I’ve used Silver Efex for years. I’m not sure when the ability to change a control point circle into an ellipse happened but I find it useful in Silver Efex 7.
I recently purchased PhotoLab 9 having never used PL before. I cannot figure out how to make control points in PL elliptical. I do not see grab boxes on the control point circle. I assumed there would a least be a modifier key to do it but I can’t find it.
Am I missing something or did DXO leave this out of PL for some reason? I’m curious if Silver Efex 8 maintains that function.
I, too, was hoping that DxO would port the new control point shapes to PhotoLab. While I’m disappointed that this didn’t make it into PhotoLab 9, it could still arrive in a future release. Only DxO knows. Fortunately, DxO is still improving control points in PhotoLab, as PL9 shows.
While it isn’t the oldest of the open feature requests for this, the following topic does have plenty of votes. You can add your vote and comments to it to hopefully get DxO’s attention.
What’s your concern? 41 votes makes it one of the more popular feature requests around here. And the fact that DxO recently implemented it in the Nik Collection shows that they’ve become interested. In the past, they didn’t see a need to shape the control point area of influence.
Here’s how I see it. The downside is that 41 votes and five years is for just the one feature request. There are older ones for this same feature. DxO has been asked about this in the forum for more like 10 years. They initially said no. The upside is that they didn’t close the feature requests that came later and have now actually gone ahead and implemented the request in the Nik Collection - THEIR software. So I disagree with the concern that “DxO isn’t going to do it”. They DID do it, and might therefore do it in PhotoLab also. More upside: PL9 introduced a lot compared with PL8: it wouldn’t surprise me if for that to happen some improvements had to get delayed in favor of others. DxO’s been working a lot on the AI masking up to this point - but they also made some control point improvements in PL9. Isn’t it reasonable to believe that more might be in the pipeline, such as this one which was just recently implemented in Nik?
I think it is reasonable to believe that there will be improvements as time goes by. Whether this one will be one of those is just speculation on my part because even though I have been using Nik from nearly the beginning I do not upgrade often and have no experience with DxOs responsiveness.
I also think that people like me have no idea what it means to code new features. On the surface of it it seems like if they have the feature in one application it should be easy enough to add it to another application. For all I know that might not be true. I also don’t know what DxOs workload is like. This feature might be on a to-do list that is a mile long and they just can’t get to it. Especially when it is probably the gee-whiz AI stuff that pushes sales and therefore gets prioritized.
Also, they might have to keep new features, even small ones, in their pocket to add to the list of reasons to upgrade to PL10.
Each to their own; I stopped believing most companies would do anything positive based on faith alone long ago and see no reason not to include DxO in that.
Certainly other new features have been added, but this one isn’t new (in fact it’s older than AI, and I’d wager easier to implement), and when your customers ask for something (and something reasonable, at that) it’s generally smart to listen, not say “no”.
Time will tell I guess. Maybe 5 years, maybe 6, 7, or 8…