A storm in a teacup

Share your images & Chat
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@mikemyers and @mwsilvers Having promised that I wouldn’t touch this particular category with a “ten foot barge pole” I feel that a response from me is required after a comment I made in Weymouth Harbour.

It sparked a somewhat “heated” discussion between you both in that particular topic, my apologies @mrcrustacean for the disruption it caused to your topic, but it prompted another picture of Weymouth from you.

It has been a long time since I have been to Weymouth. In fact a very long time since we were in the harbour area, possibly as much as 30 years ago, so no digital images then!

My “paranoia” about this “Share your images & Chat” category was caused by the fact that it was introduced by a DxO member who had been extremely and unnecessarily derogatory (in my opinion) about the posts and posters in this forum.

I put 2 and 2 together and got 6, i.e. dilute the complaints by the users by introducing lots of interesting but mostly benign (for DxO) posts!

@mikemyers I have mostly managed to ignore your Part 2 epic topic but not entirely

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and mostly managed the same for Part 1 but given the number of posts it gets then someone obviously likes it and the same appears to be true of this new category, even though it would have been possible to do much the same thing without the new category, i.e. it could have been started at any time by the users!

Perhaps I am in a minority of one given that your Mark 2 post has 2.0k posts and 20.7k views but not a topic for me!

Given I have been running down my involvement in the forum I will continue to ignore your mega post @mikemyers and this category which should give me more time to concentrate on topics where I might be able to assist other users or get guidance with my own editing issues or get on with living in the real world.

But I do take real exception to this part of your post

“Not those who are complaining about it”, and that most certainly involves me. I am not making gratuitous complaints but rather I am disappointed and frustrated as the product slips further and further behind. Your words seem to echo those of the DxO employee that I took exception!

@mwsilvers Thank you for your support

Since PL3 so you are a newcomer then, I first started using free copies of OpticPro 8 and then 9 and finally bought OpticsPro 11.

There is a list as long as your arm, including all feature requests that are essentially ignored, and I have addressed many of my complaints to DxO staff directly.

I don’t dislike the product, the reason I have been using it for so long is that I like to edit and stop and then start again and then … The reason for my frustration is borne out of concern for the product and its future.

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Based on several discussions in that “off-topic” thread, I sent a message to DxO Customer Support, proposing a “DxO Cafe”. After a few mails back and forth, DxO decided it would be a good idea. They also asked if I could introduce it to the forum, which I declined.

This new configuration was started by " Fabrice-B Support TeamDxO staff

I then entered a post about it. I also told DxO that I want to be just another user, and certainly NOT in any and every way responsible, or thought of as being anything more than just another user.

Fabrice-B passed on the information to other DxO staff, and they went along with the suggestion. I highly doubt he is the person you are referring to. I have no idea what he does at/for DxO. I do know that a week or so after the new forums started, he was very pleased.

I don’t know anything about the complaints, and so on, although I did finally find a list of them. I have no idea how important they are. I use what I can in PhotoLab, and find work-arounds for things I can’t do.

If…

… it is just a coincidence. Like I wrote, I’ve never read that list of requests directed at DxO.

None of my cameras are “perfect” to me.
None of my computers are “perfect” to me.
My 2020 Mazda is not “perfect for me”.

I just “do the best I can with what I’ve got”.

Not having read any of them, I don’t know what those “complaints” or “request for help” are about. Not sure it matters - I can use PhotoLab, or Lightroom, or DarkTable, or any of the other editors. Mostly because of one person, @Joanna, I fell in love with PhotoLab, as it lets me do what I want, once I eventually learn how to do so.

Bottom line, I’m certainly NOT going back to Adobe, or all the other image editors I have downloaded and tried. If PhotoLab closed, I would use it as long as possible, and if I had to change, it would be to DarkTable.

Which brings me back to what you posted such as:

Maybe what you are saying is that the competition is gaining, and DxO isn’t keeping pace? Every update, PhotoLab does more than it used to. In what way, other than compared to other software, are they getting ahead, or PL is getting more behind?

Me? I’m not a good example for any of this. I use my new and old cameras, my car, computer, phone, and watch, and I’m doing a terribly poor job of being “up to date” with any of these (other than automatic updates).

A storm in a teacup… I guess I’m just ignorant of all these goings on, as I wrote to Mark. He seems to want me to get up to date on them, but why?

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@mikemyers The individual you identified was the individual that I referred to, hence my “paranoia” and while the new Forum Category that was started has quickly gained a lot of support from users I am still sceptical about the motives behind it from the DxO perspective, i.e. is it a “distraction”?

Rather than filling the vacuum caused by the dearth of any information from DxO with such a “distraction”, useful and entertaining as it seems to have become, I would like to have seen that accompanied by more positive action and information from DxO.

You did effectively make a very similar comment to the one made by that DxO individual you mentioned, about the motives of forum users and the nature of posts, to which I took great exception!

Conjecture over whether PhotoLab can “stay the course” is sad, but once again the vacuum created by the absence of feedback from DxO is filled with … even more conjecture.

I do understand that DxO cannot be brutally frank with users with respect to commercially sensitive data, because of the potential commercial impact, but feel that more communication was/is essential.

It is one of the few forums I have seen where the developer is conspicuous only by their absence. Relying on users to provide technical guidance and support completely unaided is just not right. It can lead to many forum posts where one user after another attempts to resolve a problem with no positive outcome whatsoever.

This forum was and still is a place to provide assistance, exchange knowledge and entertain other users but where DxO is now almost 100% absent and even when they were present they were extremely parsimonious with any real information, not the support individuals fault but a DxO diktat or so it seemed (seems).

As for the nature of the product, it is my only real photo editor and it suits me way better than any of the products you mentioned plus products like ACDSee, Paintshop Pro etc, which I have licences for and renew from time to time, but in certain areas even these “lowly” products leave DxPL way behind.

It is not just that other products have developed faster but that DxO appears to be unwilling or unable to keep up and as a consequence is way behind in certain areas.

From a personal perspective keeping up with current technology gets harder as you get older but not attempting to keep up simply means that it is then harder to catch up, if you subsequently want or need to.

Arguably the lack of any useful data about the structure and working of DxPL prompted me, and others, to dig deeper into the actual structure of the database, of the DOPs etc. in order to be able to answer some of the questions from other users.

The risk of getting it wrong, the sheer amount of testing required to empirically “prove” an idea about how the product works when DxO have access to the design documentation (I hope - sorry) and access to the code and the fear of publishing the findings with the risk that you might have got it wrong can be a bit tiring.

Those investigations took place in the forum and provided an ideal opportunity for DxO to reach out and assist but not only was the original response from DxO support inadequate or actually wrong, which caused the user to seek assistance in the forum in the first place, but the silence from DxO was positively deafening, so many missed opportunities!!.

Hence, my deep disappointment in and scepticism of DxO.

While writing this post I started to write the following

"I feel that DxO have never left their “castle”, the portcullis was always down but they would allow users to converse through the grill of the portcullis and would offer some crumbs of comfort to users.

However, on more than one occasion I have felt some of the “hot oil” drip through the “murder hole” from another DxO engineer, i.e. not the one you referred to in your post.

But then DxO decided to raise the drawbridge and the only communication was shouting from the battlements and fortunately there has been a bit of that from DxO."

but decided to leave it out because it was a bit OTT!?

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Perhaps, instead of correcting these issues, the updated code will go into PhotoLab 8 ?

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That’s a very naive hope.

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…together with new issues → back to square one.

Software companies seen to feel obliged to issue a new major version of their product(s) on a yearly basis, partially because they need the money and because everyone else does it too.
(Note that the words in italics were also chosen in order to raise questions)

Tight schedules like this don’t allow to deliver products that just work, because new features get more attention than “finally having fixed” long standing issues. I think that the last time I’ve seen bug fixing as a reason to buy a product was Apple’s OS X “Snow Leopard” in 2009, two years after “Leopard”. Judging releases by the quality of references to bug fixing in the release notes would normally tell us to run away instead of dropping more money.

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Is this an accurate history of DxO ?

From Google:
Number of employees 89 (2021)

Screenshot 2024-08-06 at 11.51.54
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I wonder how many of the less-than-100 employees they had in 2023 were in the software departments, developing code?

Just an opinion - seems likely to me that the bugs from before will hopefully be corrected in the next release, PL8, and was noted above, there are almost certainly new bugs discovered after the launch. A long time ago, I worked in the software department of a company in Michigan, with my job being to find “bugs”. There was a small group of computer engineers who were to fix these bugs.

Nowadays, I just accept “bugs” as inevitable, and try to work around them. Most of PhotoLab for me, seems to work just fine, but I’m certainly no expert, and I think I’ve learned to only use tools that work for me, and ignore others.

I’ve got nothing more to say about this. When PL8 comes out, we’ll find out if the above guess is reasonably accurate. :-/

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That’s a very naive hope.

Is it me or is there an echo in here?

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cho, cho, cho, cho…………………

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You are, unfortunately, incredibly naive when it comes to PhotoLab’s historical approach to development. That ignorance is not entirely your fault because you’ve had no involvement in that development and have not actively participated in any of the many hundreds of threads discussing it. Many of the members of this forum were more intimately involved with the development of this software over the years.

At most DxO addresses a combination of around a dozen new or updated features and fixes to performance issues and long outstanding bugs in any new version of PhotoLab. Each year it falls farther behind their competition with regard to the addition of desirable new features which are becoming common in their main competitors’ software. PhotoLab is still my preferred software by a wide margin, but I fear that it may not survive if it can’t compete better.

Based on my experience, I feel confident in saying that very few of the multitude of issues including performance issues, bugs, a significant number of unfinished features, and missing important new features needed to compete, will not be addressed in PL 8.

There has also been a number of much-needed enhancements promised by the DxO team over the years but never delivered. This includes the implementation of a new main viewer which is critically needed to address a number of serious issues with the current one.

You are not aware of these things from your own experience primarily because you are a very unsophisticated user of PhotoLab and take advantage of very little of what PhotoLab has to offer

Mark

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In other words, among other things, “ignorance is bliss”.

You are correct - I stay away from those discussions, and just use PhotoLab to edit my images.

If I “stick my hand in the fire”, my hand “will get burned”.

Can I ask you one question - of all the commands and tools and procedures in PhotoLab, roughly what percentage of them are defective?

Regarding “a storm in a teacup”, most sailors try to go around storms, not through them. Or, maybe I should ask you to speculate on what percentage of PhotoLab users are directly affected and bothered by these issues?

Let’s say there are 100 issues, just to make up a number. Has anyone here contacted DxO with a list of the most important issues that need correcting? Does such a list even exist? If not, how would a mythical Mr. DxO know where to start, in addressing these issues?

I would also ask you how many of these issues are “critical/very-important”, that should be at the very top of the bug-list?

Since I’m still oblivious to any and all of this, someone who is involved might want to create a list like this, emphasizing which are VIP items to correct, and which are simple “bugs”.

Sorry for writing so much - I didn’t intend to reply with more than a sentence or two. I’m ignorant of all this stuff. Again, “ignorance is bliss”! :slight_smile:

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@platypus Sadly you are right but revenue comes from two streams, new users and old, sorry, existing users. The former would be put off by the fix list but the latter would see the world moving in a better direction, even if their pet gripe wasn’t fixed.

No new user will applaud DxO for providing an opportunity to avoid “unwarranted”, sorry “unwanted” Virtual Copies, but some existing users definitely would but only some, others just throw the database away as a matter of principle! By the way I don’t believe there has been any such change.

My slip with “unwarranted” was deliberate and points to the results that come from inadequate design reviews and then just letting things drift for year after year after decade after …

I love the product (mostly) but as for the developer!?

@mikemyers keep being your naïve “lovable” self but please do not attempt to insist that all is well in the PhotoLab world. It never has been as far as I can see but I only got deeply involved with PL5 beta testing and and then trying to help with the post release fall-out.

@mwsilvers The biggest single problem with DxO development is the bug fix release notes, sorry the absence of the bug fix release notes!

There never is any detailed summary of what has been fixed, or, rather what DxO believes has been fixed. If DxO don’t know what should be on that list what hope is there for users!

With PL7 DxO destroyed the asynchronous indexing feature and replaced it with a synchronous indexing feature. Was the feature changed because there was a bug in the previous method, who knows!?

For the actual PL7 release DxO changed the way a particular feature worked so I “clashed” with another user over what was working and why our results were not the same?

It turns out that DxO changed the feature just before release, I was using the official release but that was different from the last Beta release.!

DxO simply see “mere” users as just that, co-incidental to their development effort, or rather that is the way that it often appears to me at least.

Pride in a product and the users shows in strict numbering regimes for every single release not one name for every release of PL6 or PL7.

That should be coupled with a complete list of every bug that has been fixed in a given release, arguably it should contain the reference number of the submission report so users can identify that a bug reported by them has been fixed and included in release PL7.8.x released on 2024/mm/dd.

@mikemyers Bugs are not inevitable if that becomes part of the mindset of a developer then “we are doomed”. If bugs are spotted late in development then be honest with the users and explain the situation!

My career covered a wide spectrum of responsibilities but as I worked in customer support I was both a customer of the development plant(s) where the operating system etc. software was developed or the development group(s) who developed the application we delivered to the customer and a developer in my own right, designing and/or developing the application software and/or the customisations to an application, i.e. solutions management.

I tested my own software and the plants software and the application development houses software, before delivery, during the test acceptance phase by(/with) the customer and then during live running. Ultimately I carried the can for any failures to deliver a working system.

@mikemyers You mean from the lists that DxO publish? We don’t see a list of bug reports from any other user but we do see the fallout from some of the issues in the forum. In the “WYSIWYG … not” topic there were at least two users who had noticed colour artefacts being introduced below 75% zoom.

Then I started playing with my own images of bare trees taken early in the year which suffer from CA. I learned that below 24% zoom images appeared O.K. but above that up to 75% there was strong CA in the on screen images but above 75% that started to clear up!

The problem was that I had not applied any corrections to the image so the CA was either PL7 adding it to the image or greatly exaggerating what was there already.

Without a list I don’t know what bugs I might have missed and how many users have discovered the fault I finally discovered.

I will, of course get to know about those bugs that have been fixed in a new release from the release notes, or rather I won’t.

Ignorance in not bliss it is something waiting to byte(!) you in the b…!

and don’t get me started on the ridiculous voting system which DxO ignore completely.

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You question is much too simplistic and can’t be answered easily. It would involved a detailed discussion for it to have any meaning.

Except for newly discovered issues we have been discussing almost all of the others, as well as missing or unfinished features, with DxO for years.

Again, that is far too complex a question to be answered in a short response. A simple list without a lot of context would be meaningless.

Many lists have been created by a number of people over the years based on all the discussions. Many of us who are long term heavy PhotoLab users, and posters to this forum, have our own prioritized short lists of the most egregious issues that may differ from each other to some degree. DxO is well aware of all the issues and our concerns about them.

I appreciate your attempt to help with suggestions, but everything you mentioned so far has been obvious to the rest of us for years.

Mark

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Well, everything certainly is well in MY Photolab world.

Any issues are from ME, not from the software.

Perhaps you and others could create a list of the most important things that need to be corrected as soon as possible. If DxO can’t do it, perhaps you (with help from others) could do so.

When I open PhotoLab on my Mac computer, are any of those tools broken or non-functional?

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Again, Mike, that is a simplistic request based on your lack of understanding of the issues and all the concerns we have had over the years. They have been presented to DxO and discussed with them both publicly and privately for years .

That is true for you because you are a light and unsophisticated user. I am happy that you are enjoying using it. I also enjoy using it despite the many serious flaws. I would enjoy it much more if some of the most egregious issues were finally ameliorated.

Mark

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…they seem to be working on your Macs, but some of the tools give different results under different conditions like e.g. zoom level as we can read above.

Issues are mostly in the higher layers of using the software. A recent fix has addressed a memory issue that had been introduced by the release that came before the fix.

PhotoLab is easy to use, but the current low contrast UI is beyond anything that I’d call ergonomic.

One of the biggest issues for me (e.g for replacing Lightroom) is PL’s inability to provide a reliable catalog. Verifying the catalog against what is on the drive is something that just needs to work, but it has to be implemented first.

All in all, DxO’s developers do a decent job, but it looks like they have to do it blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs, probably due to goals set by the management or due to the urge to survive in an ever consolidating market.

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I think you are forgetting that Mike has no understanding of any of the many issues, and are also assuming that his definition of ‘broken’ tools is the same as yours. There are many dozens of issues and user concerns that plague both versions of PhotoLab with regard to the UI, the main editing window, inconstancy between the platforms, outright bugs, performance issues, unfinished features and badly needed new features that have been available in the competitions software for some time.

Mark

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I’m just trying to provide a few samples of what could be done to make PhotoLab better suited for what I expect from PhotoLab. Other’s mileages may vary and that is okay.

If we don’t expect too much, we can all be happy and if we expect too much, we’ll never be. The question remains: Where is the threshold? (we’ll know when we stumble)

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Maybe, rather than discussing past history, it would be good to start a brand new forum discussion about issues in PhotoLab 8 once it is released. Rather than rehashing the past, the discussions can be about PL8 as soon as it becomes available.

Presumably, some/many previous issues are likely to be fixed.
Presumably, some may not.
Presumably, there may be brand new issues in PL8.

Regardless, I suspect DxO would be more interested in identifying and correcting errors in their latest versions of their software.

I hope one of you (certainly NOT me!!!) can start this at the appropriate time.

Unless PhotoLab 8 adds something really important to me, I’ll likely continue to muddle along using PL6. I’ll wait for the announcements, and then decide what I may, or may not, do. I never used to be so concerned about the costs involved.

Just a thought - something to consider for the future.

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@mikemyers Hopefully DxO will have listened to those participating in the PL8 test phase and removed as many bugs as possible before the release. But that pre-supposes that the bugs have been found in the first place.

Not as far as I can remember from previous Beta tests has that been a priority.

Indeed I am not sure it has ever been drawn to the testers attention that a specific feature bug has been “fixed” and should, therefore, be tested except for bugs found in the new features of course.

DxPL’s new releases seem to be mostly about “headline grabbing” new features to entice new users.

“Presumably …,” - your naivety is touching!

My comment above would suggest that a new release is all about new features and the last “Presumably, …” will almost certainly be true, to a greater or lesser extent, but whether those features will actually appeal to new users, or make existing users part with their cash only time will tell.

In addition, only time will tell with respect to how many new bugs will be added to the list of bugs already in existence but users have never seen that list anyway!

I have traditionally undertaken large numbers of tests, and written posts that are mostly too long, both of which I am trying to reduce, to as close to 0 as possible.

But you can take a trial copy and test and post reports for 30 days and then stay with PL6 or move to PL8 as you choose, but please remember that any edits done in PL8 won’t work on PL6, PL7 etc.

DOPs are forwards compatible but not backwards compatible so back up old edits (DOPs) before starting to “play” with the new release, so that you can re-instate them if you go back to the old release.

The same applies to presets so keep a record of any new generic presets that don’t use the new features so that you can recreate them on the old release, if necessary.