Perfect Photo Suite

[davidedric]

Update on my comment above. Having taken the plunge with version 9 I have started to see several strange behaviours including freezing (especially when using the Quick Mask brush) and crashing (program has stopped working). It is going to take a while using the standalone version as well as invoking from Lightroom to understand what is going on, but I am worried and not so impressed.

Dave

[ajohnw]

Excellent 'review' if I may say. One point I would add is about sharpening - the amount applied and shown on-screen is not necessarily what you will get in a re-sampled image (down or up). This is mentioned in the manual.

I lost this thread so may as well add to that now - people who are interested in RT might read this.

Sharpening is a bit of a bug bear on all none destructive packages when shots are finally reduced. I understand Adobe automatically add some degree after reduction - word of forum elsewhere, can't be word of mouth on forums.

What I do with RT is see sharpening as a 2 step process. I may want to sharpen the full sized image often called sharpening in. No problem just do it at 100% view one way or the other. When I sharpen after a reduction I simply load it again and sharpen it so that I can see the effects directly. That might be in RT or some other package. That is sometimes called sharpening out.

The usual approach - based on comments from Colin who will be sadly missed - on CC etc is mild sharpening in but heavy sharpening at this stage can be beneficial providing it doesn't cause haloes. RT can help with the halo aspect particularly by making use of the luminance mask feature in the unsharp mask section, also the anti halo setting. Hover over the pointers on the luminance mask and pop ups explain how to adjust them. Sharpening in like this can help retain detail when a shot is finally reduced. It applies something that looks like a contrast improvement in finer detail in particular. It can also be used to give a general contrast increase in an odd sort of way.

They have also added contrast by detail level as an alternative to sharpening. I'm not sure it helps get a clear idea what the final reduced image will look like but some see it that way. It's very useful in it's own right anyway.

I have already outlined what to adjust 1st. Expanding on that. Colour balance may also need changing. As well as the usual spot there are a whole host of standard lights available. The normal brightness etc sliders have a different effect to the lab ones - a mix can be considered. No detail enhancements should be applied before noise removal is used. The wiki now gives a good set of instructions for using that. It seems to be a good idea to colour balance before using this. I used it in an odd way recently. I remove a lot of noise but not all still retaining a lot of detail. I then reduced by 50% and saved which still leaves a large image, loaded again and applied more. Reduction always seems to remove a certain amount of noise. Then did the same shot again removing the lot. There may be some gain doing it in 2 stages on some cases. The detail retention level slider gives a lot of control so all depends on the detail level that needs to be retained. It's usually more than adequate in one go even at 25600 ISO.

I've noticed of late that when a raw file is loaded it will apply some standard settings derived from previous work of late. Mixed feelings so I click and select neutral. It labels the processing as default when it does this. Handy if many shots have been taken under similar circumstances - bit like batch processing but give the opportunity to make individual changes. I didn't notice this behaviour at first until I changed something it had already set. It always loads the last saved processing steps when any type of image is loaded again.

Things to play with once the basics are sorted. There is a check box at the bottom of the 1st panel CIE 2002 colour model. This takes exposure information from the exif and processes accordingly. This can be used to alter the behaviour of tone mapping. Hover over the tone mapping enable and it will give instructions. LH, CH and HH can be used to adjust colours individually. There is a button at the bottom of the panels, click on it and the image can be scanned to show the underlying colour on the graph allowing adjustment points to be set there. There is another way of using this but that's what I do.

Sharpening - I like to gauge how much is actually needed when the shot has been reduced.

I've just noticed it will shrink images down to a very small size rather than just magnify then to various levels. This can be used to gauge what people are likely to notice first when viewing the final image. If nothing is obviously prominent as it's slowly enlarged from a very small size there isn't any real focal point. Distractions can easily be spotted. Probably of most use for people type shots etc. A useful tip from a pro on youtube.

John
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[FootLoose]

Having taken the plunge with version 9 I have started to see several strange behaviours including freezing (especially when using the Quick Mask brush) and crashing (program has stopped working).
Dave

An update is now available, Dave, that is supposed to fix those crashes and freezes.

[davidedric]

Thanks, Greg. I downloaded it last night and it does seem better. Haven't had a chance to really thrash it yet, though. Some of my problems I tracked down to using a Wacom tablet, fixes for which were specifically mentioned in the upgrade notes, and that does seem more stable.

Dave

[NorthernFocus]

I haven't had those issues. I didn't download right away when it came out and got the fixes by the time I did. I've only used it a little but good so far.

[Brev00]

I am enjoying my free trial so much, I may have a hard time going back to Perfect Effects 8. I have played mostly with Perfect Effects 9 but have also enjoyed the dedicated BW conversion feature. The rest all seems to me to be at the same high level but will take some more exploring. I am impressed and have used PE8 much more than I everexpected when I got it free. My only hesitation in buying the package is acknowledging that I got sucked in by their free offer.

[NorthernFocus]

...My only hesitation in buying the package is acknowledging that I got sucked in by their free offer.

What's that old saying?... something about a nose and a face?...

[sixiao]

Come under study

[PhilT]

"I lost this thread so may as well add to that now - people who are interested in RT might read this." ajohnw
John, you're great , I paste and copy all your RT threads to make a doc about RT and access it easily, I hope it's not copyrighted . I downloaded RT and its wiki (after reading one of your thread) and began recently to work on some raw pict (NEF-D7100). Till now I simply make it intuitively, but with your comments I hope I'll improve. BTW my RAW look "grayish" compared to the JPEGs with the same settings, I read somewhere it's normal, is it really?

[ajohnw]

"I lost this thread so may as well add to that now - people who are interested in RT might read this." ajohnw
John, you're great , I paste and copy all your RT threads to make a doc about RT and access it easily, I hope it's not copyrighted . I downloaded RT and its wiki (after reading one of your thread) and began recently to work on some raw pict (NEF-D7100). Till now I simply make it intuitively, but with your comments I hope I'll improve. BTW my RAW look "grayish" compared to the JPEGs with the same settings, I read somewhere it's normal, is it really?

I don't think so. There are other comments about Nikon raw conversion about on the web and in the RT manual. Their software produces a unique camera profile for every shot. Tough act to follow. I took me many attempts to match a camera jpg using Ufraw shortly after buying the camera. I then tried extracting a set of camera profiles that their software generates but quickly found that they do change or make use of other info in the raw file. They were tough high dynamic range shots i was working on. 2 shots and on one of them I would say a couple of hours to get something equal / better than the jpg.

I'm mostly shooting Olympus now. All I can really add is to read the manual and obtain camera profiles as it suggests an use them. The setting is in the 3rd panel under Input Profile. This may default to camera standard but the custom setting should be used to select the correct one for the camera. Camera standard is a generic thing that will process any raw file that the software recognises. I've found that the biggest problem then can be colour balance under artificial light but RT has a huge selection of light sources which can help. The rest is just practice. One thing I always do is PP camera jpg's if I can. This really started when I was using an Olympus Pen. There is a a lot of dark end info in their jpg's that is easy to adjust. Since switching to an E-M5 and and more recently an E-M1 I process raw more often. Nikon jpg's often work out ok providing there is nothing too extreme in the shot. There are some around here that also work on jpg's. I suspect there are also some that use Nikon software for initial raw development and then move to another PP package.

My usual way of processing raw is to initially get all of the info in the raw file into the output usually looking for space at each end of the histogram and take it from there. Adding say contrast might use all of this space up or require more space. Sometimes it's better to allow blacks or highlights to clip to some degree. There aren't any hard and fast rules in this area. Then there is the question of any channel clipping which it what it shows by default or all clipping available when the luminance view is enabled to see this.

One thing I mean to try is to use RT's curves more. On Ufraw's home page there is a link to a pack of curves intended for use with Ufraw which has 2 curves in it. The first one is a copy of what Nikon do on some cameras. the 2nd one is the usual curve. I'm not sure if RT works in the same way.

John
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[PhilT]

Again thanks a lot for your tips and in-depth (at least for a dummy like me) explanations. It seems this thread moved from PPS to RT, but that's not bad at all

[donvt]

Not sure what you mean by "send a picture"??? Opening a photo to edit in PPS9 directly from LR5 is exactly as it was with PPS8. You must use a feature to "send" pictures that I'm not aware of. At any rate, it seems rather straight forward to me.

sorry for the long responce, I was not notified there was any comments, I will have to follow up on this.
The windows version will not allow you to set up PP9 to be a designated editing program when you right click or the Photo>edit in method. You can designate one of the modules as the right click edit program but not the suite. Their work around was the use the LR file> plug in> PPS9 suite. When you go this route you are not given the chance to chose 1 of the 3 formats and it does not keep the LR changes. My version 8 you could edit in the suite with the right click method. I finally got this response.

Hello,


Thank you for using onOne Software! We apologize for the frustration, but you will not have the ability to go into the entire Suite from the Edit in Menu. If you would like to launch the whole Suite as a plugin from Lightroom you will need to go to File>Plugin Extras and select the whole Suite. If there is anything else we can do for you please feel free to send us an email.




Technical Support - onOne Software
www.ononesoftware.com

[NorthernFocus]

...The windows version will not allow you to set up PP9 to be a designated editing program when you right click or the Photo>edit in method. You can designate one of the modules as the right click edit program but not the suite.

The above is correct but is not a change from version 8.

Their work around was the use the LR file> plug in> PPS9 suite. When you go this route you are not given the chance to chose 1 of the 3 formats and it does not keep the LR changes...

While it is true that a psd file is automatically generated without offering the option for a different format, it is NOT true that LR changes are not kept. All LR changes are indeed burned into the base layer of the PSD file that is created when the PPS9 plug-in opens. Same as was done in version 8.

...My version 8 you could edit in the suite with the right click method...

You must have had the special/magical version of version 8. The version that I had function just the same as the new version 9 in regards to how it is accessed. Which is also how it was explained in video tutorial by Kelby that came free with PPS8 when I purchased it.

[davidedric]

Re Dan's comments. That is exactly how I find it. (I didn't use v 8 much, but that is certainly how it behaved) Incidentally, after installing the latest upgrade patch v 9 has been stable.