Portrait AI Helps Out

It is my belief that Portrait AI features in photo editing software can help photographers enhance their portraits and avoid a lot of tedium. I don’t regularly take portraits (other than family, which I very rarely post online). The software I have, ON1 Photo RAW and Luminar Neo both offer powerful AI-powered portrait features that speed up post-processing and also achieve great results. By automating the tedious task of skin retouching and facial feature adjustments, like teeth and eye whitening.

My current favourite is ON1 Photo RAW which includes AI-powered features like face detection and skin retouching. With AI-powered face detection, the software will automatically detect the faces in your photos, making it easier to apply targeted edits that are in line with your style. The skin retouching feature allows you to quickly and easily smooth out blemishes, wrinkles, and other imperfections in your subject's skin and identify and work on key facial features.

Luminar Neo also offers powerful portrait AI features, including AI Skin Enhancer and AI Portrait Enhancer. The AI Skin Enhancer feature allows you to quickly and easily smooth out skin imperfections, while the AI Portrait Enhancer can help you adjust your subject's face shape, eye size, and other facial features, the face-thinning and eye-widening are a little over the top but have been fun to play with.

Portrait AI features are now widely available in photo editing software, but have not been heavily promoted or hyped as much as sky replacement AI, however it does offer photographers powerful tools to enhance their portraits with ease. Many of the alterations are very subtle but that's good. I'd be interested to find out if professional portrait and wedding photographers are taking advantage of these tools and what their clients think?

Ps I’ve given Chatgpt a second chance, to edit my text for this post. I’ve still had tone it back down a little but it hasn’t introduce half truth or outrageous claims this time.

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.

Time for an update

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not a fan of the subscription model for software. In theory they deliver to you the most up-to-date versions of the software continuously. However, this really has not been the case in practise (at least so far), You just have to look at adobe who got into the very ..very ....very (there should be more very's but you'd probably stop reading) profitable subscription model a decade ago. Over the first 10 years if you paid the subscription for different bits of their software you would have paid twice to three times more than if you had just bought the software outright and three upgrades within that10 years. What's more they had not upgraded that much. 

Now however, Adobe are becoming more competitive in terms of new upgrades and modules because of the number of alternative products. Also the alternative products quickly learned to offer both purchase outright (with upgrade under 50% of the original purchase price) or subscription,

Anyway the idea of waiting three years, two or three upgrades, has worked well for me. Unless of course the new upgrade has feature(s) I really need. I also like the option that I can download the new version as a trial, with all the new features active to test out.

All this is a long way around saying I was happy to update from ON1 Photo RAW 2020 to ON1 Photo RAW 2022.5, not just for the new resize feature (which is great) but it makes a big difference for me and multi-image panorama. I also find the export a processed image nicer/

Not that the 2020 version was bad, it was slower, particularly on the export) and didn't do a such great job when the dynamic range across the whole panorama is large (The result from the 2022 version is shown above)

The creeping cost of upgrades

I have notice with a sadness that the former champions of perpetual license (ie you buy the software) in the graphic/art/ photography areas, where doing well because they picked up a lot of extra buyers running away from Adobe’s Subscription model. Particular at the start up adobe did ot upgrade much. The champions were upgrading often and charging a smallish amount (20-30%) for the upgrade, and this also went down well with users.

Things have changed a lot of the last two years. Adobe have reduced subscription options (particularly for a single piece of software or group of complimentary tools) and increased subscription for the full creative ? to a ludicrous level (if you aren’t using it for a profitable business). This is clearly gouging a customer base. Not nice and another way or suggesting they are cutting of your nose to spite your face.

Unfortunately the price of upgrades are creeping up to 70-80% of the first license. If the software has been upgraded significantly that may be ok. A couple of suppliers prompting upgrades aren’t yet advertising an upgrade price, if one is even to be offered. Perhaps waiting 2-3 upgrade cycles is still ok. However it is rapidly reaching the case where if you are a loyal software user the amount you pay annually is not a lot different between perpetual licensee and subscriptions.  Both teams are gouging their user base. Possibly there is a little churning of software sold to the same number of users. In both cases we the users are the losers.

The case of Luminar Neo, is a particularly blantant attempt. It is probably a market driven ploy trying to prompt hype aboput all new, limit time/number pre-purchase seats, etc, etc but I personally just see something that isn’t legacy compatible and does not offer a  bigger step forward as is being over-hyped. I have Luminar AI and love it (not as my main photo editor that’s still ON1) but because some of the AI features are really useful and time saving. I feel I share a lot this think with Peter Forsgård . Until there is a trial version I can try I will not commit to spending anything on what is still vapourware.

Merging for HDR :: On1 Photo RAW 2018.5 .vs. AuroraHDR 2019

The photos on the track also gave me a some clearly high dynamic range scenes to compare the two HDR merging applications I currently like.  I began with a set of 5 bracketed photos (-1.3EV, -0.7EV, 0.0EV, +0.7EV,+ 1.3EV) and used the RAW versions on these (shown below is the unaltered jpegs straight out of the camera)

I then merged into both packages using the align image and de-ghosting options in both systems. The On1 version being faster to get to the basic higher dynamic range image (with a generic tone map) which you can pick that up and do further tone and colour refinement as desired. As noted previously the new version of aurora actually refines the individual input brackets using an AI guided system (called by Skylum their Quantum HDR engine) , which takes longer to get to the default tone mapped image. However that default tone map is somewhat optimized to the features of the underlying image. The results where just cropped, but in the case of the AuroaHDR image also vertically transformed to avoid the converging of the tree tops.

The results are both fine, but which is better? The photo on the left comes from On1 Photo RAW and it definitely has done a magnificent job with the shadow detail however it is a little flat compared with the Aurora HDR on the right, which has stronger contrast and slightly more vivid colour. I’m sure I could easily further adjust the On1 Photo RAW output to also show stronger contrast and colour but for now I’m happy with both but Aurora being the new toy has become my favourite. Of course Aurora HDR can not stitch panoramas.

It is worth mentioning that my version of Aurora has been recently updated to version AuroraHDR 2019, whereas my version of ON1 Photo RAW is still version 2018.5

Did Windows 10 have an accomplice?

I have slowly got my two very sick Windows 10 computers back to health (one by a full reset and the hassle of reloading all my software and data and the other by a in place reset). Its taken the best part of four days and a decent amount of angst. I’m none the wiser of the cause, but I’m slightly worried one of the software packages I’ve recently installed (or more particularly related drivers) might have cause some incompatibility. I had really only installed a number of photo software Luminar (as a windows beta version) On1 RAW Photo 2018 (as a trial version) and Aurora HDR 2018.

The Windows beta of Luminar didn’t seem a real candidate because I had been using it for a while and it was installed on the another windows 10 computer that didn’t exhibit the update problem. Aurora hadn’t been installed on this computer and when I tried to install On1 Photo RAW 2018 it reported that the computer was not compatible with Open GL 3.3 (yet I use mining software on that machine that relies on Open GL and currently uses version 3.3). On1 Photo Raw also proved essentially unusable on the HP spectre small screen and frequently froze in tablet mode. Frustration overload

I have purchase Aurora HDR and love it, so I’ll be making sure it works fine before I try reloading either of the other programs. I do like Luminar but it doesn’t yet do any file management or cataloguing so I’m still stuck with lightroom for the time being. I also like On1’s stuff, especially its layering, masking including great luminosity masking tools and blending, but if it only works on one of the three machines that I will be using, it is definitely off the potential purchase list for now (so I’ll stick with On1 Photo 10.5 for now)