Waiting for better colour tools

Photographic software, particularly editing software, has been dominated by adjusting the RGB Red Green Blue numbers. But human perception of colour is slightly more complex in capturing filtered colours on a light sensor under bayer filters or viewing a screen of  LEDs light emittingdiodes, coloured red green and blue-ish . Further  many graphic artist had complained mixing coloursd in graphic software,  doesn’t necessarily create the same colours that you would expect in a mix using pigment paints.

In the end I had to just live with these limitations.

However things are changing a few graphic applications will now more naturally mix pigments for graphic software. What I wish to discuss here is a surprise addition to the update 1.21 to Lumina Neo. It includes a new section called Color Harmony. The two top sliders will be very familiar to ligthroom Photoshop users but with slight different colours on the top slider, which is not called Tint but Brilliance. Instead of starting at green and moving to a magenta it runs for a bluish grey green to a red. I suspect is colour harmony is very much inspired/controlled by the NCS system which still dominates many European countries.

Colour Contrast is something I will also discuss later as it deserves a bit more investigation.

Split colour versions of pigments, as warmer or cooler versions when mixing intermediate colours, have been a long standing practise of how artists have traditionally bought a lot of drama and harmony  into their artisticworks. On a flat surface, like a painting or photograph, cool colours tend to recede warm colours tend to come forward.  

Portrait photographs have known this even back in the film days. Using various filters of coloured lights to enhance their work and bring the sitter to life. In the smartphone world there are “warmify” apps to liven your selfie and deeply buried option on most digital cameras to alter th colour temperature of the photo output. Cannon is renowned for their “warmer” sensors. These digital tools usually apply to the whole image

Why these Split Colour Warmth sliders are different they change warm and cool components of your picture separately. This is a bigger deal than I originally thought. Here is a simple example of a young bougainvillea “bloom”, actually just new leaves that are orange before turning magenta, taken at my studio window. I’m a little amazed how much impact can be achieved when you separately adjust the whoops and cool have on the photo. I’m expecting to have a lot of fun with these sliders.

 

Colour Balance adds nuanced refinements, combining tonal/luminance steps with more detail colour adjustments. It is also an area I wish to explore further.

 Finally I should point out the Film Strip at the bottom of my screen capture above, this has been a long asked for addition to Luminar Neo. It allows you to see several thumbnails of adjacent images in the catalogue and you can rate and compare them directly here

Luminar Neo's GenAI Tools Need More Time in the Oven

Luminar Neo recently added three new generative AI tools called GenErase, GenExpand, and GenSwap, all supposedly based on generative AI technology. I’d seen a bit of hype about them and they just turned up for a 30 day trial, so I just need to play and try these new features. I have to say they clearly needed more time in development before being released to the public.

The tools are only available through Neo's subscription service presumably because they utilize cloud computing power. This means they will likely never be available to run locally on a desktop.

I was most interested in testing out GenExpand, which is supposed to let you extend the edges of an image. I do like Neo’s Panorama stitching extension but I often get bulbous, untrimmed images when stitching together handheld panoramas in Neo, so I thought GenExpand could help with that. Unfortunately, my first attempt to expand a massive 588MB panorama got stuck taking forever and then just produced blackness over the area I’d selected. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

 A smaller test image did successfully expand, but the new edge addition was blurry and grayscale. On closer inspection the horizon matched byt clouds and waves didn’t matchup well to the original.

Hoping for better luck, I tried GenSwap to insert a kangaroo into a photo. The AI clearly wasn't trained on enough Aussie animals, its a bizarre creature but “thats not a real kangaroo”. At this point, my enthusiasm was waning.

Finally, I tested GenErase to remove objects from photos. It performed decently but didn't seem much better than the standard erase tool already in Luminar Neo. Trying to erase a larger object again resulted in the tool freezing up.

In the end, while the ideas behind these new GenAI tools are intriguing, I feel they simply aren't ready for practical use. Too many bugs, glitches, and failures to finish make them more frustrating than functional. Luminar Neo would have been better served by traditional beta testing before releasing them. For now, I don't trust these tools, or for that matter many other developers' generative AI tools to deliver satisfactory results, or are my expectations too high? Maybe someday the technology will mature into something more reliable, but for now GenAI feels more like a breakable flashy toy and “trying to keep up with the Jones”.

The hyper-real, as a replacement for our photographs?

 

I was out scouting for my last photowalk, on a bright winters day with virtually no breeze. The Jells Park lake was forming a beautiful mirror with strong reflections. I am also testing out the new Skylum Neo extension for creating a multi-image stitched panorama, its nice and much faster than the stitching routine I'm currently using in ON1 Photo RAW.

Things are changing fast in generative AIart all the time and I was also testing out the latest version of Stable Diffusion (model SDXL 1.0) on Nightcafe studio and thought a sunny winter's scene like the above would make a good test. I used the text prompt -

"bright winter blue sky, some clouds over a still lake with strong reflection, yellow ochre grasses in foreground, Professional photography, natural lighting, shot on micro four third digital camera sharp focus"

With the above photo being given the defaults of a 50% Prompt Weight and 50% Noise Weight as the starting diffusion image for the generative process.

Certainly the capabilities of these generative AI systems has become really great, the detail is definitely starp and the reflections undoubted strong. However is it just a bit disturbingly too much on the hyper-real side?

"Hyper-real: More real than reality..." Brookes Jensen, Lenswork PodcastLW1362 - The End of the Trail, Sort Of

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.

Luminar :: A perspective of Skylum's AI Journey

The Luminar journey started with Macphun, a company that developed photo editing tools solely for Apple Macintosh computers. They were the original developers of Nik Collection and Snapseed, two of the more popular post-processing tools in the apple market (Mac and IPhone) at the time.

Later, Macphun shifted its focus to the Windows environment as well and started testing new simpler user interfaces. This approach eventually led to the birth of the Luminar suite. The initial versions of Luminar were standalone software that had a photo browser underneath and ran modules similar to the specific style of add-ins they had previously supplied. The software was less expensive and simpler to use, and it was popular with photography enthusiasts rather than professionals.

Macphun, became Skylum, and upgraded the software at an incredible rate compared to Adobe. Some of the upgrades introduced new approaches, which were mainly loved, but incompatibilities across updates were poorly received. The cost and frequency of upgrades meant that owning and maintaining an up-to-date version was becoming expensive. During this time, Macphun/Skylum also developed Aurora HDR in association with Trey Radcliff and included a number of AI-based techniques, specifically being able to recognize different parts of an image, such as the sky, people, buildings, and lakes.

The introduction of Luminar 4 was a significant rethink of the way photo editing was undertaken. Unfortunately, it had several incompatibilities with previous Luminar versions, and some previous tools were missing, so a lot of the previous non-destructive edits could not be reproduced. User were generally not impressed.

Not long after the Luminar 4 fiasco, Skylum released Luminar AI, which was again a new and somewhat incompatible rewrite. It still provided a comprehensive photo editing package but was based on the use of AI-trained tools exclusively to perform most functions. While it was nice to use, it wasn’t easy to figure out what was happening in the edits, and how it might be used as a start further photo enhancements. Some of these issues were quickly resolved with updates. However, some users felt that Skylum was gouging money out of their supporters by releasing new stuff that made upgrading a daunting repurchasing and relearning exercise.

Soon after Luminar AI was released, Luminar Neo was promoted as a totally new way to post-process. However, it was not really compatible with previous iterations of Luminar. While the single enhance slider was pretty amazing, the great list of "edit" tools on the right-hand side of the edit panel showed several of the same sliders, and not always getting the same result depending on which item they were run within. The tools were also grouped into similar tools, favourite, Essentials, Creativem portrait & professionals, which helps negotiate such a long list of edit tools. The fact that there was no attractive price for updating from Luminar AI also got a lot of bad press.

Despite some reservations, many users, including me, still like Luminar Neo and use it a lot. However, it is definitely not as fast on my older hardware, and the solution of buying a new faster computer and having to pay for the extensions does not appeal to me. The extensions, which are a return to the add-in single effect style of tool, can be purchased as bundles (including not yet released features) or individually, plus numerous discount offers, making pricing complex and hides the true cost of getting a full function editor. 

I've chosen to process an "ordinary" photo without surreal colour changes or adding drama (the dark side of AI tools), since it can give a better view of Luminar as a regular photo editing tool.

In conclusion, Skylum's journey with Luminar for me has been a roller coaster ride, with its ups and downs. While some users love the new AI-based approach, others are still nostalgic for the simpler, less expensive earlier versions of NIK Collection the earlier Luminars. Nevertheless, Skylum's commitment to innovation is admirable, and it will be interesting to see what new AI iterations of Luminar will come out in the future.

Reluctantly replacing the sky

I'm definitely not a sky replacement guy, but there has been so much discussion and hype about it I figured I should at least try it. This is a photo I was looking to capture the "sparkle" on the lake with a low winter sun backlighting the scene. This is a challenging photo from the rigors of exposure given the Dynamic Range to be captured, Getting detail in the foreground shadows means the sky (which was the vivid Australian sky blue becomes a blown out grey/blue. Importantly I hadn't taken a bracketed set., to no real chance to recover the sky

Original Photo

My recent purchase (Update?) to Luminar Neo. With it big promotion of the ease of Sky Replacement meant I really should try it out, despite my reluctance to do such things. So here are three results, all achieve with one click to select a sky from Luminar Neo's library and a couple of tweaks for Sky Orientation (the positioning of the sun) and also the Scene Relighting.

Adding a blue sky (clouds)  & relighting

Making it Overcast

Moving to the Golden Hour?

Does it worry me that they all look uncannily real?

Yes a little.