Luminar Neo update 1.8

Skylum has quietly slipped out an update to Neo without much fanfare. It has two features I’ve really wondered why they were never included. Both make a significant improvement in useability for me.

1. Before & After Sliders

This was pretty hard to believe because Skylum had this feature in Luminar Ai and PhotoLemur. I do find it much better to compare before and after on one screen than flicking the whole screen before and after backwards and forwards. The fact that this also works when you mouse-over presets leads to a better appreciation of their effect on your chosen photo. Finally having a slider to control the opacity of how the preset is applied makes this a real winner in my books.

2. Histogram at the top of the edit controls 

This was also a real puzzle because the histogram has always been displayed in Luminar’s catalogue screens, but was missing when using the edit tools. This is the time that I find the histogram gives its most useful feedback. Specifically, it changes as you apply different edits, so you can follow the tonal impact of them, You do need to understand how the histogram works and why it is a useful graph. It is activated from the main View Menu by ticking the Show Histogram option at the bottom of the pop out list.

The Shape of Things to Come?

I’ve left to last, writing about aspects that I believe Ai techniques should be applied for photo editing and management in the future. The movement to apply different Ai based refinements into existing tools (eg masking, blending etc) will definitely continue. What I would love is to be able to train my own AI with my style of processing images and being able to supervise a more automatic “workflow” to suit both the photograph's content and my objectives.

Ted Forbes of the YouTube channel “The Art of Photography” has reviewed a new AI based photo editing offering called Imagen AI

This does sound a lot like something I have been looking for, a service that will automatically create edits for you using your styles (or generic “talent profiles”). At present, it appears very much aimed at bulk usage cases like event and wedding photographers and specifically from Lightroom. I hope the methods can be taken further, expanded to be more general and interfaced with other software/starting points.

So this is interesting, but not immediately helpful for me (whilst I do have an old version of Lightroom still but never use it) and I’m not holding my breath that it might become the next big thing.

Google have now also released its own text-to-image service also called Imagen, It's a competator for other similar AIart and whilst appropriate prompting can elicite photo-realistic images it's unlikey to be interest to or useful for most photographers.

From an Also Ran to a Thoughbred

I first started using Onone perfect Effects products as add-ins to lightroom, so long ago that I can’t reliably remember. They were great little tools that did simple things but with beautiful results. However, they suffered from the round trip of exporting from lightroom and then re-importing the result. There were all those temporary files. Still, they brought magic to the art of post-processing and Lightroom and Onone made a great team.

OnOne Effects were improved in several steps and started to offer a lot of advanced tools/effect that made it progressively more competitive with Photoshop, including some masking and layer features. They were still add-ins to Lightroom.

Sometime later Onone rebranded to On1. In the shape of things to come On1 Effects was released as a standalone photo editor. Not long afterwards On1 bought out a RAW rendering feature and then the ability to browse that meant it no longer needed lightroom. So it had become a standalone photo editing suite, with the ability for advanced photo editing features and particularly layers. People soon realized it was not only a competitor to lightroom, but also to the lightroom/photoshop combination. The biggest difference was that  On1 Photo RAW was a lot simpler to learn and use than the adobe products without the need to do a round trip, saving time. I stopped using Lightroom around this time.

At each upgrade various AI functions were introduced, starting with context-sensitive retouching, refinements to Masking, and especially a number of Portrait AI tools (which could find and differentiate eyes, lips, teeth, hair & skin etc). it all seemed very magical.

Next came the sky replacement wars. On1 may not have been the first but its AI-driven features made it a standout choice. I’m not sure why there was so much hype around this feature. It was easy and fun to use but I haven’t used it much. This is the time that AI tools became important additions to any serious photo editing and management package (Adobe have been doing a fair bit of catch-up) and there was significant improvement being added with each upgrade (but the upgrades were also becoming more expensive!

The latest version of On1 Photoraw 2023.1 is now out (I haven’t pushed the upgraded button just yet) and it really appears loaded with the sort of feature I have been looking for around better segmenting photos and refining masks. Even an adaptive preset feature knows what segments can be altered in different photos.

Alvin returns as my photographic Life coach

Its more than a year since I sort out my cartoon ultra-ego., Alvin, as a personal trainer to help me reduce my mucking around in photo editing software and social media. Potentially avoid wasting a lot of time.

So how did I do? Social media is definitely cutback (largely because of frustrations rather than conscious effort). My attempts to reduce my burgeoning harem of photographic software mistresses hasn't gone so well. What I have found is a hybrid solution of using the tools that are best suited my projects at the time was far more satisfactory than trying to adopt a strict workflow and a single software application. Having a range of tools suits my creativity, providing I know how to use them, then I don't have too!

PS I seldom use Lightroom (its version 4.4) any more, just occasionally to find an old image.

Is PhotoLemur really an Automatic Fixer?

Photolemur, from Skylum, introduces itself as the world’s first fully automated photo enhancer powered by Artificial Intelligence. A big claim, and does it live up to the claim.

Maybe it Does!

It probably isn’t the total magic autofix app, that photographic postprocessing killer. However it is very neat and does a really wonderful job with exposure, tonal balancing and colour. It’s probably close to weaning me off the need for HDR to get photos that look like I remember the light was when I took the photo. Having said that there is one feature that is sure to appeal to those that avoid post processing photos. There is only one button (the export) and one slider (the paint brush dot), which activates  a nice screen width slider which allows you to control the amount of “boost” from the the original to fully enhanced. I would love to understand how the AI works in detail and I don’t yet, but I am impressed this is a significant step in the right direction. Specifically it is touch sceen friendly so perfect for my little HP spectre.

If you act fast you can get both a free trial (with the watermark) and/or buy it for a great preorder price today at PhotoLemur.

Windows Beta of Luminar has reached 1.0.0

I have been testing the Luminar for Windows Alpha & Bets version for a while and they have clicked over from pre-release versions to version 1.0 so I’m expecting that they will be officially release very soon. The last updates are for specific tools, adding a radial mask and texture (tweaks to clarity & structure sliders). Without doubt the best filter is the Enhance AI filter with the single boost slider (its magic, you have to try it out to appreciate its power) A lot of very ordinary photos will be quickly made impressive with this single click filter and single slider. If you are on a Apple Mac you can get the free trial now, and Windows user will have to register for the beta in the short term. Visit Macphun for the details.

However there are lots of other filters in Luminar made up of numerous common adjustment sliders. Rather than have to set the slider individually or use presets (like lightroom) you have pictures of how the adjustments will look on your photo (like OnOne & instagram). Here I thought I saw a great photo with the dusk sky out to sea reflected in a sheet of shiny stainless steel (A public sculpture on the Coolum board walk, referring back to the seaside fun parks).Well because of the extreme dynamic range the photo ended up insipient and flat (such is life). However loading it into luminar and skipping through the filters I found “Dull no more”, it looked a bit dark but closer to what I was trying to photograph. One click and I as 95% there. I just added a fraction more clarity and I was done.

Luminar is currently a single image editor, it works with all the RAW & Tiff files I threw at it, but it doesn’t have a photo browser within it (ie it will not manage your photos). As a single file editor it really shines and gets the job done super fast.

Can you really fix bad focus?

I managed to capture a couple of parrots in flight, but they where very close and the light in the forest wasn’t great. I was panning ok but the speed of the bird and the slowness of the shutter and not to mention autofocus cranking away. Ok The birds swooped in and I had little time other than your pick up the camera follow the bird and push the shutter. The result was clearly out of focus birds, yet the composition and action was interesting.
Can I recover the focus? My experience has always been I Can Not! Normally such photos get culled as they are first uploaded.

It just happens that Corel are promoting their registration and support with a link to their new 64 bit add-ins and two of the add-ins caught my eye. The first was Wavelet Sharpen 3, which use a larger radius Unshapen Mask (USM) as well as the wavelet sharpening algorithm popular in GIMP. But such sharpening usually enhances the noise, so Wavelet Denoise also looked interesting. It brings the common controls over both luminance and colour noise filtering. With a little back and forth adjustment between these two add-ins and I was able to bring the images to a better “not quiet in focused” state albeit with some grainy artifacts in the background and some haloing. Definitely not in focus but more acceptable. However I can see there is a lot of power in these tools.

Big Hint: Normally I would recommend using manual focus when panning after birds in flight and have any anti-shake of stability adjustment turned off. Of course you need to pre-set the focus to roughly the distance you expect the bird to be and there is a limit on to how slow you can let the shutter exposure be. (for most of us the limit is something like 1/60th. second) so in low light that means a higher ISO (eg 800)

PhotoEditingTools :: Looking Sharp

I’ve stayed away from the use of sharpening. Especially on RAW files because sharpening often lead to extra digital noise. Over sharpening can be very distracting, producing halos around dark or very light edges, How much sharpening is to much? Its a personal decision. All to often the extra detail in a sharpened image is not real just an artifact. It can happen in HDR when too much contrast is included in the tone mapping. So some restraint is desired and access to good sharpening tools esential. Here I am using perfect effects, which splits the sharpening into three groups. the last two are for the screen (not as contrasty) or printer (which then has a series of paper styles) and is much stronger sharpening (to the point of looking a little scary on the screen). However my favourites sharpener are in a group called Fix Focus. My particular favourite being High Pass sharpening, which is also available in Photoshop & Aftershot Pro

PhotoEditTools :: Straightening in Lr CC/6

1. Before I finish the Lr CC trial I feel it is necessary to highlight a nifty little addition to the crop tool. It is the little Auto button over on the right hand side. It does a good job straightening horizons. It also automatically adjust the crop window to just fit the rotated image.
2. Those with previous versions of Lightroom, or those that like making their own adjustments (and of course when Auto doesn’t work) can use the convention straightening tools within the Crop tool. The simplest approach is the little level icon, you fix it to one point stretch the line to another point and click a second time. Very simple, it makes near horizontal things horizontal and near vertical things perfectly vertical (it does not however fix barrel like distortion from wide angle lenses). Alternatively you can use the slider which tilts the image according to the angle shown on the right of the slider.

On phone editors

I was planning a comparison of snapseed versus lightroom mobile as a photo editors you can run on your phone.

They both work on my LG android phone. However  there can be no legitimate comparison after that. Snapseed which comes google these days. is free and super easy to use. To use lightroom mobile you need to subscribe to adobe's creative cloud.  Whilst the edit capability covers many of the features from lightroom's well loved develop module, the look an feel of the interface is really different, even some of the terminology is not the same and I found all this somewhat confusing.  The biggest disappointment came when I tried to share an edited photo, I could not do it from the phone at all  The software claiming I didn't have enough available memory (yet I had an almost empty 16GB microSD card installed, but lightroom apparently can't see this)/ Lightroom Mobile can and does synch beautifully back to lightroom on a desktop. 

So unless you are an Adobe fan boy, have a creative cloud subscription, have lightroom on your computer and don't want to share directly from you phone then snapseeed is a much better option for editing photo on an android phone.

View Of  Melbourne Taken on LG Phone & Edited in Spapseed
pity about the power lines

This post was sent from my android phone

Learning Workspace & Tools rather than Workflow

I have never been a fan of the idea of “the” workflow to control how you work on images. At least for a creative person this approach will guarantee that your work looks just like almost everyone else’s. Instead I prefer to think a better way to "learn" your own style and skills should be a self exploration of the workspace and the tools available.
I'm actually falling back on the way an artist might be expected to learn to sketch. Some of that instruction might be how to hold the pencil but most of the time will be dedicated to seeing the subject and making the appropriate marks on the page, sometimes using a HB pencil sometimes sometimes much softer like a 4B or charcoal and other times maybe coloured like a watercolour wash or crayons. To this end I began a series of simple post where I described the workspace available in common software (specifically software I have used). This was a lot like opening the page of your sketch book or perhaps a setting up a ready primed canvas and getting out your pencils, pens and/or paints. However once you are familiar with the workspace it is time to find out what tools are available and what they can do.
What I am going to tackle next is an exploration of tool types, by tool type. Not trying to cover everything  but definitely those which I consider the important photo editing tools. This is somewhat like using different media in the sketching but I will be focussing on specific tasks that most photographers and/o artists will commonly encounter. I have picked a dozen common tasks and the tools to do them and divided these into three groups

Basic Tools	Flourish Tools	Special Tasks
White Balance	Sharpening/Smoothing	Noise Reduction
Exposures	Selective Refinements	Red Eye Reduction
Tonal Enhancement	Layers, Masks, Gradients	Lens Corrections
Straighten	Filters, Presets
Crop

You probably don't need to learn all of them or even learn them in the order given. They are just a set of tools I think are important to learn. They are not a comprehensive list of tools to answer every possible modification of a digital photo. I intend to discuss each tool, one at a time, and generally one tool in one or just a couple of software package at a time. I don't intend to explain every possible option for each tools but I want to start you on the journey of learn new tools and which tools can be used for which tasks. I particularly want to leave you with a desire to experiment with those new tools and skills.
So next time you have a photo you think has potential, look at which task/tool is likely to deliver that improvement and start to experiment with just that tool. Shift the sliders both ways. Look at the extremes. Perhaps even try the same image in a different package or the same tool on an on-line service. Like any artist you should become skilled at making your mark in the way you feel comfortable.  You could wait for me to discuss that tools (you might have a long wait) but If you aren't comfortable yet just set aside some time to experiment with the tool, try every which way. The big advantage with digital images is it will cost you little more than your time.

There are dozens of expensive books that follow elaborate workflows but I don't think you can beat learning how to use one tool at a time on a task that is important to creating/enhancing your own image.

Once you know the way in which you want to use the tools and you find yourself doing the same tasks time and time again, then  this is the time to considered work flow, But it should be something that suits you and enhances your creativity.

PhotoEditingTools :: Straightening up in AfterShot Pro

Something that everyone seems to be an expert on is straightening when the horizon is water. Everyone seems to “know” that the horizon will be flat and can be harsh when it isn’t. However straightening is one of the tools that often get overlooked when learning photo software. Further straightening is one task that is handled very differently in different packages.

I am using AfterShotPro on my laptop much more, often in association with Picasa to review photos when I first load them. I find this is the best time to cull, rank, add the metadata and perhaps do some very basic edits. Whilst Straightening is never a high priority. I find that AfterShot Pro has a really wonderful straightening tool, it is the small tilted picture icon at the bottom left of the main image display. The tool displays a bold arrow, clicking and holding the mouse will then select this point as an anchor and as you move the mouse away from this point a circular target style image opens up which has a horizontal and vertical grid markings (useful in aligning both vertical and horizontal items) Movement of the mouse can rotate this target circle. As you move away from the target a bold line is draw on one of the prime directions (right. left, up or down) closest you you movement. If you move the mouse outside a certain size (ie the circle almost fills the shortest axis of your image), the circle no longer expands but the bold reference line continues as you drag the mouse further. In the example above I have anchored the first point on the horizon on the left and side and draw out my desired horizontal to the horizon on the right hand side. Releasing the mouse rotates the image to use this new horizontal.

Unlike most other straighten tools, the one in AfterShot Pro does not automatically crop your image. So you are left with triangular salvages (shown in grey On the left) along the sides. The crop tool is the two overlapping L shapes with a tiny scalpel icon, its is to the left beside the straighten icon. Clicking on it displays a small dialogue box, in the upper right hand corner is a button labelled fit, clicking on this will then automatically fits your rotated photo into the largest rectangle that it can generate without displaying the salvages, (ie it trims off some of the edges or your image). This basically matches the automatic cropping of other packages. However when you rotate the image the aspect ratio of that fill rectangle can vary, so being able to crop to a defined ratio instead of the best fit could be desirable in many situations. Finally for all the “pixel peepers” and/or folk with a micrometre, here is my straighten version of my contre-jour seascape