I upgraded from PL 5 to PL 7.8.0 recently. Now I notice artifacts when applying any of the default presets to DNG raw files from my Pentax DSLR. Initially, I saw this on portaits which I don’t want to share here. But I can describe my concerns with a different example.
The following are screenshots from PL Customize. First, the photo in total, then close-ups from a letter. First, with presset “No Corrections”, then with “Only Optical Corrections”. As you can see, there are strong artifacts at edges similar to halos from over-sharpening.
Why is this so? I think that this degrates the image quality significantly. Is there anything I can do to workaround or even fix this?
Thanks for the quick reply. this indeed seems to influence and mitigate the artifacts. But then I’ve further questions:
What does “global” do? And Why is this any good if it degrades quality?
Does “which was changed to 1.0 by default at some point” mean that this used to be, say, 0.0 in some previous versions of PL?
Can I configure this in the application settings? I don’t want to check every photo and adjust the value as the first step of my processing. This would be very cumbersome.
This is a setting that applies to the entire image - “Globally”
Yes - the default used to be 0.0 … I don’t know why it was changed … 1.0 creates the problems you are seeing.
You can create your own custom preset … replacing the “Auto-applied” preset(s) that are applied to all newly encountered images - - - See Preferences settings;
There have been other threads about this issue. PhotoLab is severely oversharpening and overprocessing photos in its default settings, giving pro camera photos a smartphoneish kind of look.
This is sad, because it makes PhotoLab look worse than it actually is when youtubers and tech sites make comparison. For example, I have seen youtubers compare DeepPRIME denoising to competitors denoisers and they (nor I) didn’t like how the DeepPRIME version turned out, but the problem wasn’t DeepPRIME but that they left the Lens Softness Correction setting at its far too high default, which ruined the outcome.
You need to create your own preset if you want a more professional, natural starting point for your photos.
Lens Softness Correction of -0.5 is a good start. Already super sharp lenses tend to look best at -1.0 and soft old or cheap lenses look best at 0.0, but I haven’t found one that get any improvement above 0.0, just more halo artifacts.
You should also disable ClearView and make sure that Microcontrast is at 0. If you want Smart Lighting in your default preset, set it at 10. You can always increase it per photo if needed.
Thanks all for the very valuable hints. It is really weird why they do this. I think that PL can make a real selling point with their superior image quality. They should really drive towards professional than anything else. All the tools are very advanced (at least from my point of view ) - why would they go for a smart-phony look.
Anyway, I’ll see and learn how to create custom presets. So far I didn’t bother about that. But probably it makes sense anyway as I tend to do the same tweaks initially.
My guess is it was decided by the same kind of people who like autotuned vocals.
I see lots of people on social media go “oooh, sharp!” at photos with tons of horrible looking severe oversharpening halos. Anecdotally, the same people listen to robot or pan flute sounding vocals and go “oooh, great singer!”.
Probably, we’re just old and have old people’s hang-ups.
Yeah, you’d think that a preset with that name would look “natural”, but it’s just a little bit less exaggerated that the others, but still exaggerated.
You should really create your own default preset with as little as possible enabled. A great tip for a personal default preset is that you can set module settings in your preset but have the actual module itself disabled, so you can enable it on demand.
For example, in my default preset I have the Contrast set to +25 but the Contrast module disabled, so I can just enable Contrast for a specific image with a single click and it will then be at +25. Similarly I have configured ClearView to default to 5, but have it disabled by default.
) - why would they go for a smart-phony look.
