So earlier I had this idea that Upoints should be user customizable so that you can make them into a more elliptical or oval shape. Other people seem to be really like the idea of adding a radial filter (one that doesn’t depend on a sampled area, but makes adjustments evenly in a circular or elliptical pattern).
I just had a great idea that could make Photo Lab EXTREMELY powerful and could become a major selling point to the software. Why not have one filter that does BOTH things. This could be accomplished by doing two things:
Make Upoints adjustable so that they can be made into an ellipse, just like any good radial filter.
Add a slider to Upoints, where at 0 it acts as a normal Upoint, and at 100 it acts as a radial filter. At any value in-between it combines the behavior of both a Upoint and a radial filter.
Let’s say you put on a radial filter (slider set to 100) and it doesn’t look natural enough. Then you put it to 0, so it’s a normal Upoint, and it’s not effecting enough of the pixels within the radius of the filter. You could set the slider to around 80 and get just a little of the Upoint behavior added to your radial filter, so that the radial filter was a little less obvious.
Slider set to 50 would obviously mean half radial filter behavior, half Upoint behavior.
This sort of functionality would be completely unique and blow away similar tools in other photo editing software programs. It would be one of the most powerful and easy photo editing tools I’ve ever used if implemented well.
I think this is a much better solution than just a radial filter alone. Sometimes radial filters look unnatural, which is why Upoints are so innovative. But sometimes Upoints look unnatural too because not enough of the area within the Upoint is being affected due to the sampling algorithm. If you can combine the behavior of both and tweak until you have a happy medium, you than have a feature that no other software on the planet even approximates!
Isn’t upoint not luminance and color selective? It select a certain by you pointed area of a color and luminance and all the same kind of the selected pixel. The gradient filter is just a luminance filter which in a gradient way goes from light to dark. (a variable ND filter)
So combining this would be a difficult cookie.
Maybe it can be done to connect both tools:
select a gradient filter: do the first correction. (sky control?)
select a upoint on the place you like extra control: (that only building in the sky got also darker so you lift it with upoint) if hit a control key link both masks of both tools together for further fine tuning and blending masks.
But before we try to invent new tools i liked to see a expert show us what al those existing tools can do combined and which effects are already linked or linkable. Because i suspect that gradient filter and maskingbrush and upoint or masking ereaser can do alot more then i can com up with.
A gradient filter can be used for luminance, or pretty much anything else. You can set it to saturation, or luminance, or contrast, or whatever. It can be set for whatever parameters Upoints can be set to. So combining them shouldn’t be hard in the way that you’re saying. It might be hard to program uPoints that can change shape into ellipses instead of circles though…
Fading between a uPoint and Radial Filter is probably just a function of fading opacity values between both. Maybe a little more complicated, but shouldn’t be too hard.
@Timedog => We totally agree with that. Elliptical U Points have been on our list of improvments for a long time
It’s part of the “enhanced toolset” we planned to offer at some point. This solution (or maybe better) will rise.
It’s more a “when” than a “wish”
