi-okay even in remote X running on a virtual machine. And an interesting right-click box that supports both typing numbers AND variable-precision mouse control (not drag-based; you click on the spot, with curves showing you roughly what each spot means).

Here’s the main editing window, with the right-click box open on the exposure slider.

It doesn’t seem that I can change where the filmstrip appears. Since modern monitors are overly-wide and far to short, it’s much better to take required (and I can’t find a way to make it go away, either) space-using elements to the sides, NOT top or bottom. (The basic editing area, when all the overhead is subtracted, needs to be square; otherwise, either horizontal or vertical pictures are at a disadvantage.)

Specific Issues

Crop and Rotate

The “guides” selections give you a wide choice of cropping guides visible during the drag. However, I can’t find a way to get it to do a 5×5 grid for me, which is what I’m currently using most.

Color Balance

Not sure about settings for “white balance” and “input color profile”
and “output color profile”. The model I’m familiar with from Bibble
and Photoshop involves a “working space” and then using the tagged
input space (or specifying if not tagged, but with my cameras that
never happens).

Docs say the white balance module has a “temperature in” slider, but it
doesn’t; it has a “temperature” slider, and tint, and r, g, and b.

And that “temperature” slider seems to run up to 30,000K, an extremely cold color balance.

And things jump around at random a lot, often leaving me with an
intense green color balance.

White Balance

The “flash” preset sets the color temp to 3965K.Â Daylight is 3556K.Â Daylight and flash are normally 5500K in the world I come from.

Exposure

The exposure slider has a huge range, going out to 18EV. This makes it very hard to work with. Possibly becoming more comfortable with the right-click features of the slider would help here, however (making the actual slider kind of a secondary control).

Example Images

Derby

I’m pretty happy with the noise reduction here. I may have taken it a small step too far, but it was also interacting with attempts to sharpen the not-quite-perfectly frozen heads.

Dr. Mike

Again, this is primarily a noise reduction problem. This image was shot at ISO 1600 on a Fuji S2 (and saved as jpeg, not raw). The fact that it’s a jpeg original partly explains my not trying too hard to rescue the clipped whites on the shoulder.

Minnehaha

This one is a technical failure. Converting Fuji S2 RAW files, even via DNG, doesn’t work usefully in Darktable. The artifact grid also really messed up the jpeg compression, so even the “full res” version is a rather low quality jpeg file.

Naomi

This image may be too easy to show much. But at least it shows that a good final version can be produced.

Purple Flower

This may be the least successful edit I did with Darktable.

Smith Books

This worked about as well as anything else at rescuing some of the overexposed areas. (Remember, the overall exposure was such as to guarantee some areas that remain overexposed; thus it looks like crap.)

Lightroom Raw Processor

Why do Windows software developers hate me? Lightroom refuses to put its catalog on a network disk, and network disk is all I have (well, there’s a small SSD to boot from, but certainly not big enough for the Lightroom catalog). It similarly refuses to put the catalog on an external drive. It does seem to succumb to the linked directory trick though.Â But still, why does it try to refuse to use the most reliable disk available to me?Â Idiots.

The need for a central catalog in the first place is one of the main reasons I’ve never really used Lightroom, not even a serious trial. I’ve already got information irrevocably embedded in a proprietary database (I’m contemplating committing serious Python scripting to get the data out), and that’s the last thing I want to commit to.

Plus of course Adobe is out of favor with me right now due to the “cloud” licensing scheme.Â They’re asking me to pay them 2-5 times as much per year as I’ve been paying them for Photoshop, and telling me I can’t schedule when I can afford to do it.Â Plus all the usual worries about controlling update scheduling, losing access to saved files if I let my license lapse, and so forth.Â Basically, Adobe is enthusiastically encouraging a lot of their customers to frantically try to find something, anything, other than an Adobe product that they can live with. I expect that this boondoggle will lead to the creation of the competitors that will eventually kill Adobe.

Using Lightroom 5.0, on the standard 30-day trial. I think I may have had an earlier trial on this computer, but apparently they reset on major version changes or something.

I realized I needed to test Lightroom directly, because the responsiveness issue (which is bidding to be the major problem of many of these packages) isn’t going to be revealed by just using ACR in Photoshop.

In general I hate “all in one” software; it tends to be second-rate at most things, and third-rate at some.Â Very rarely it’ll be first-rate at something, but basically never more than one thing. I want packages that are really good at what they do, and that work together.Â Like Photo Mechanic, which is unsurpassed (has no competition, in fact) for the task of sorting and rating photos.

Specific Issues

Catalog

I really don’t want another catalog of my photos, but I don’t have any choice. It does seem to be able to import directories in place, without trying to absorb my existing photos, anyway.

Screen Layout

The filmstrip tries to go across the bottom of the screen, but it can at least be easily changed to auto-hide. Haven’t found a way to move it to the side, or a second monitor, or something yet.

Sliders

Hmm, these seem to ignore the mouse wheel until I’ve dragged them, but then start responding to the wheel. No, I guess it’s clicking on the slider (tiny target) that enables the wheel.Â Painful!

Responsiveness

Yeah, as expected it’s doing very well here (Photoshop does, and ACR does).

Noise Reduction

As with ACR, quite primitive, not nearly adequate. Preview response isn’t bad, around a second.

Crop

Oh dear, it’s got that stupid crop mode where both the border and the picture move, in opposite directions, when you move the mouseâ€”so that the effective motion of a given mouse motion is twice what you get in general. I think there was a way to turn that off in Photoshop, haven’t found it here yet. What a stupid idea!

Straightening is also part of this module. There doesn’t seem to be a way to use the level tool to define what I think is straight, and then modify the rotation, though. When I’ve got images in the wrong orientation, which happens sometimes, I prefer to use one rotation to fix both their being 90Â° off and any small departure from straight.Â Does it really matter?Â Who knows; a 90Â° rotation should probably be lossless, but I’m a suspicious curmudgeon.

But the keyboard shorcut to invoke this is “R”.Â Not “C” as in Photoshop and everything else.Â Similarly for zoom keyboard shortcuts, incidentallyâ€”different from Photoshop and hence from everything that has copied Photoshop.

Ratings

The editing screen doesn’t seem to show ratings, color, selection, and hence also has no way to change them. They’re available in the film strip, but since that’s bolted to the bottom, that has to be hidden to have room to work.

White Balance

The eyedropper tool (click on neutral) disappears after one use, so my very common mode of prospecting around for a good neutral point is ten times slower than normal, and far more annoying.

Example Photos

Â Derby

Noise reduction is key to this, and Lightroom has just the basic ACR tools there, which don’t hack it.

Â Dr. Mike

Even on a jpeg, Lightroom gives me Highlight control. It doesn’t seem to actually accomplish much, though.

Minnehaha

This one is always tough; it’s badly exposed, really not something that can be rendered into an art-print grade result. However, lots of useful photos have problems that way, so that makes it a good test.

On this one, even dragging the shadows up to 100 didn’t help much. I’ve ended up with highlights -100, shadows +100, and exposure +1.15.Â And clarity kicked way the hell up, too, at 64. I tried both the DNG and the original RAF, and they behave the same, which is nice.

Almost starting to look like something, and I haven’t made the burned out highlights in the water above the lip much worse.

Â Naomi

Always easy. Still easy. Probably not a good test photo, but kind of too late to replace it with something now.