PhotoFlow News and Updates

@Carmelo_DrRaw PhotoFlow (photoflow-w64-20170911-git-linear_gamma.zip) crashes on launch: log.txt. 20170909 doesn’t. As usual, I am using Win7.

An interesting find for git-stable is that, when I start exporting, if I make changes to the working profile, the export adopts the new profile. I haven’t tried this with other changes yet. Basically, if the status is at an intermediary stage, I can make changes that affect what is being exported. Not sure if this is the case for git-linear, which I just started using.

There has been indeed a problem in the packaging of this specific version. Could you grab photoflow-w64-20170914-git-linear_gamma.zip and see if it works? I checked it and all seems to run fine.

Also, since the linear_gamma branch will soon become the basis for new releases, I am very much interested in any feedback you could have.
FYI, I am planning to write a post describing what is new and different in this branch.

The problem is actually that the application does not wait for the export completion before allowing new changes to the image parameters. Something I need to fix since quite a long time…

I thought of something good last night but totally forgot :blush:. Here are a few things that I would like to see in the future of PF:

  1. App icon for exe and version number in window title for better identification.
  2. More tool tips, descriptions and documentation.
  3. Samplers
    a) Indicate channel name and its range.
    b) Selection to toggle values among; e.g., RGB, CMYK and LAB.
    c) Ability to specify custom value range; e.g., 0-1, 0,255 and %s.
    d) Ability to select* a region and get the average value.
  4. An actual G’MIC command layer. (G’MIC doesn’t have to be packaged with PF. Just have the user locate the path.) At the moment, there is only a select group of filters. Alternatively, include and adapt the G’MIC plugin to PF’s non-destructive workflow, but that would take up too much of your time to pull off anytime soon :smile:.
  5. This might be my inexperience with PF and/or color management but working profile is the output profile? I would think that there is the input, working and output profiles…
  6. PFI incompatibility warning, though I was surprised that some of the tab contents adapted to stable when I loaded a stable PFI in the linear-gamma version.
  7. Ability for spot wb tools to select* a region and wb based on the average value.
  8. Edit: Percentage of clipped shadows and highlights.

* Would be awesome if the selected region could be drawn by a freehand or path tool. Haven’t seen the implementation of this feature before but it would be handy.

Hi! And thanks for the suggestions!

  1. I’m working on that, at some point it will come… don’t lose hope!
  2. Definitely… that’s where the procrastinator that lives in all of us kicks in :wink:
  3. Samplers
    a) I agree
    b) sometimes it is not evident. For example, if you have your image in Lab colorspace and you want to sample in RGB, which RGB colorspace should be used?
    c) ok, that’s doable
    d) also doable, requires quite some work though…
  4. It actually exists already, but the tool is not exposed in the UI. I will enable it in the next package I’ll produce.
  5. the working profile becomes also the output profile unless you insert a “colorspace conversion” layer at the top of the stack. Since the colorspace can be changed as part of the editing workflow, the working colorspace is kind of a dynamic concept. Anyway, soon I will introduce a more sophisticated “file export dialog” which will allow to chose an output colorspace as part of the export process. Most likely, the dialog will include soft-proofing of the output colorspace.
  6. I have put quite some effort into preserving the compatibility between the linear_gamma branch and the files produced by the stable one. The linear_gamma code should be able to open any file saved by the stable branch, but not vice-versa. When the PFI file includes tools that have been modified in the linear_gamma case, a legacy version is used instead to guarantee the compatibility.
  7. This is once more something that is in my TODO list since a while.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I probably asked these things multiple times in the past, maybe not all w.r.t. PF. Good point on Lab → RGB. I am sure that you will come up with something. I would consider points (b) and (c) convenience features. For a given application, I may think in a certain color space and/or value range; e.g., CMYK, HSV or YCbCr for evaluating skin color.

It works. Thanks.

I’ve added few enhancement requests on github, just not to forget:

Color sampler labels 4-8 don’t appear next to their cross hairs, only 1-3 are marked.

Looks like the current implementation of G’MIC in PF isn’t very good or fast.

  1. It is a pretty outdated version. I would love it if it could updated by the user as new versions emerge.
  2. It is buggy:
    a) Dream smoothing stops processing after a short while; i.e., no further output in console.
    b) Tone mapping draws a small image on the top-left corner.

My raw from [PlayRaw] Flowers Flowers Flowers!

image


BTW, I also noticed that Threshold is listed twice under Add New Layer → Color

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Have the same issues as @afre mentions in 2.
I use: photoflow-w64-20170914-git-stable

@afre @McCap thanks for the heads up, I will have a look into those G’MIC filters. I shall definitely also update the G’MIC version included in the PhF sources…

EDIT: I created an issue to avoid forgetting about the problem.

+1, especially for the option to toggle between color space models. It would be nice to add LCH to the options.

The ability to select a region and get the average value would be awesome both for a sample point, and for setting a white balance during raw processing. I think right now only a single pixel can be selected when setting a white balance.

@Elle Definitely would have liked LCH sampling as well, but I didn’t want to sound too greedy! I wrote about raw WB in the same post:

I just opened the CR2 from [PlayRaw] Hawkcraig Pier and found that the lens correction did not crop out the black at the sides (all corrections). On further inspection, looks like it has to do with distortion and ca, separately. By looking at the image, I cannot tell whether the vignetting correction is applied correctly…

There is not (yet) any auto-crop for the lens correction… certainly one more item on the to do list :wink:

I have just finished working the color samplers UI. The main improvements are:

  • the channel names are now displayed before the values, and reflect the colorspace of the image data (RGB/Lab/CMYK)
  • CIELCh vlaues are now also always displayed, to allow for a better interpretation of the image colors

Here is an example of how the new samples look like (there is still room for improvement in the UI):

@afre since you were requesting some of those features, could you maybe give the new code a try? You can grab the latest version from here. Note that this is the first example of auto-generated windows package, and it might not work properly. As I have no windows machine to check it, I would be really interested in feedback from Windows users.

@Elle you can get the new version from the linear_gamma github branch as usual…

@Carmelo_DrRaw you can get free Windows VMs to test here: Virtual Machines - Microsoft Edge Developer

Thanks! I’m getting one right now…

Hi @Carmelo_DrRaw - Something seems to have gone wrong somewhere in my build of the new code on Gentoo -whether in the build process or the actual code, I don’t know (I deleted the build folder before rebuilding, but I didn’t delete the old code from the prefix). The sample point in the image below should read approximately L=50 and R=G=B=18.8%:

No matter how many sample points I put in the image, they all read 7.2 for all channels.

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