Intelligent Masking

Good that it’s a rhetorical question, as I think the only person that should answer to it is yourself.

Your arguments of efficiently and effectiveness are exactly what we are all talking about, and they are in favor of AI masking.

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Do I? COMPARING Capture One´s AI masking to the tools and processes of Photolab ticks both the efficiency and effectiveness boxes - what isn’t relative about that. The AI-masking in CO does my tasks far more “right” for me in a workflow that suits me far better than the ones in Photolab and with far better precison too - unlike both Lightroom and Photolab the precision of a mask can be controlled by a “Refinement”-slider too in Capture One which make a huge difference for the accuracy. Most reviewers comparing Lightroom’s AI-masking that seems to lack a function like that with the one in CO seems to overlook these facts too.

The “effectiveness refers to doing the right things” according to your source’s definition - with that quoted, do you really think using for example Control Lines in Photolab to create a mask for non-linear elements sounds like the most obvious tool to solve that kind of issues?? For me that is more like a carpenter using an axe because there is no hammer and chisel available in his tool box of some reason or using a line centrick tool as a genneral tool because there isn´t anything else to use. Does that sound like “doing things right”??

Photolab today is very much of using the wrong suboptimal tools in unnecessarily cumbersome suboptimal processes when you have to do precision masking work. The AI-interface in CO is super-efficient and consists of just two main tools like AI-select and AI-Erase. Lightroom have a far more cluttered and complex interface. The basics take an idiot seconds to learn in CO.

“Efficiency is about optimizing processes and achieving a high level of productivity, whereas effectiveness is about achieving the desired outcomes and results” - Capture One does both really in a very intuitive and natural way and in a very clean, effective and minimalistic interface.

Unlike Photolab there isn´t really any need to add new layers manually anymore either since the layers are created automatically when using any of the built in Style Brushes used for retouch or the AI-Select. If you want to make your own Style Brush-tools you can easily do that too. Try that in Photolab. … and don´t tell me that Photolab have a lot of useful presets…

In fact it all boils down to saving time and efforts to make things done and these AI-supported systems saves a lot of time, no matter what kind of concepts we prefer to group them under. That is more of an academic game we play here but most users have no time to take part in these games. They just try to survive as professional photographers on a more and more proletarized labour market for photographers where the prices of all pictures have been depreciated by generative AI.

The only way to do that generally when people are willing to paying less and less for their pictures is to produce them and market them more efficiently which means in less time no matter which concept label you want to put it under and even here in this tread, we hear voices from people that have chosen more efficient tools than what Photolab is able to offer today - period.

I don´t think I have anything else to add concerning these matters really. If you are happy with Photolab it is fine. The world is full even with people preferring manual lenses before AF-lenses too. Some even prefer using analog processes and equipment too but they generally seem to do it of different reasons than efficiency - and that is fine too :slight_smile: … and saving time is generally nothing that matters in that case. It seems really more about spending a lot of time. It has more to do with “slow cooking” than efficiency.

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Hi,

Yes, however the question is not to do one or the other…

Indeed true. He was a true manager, not just one with a diploma like the whole managerial class we have today. Where everyone is indoctrinated to manage something based on ideology out of collage and no actual experience or interest in efficacy or efficiency, just ideology. All those DEI and HR departments must have old Peter spinning in his grave.

Old Peter spinning in his grave indeed. All that effort and not only do you mix the two concepts as if they are the same, you also miss the point of each.

No wonder you are struggling with color pickers and think AI will save you.

If it does for you personally, which is a relative outcome than use Capture One and go on their forums complaining about whatever… But you can’t argue that AI masking is a need for everyone or solution to everyone problems. Its a relative, not absolute thing. Why can’t you understand the difference between absolute and relative statements.

Hmmm. Since you are into AI so much. How would AI answer this.

Absolute and relative statements are two types of statements that convey different meanings and implications.

Absolute statements are those that are definite, unchanging, and independent. They are often used to describe something that exists independently, without any reference to other things. For instance, the statement “The sky is blue” is an absolute statement because it describes a fact that is true regardless of one’s perspective or location.

On the other hand, relative statements are those that are dependent on something else, often a reference point or a context. They describe something that is changing or relative to something else. For example, the statement “I am taller than my brother” is a relative statement because it compares one’s height to someone else’s height, which can vary depending on the context.

In summary, absolute statements describe something that is definite and unchanging, while relative statements describe something that is dependent on something else and can change depending on the context.

*AI-generated answer.

Yes, exactly.

On a side note about AI and its shortcomings and strengths.

I’ve been on quite a few forums for quite a few applications. Currently I’m on Blackmagic forums as well for the DaVinci Resolve and Fusion. Same kind of people there as well. No matter what the application can do and tools that exist, they always have a problem for every solution and simply refuse to learn what is there and demand some new feature that they think will solve all their problems.

Surprise, surprise, AI is hot topic there as well. Not because its the right tool for the job, but because the AI bubble mania of being just something you magically sprinkle over everything and somehow it will be magically solved, has infected way too many people.

Its like when Adobe added automatic vocal processing tool for audio noise removal to Premier Pro. And it would use statistics to reconstruct missing parts of the words that were missing once the background noise was removed. So sometimes it would interpret similar words as something else. Or it would not have enough training data so it would use similar voice to fill in parts of the sentence. Of course AI has no intelligence at all and no conscious and cannot judge what it has done so still human has to correct things. Relaying on AI for batch processing of images for example, works to the extend its something fairly straightforward, but tends to be either statistic average when it comes to creative decisions because it has no creativity whatsoever, or it fails in technical tasks when the statistical models it has been trained on are not sufficient, but of course being non-intelligent, it cannot judge the error of its ways and correct itself. In some ways it similar to some of the people on forums.

They keep on doing the same things they have been programed on, no matter the error. They simply have no capacity for correction. For such people every problem is a nail, so every solution is bigger hammer.

Syntax (AI) vs semantics (human).

I asked ChatGPT to tell me the difference between Syntax and semantics

Syntax and semantics are two important concepts in linguistics and computer science.

Syntax refers to the rules that govern the structure of a language. It deals with the way words are arranged to form sentences and how those sentences are structured. Syntax is concerned with the grammatical correctness of a sentence, regardless of its meaning.

Semantics, on the other hand, is concerned with the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences. It deals with the interpretation of language and how words and sentences convey meaning. Semantics is concerned with the meaning of a sentence, regardless of its grammatical correctness.

In summary, syntax is concerned with the structure of language, while semantics is concerned with the meaning of language.

“ChatGPT is a statistical representation of things found on the web, which will increasingly include ITS OWN output (directly and second hand). You post something picked up from it & it will use it to reinforce its own knowledge. Progressively a self-licking lollipop. Enjoy [#AI]” - [Nassim Nicholas Taleb][@nntaleb]

Someday a computer will give a wrong answer to spare someone’s feelings, and man will have invented artificial intelligence. (Robert Brault)

ChatGPT is just a statistical database expressed as a directed acyclic graph plugged in to an (Natural language processing) NLP. I imagine the compiling of data needs much higher specs.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) involves programming computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer, known as GPT-3, has demonstrated ability to synthesize text based on NLP combines computational linguistics—rule-based modeling of human language—with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models. Together, these technologies enable computers to process human language in the form of text prompts or voice data and to synthesize a response in the form of an answer.

“Computers are stupid. They can only give you answers.” Quote is often attributed to Picasso (I believe in 1968).

He was correct. Computers are near-omnipotent cauldrons of processing power, but they’re also stupid. They are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation… unless they have been programed to fake understanding based on specific database and rule set.

A friend once showed a Picasso to Picasso…

who said, no, it was a fake.

The same friend brought him,

from yet another source…

another would-be Picasso,

and Picasso said that, too, was a fake.

Then yet another from another source.

“Also fake,” said Picasso.

“But, Pablo, ” said his friend…

“I watched you paint that with my own eyes.”

[ Chuckles] Said Picasso,

“I can paint fake Picassos as well as anybody.”

ChatGPT is just a database + search engine. Through controlling the data & the algorithms they can make it act however they want. There is no capacity to think for itself or understand the error of its ways. This makes it very, very limiting in many tasks and very powerful in others. In other words, its all very relative. AI is not a solution to everyone’s or all problems, its juts a tool.

AI masking in PhotoLab would be nice addition and another tool, but it would not make every user of PhotoLab able to produce better images or be more productive in every task, that is just absurd.

The direction of the niche product of best image quality and best tools to produce most out of Raw instead of processing thousands of photos with mediocre or standardized ways, to me seems to be what Peter Drucker would suggest. There are tools and there will be more of them that specialize in the opposite. Billions of photos, delivered to you before sundown. $19,99 for premium program. Servers are in India. You get a free bitcoin with your first order. lol

I just don’t think small DXO team would benefit as a company nor would I as a user if they jumped on the AI bandwagon as well and instead of implementing AI for noise reduction and demoseicing, something that makes sense for their company, to focus on AI masking that would not improve final image, it would only make some people complain less on forums… for a week. Than someone would ask for a magic AI button that replaces the background and puts them in Paris or London. And changes the winter season in the photo to summer. Oh, and makes them taller.

I mean, haven’t we been down that road with generative AI. So many tools and options and what was the outcome? What did people use it for?

Robert Genn: Many a fine style has evolved from a decent handicap.

"The higher the obstruction, the more single-minded the problem, the more the creative mind is challenged.”

—Leon Jacobs

The greatest enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

“Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better. It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.” ― Georges Braque (1882–1963)

“We demand too much of technology and not enough of ourselves”.

AI won’t replace humans, because it simply cannot do the same things. It is at best assistant tool. But much like a gun or a vote, it depend son the user.

Hello,

I understand that you don’t want AI masking and so on in Photolab, and that you kind of consider this a bad solution for whatever reason, and this is your right.
Like a comment said before, there are also people still using manual focus lenses and so on and this is totally fine.

However our point of view is that most of us doing this request are professional that were former users of Photolab and liked it few years ago, but had to leave it due to missing features like this one that impacts negatively our business.

The facts are, for an event photographer working on hundreds of pictures on far from fully controlled environment, the AI masking tools of lightroom / capture one are gamer changer.
In my case and my competitors, this is about 20% of working total time saved, in addition to get a more accurate masking (AI masking being in our case more efficient and effective).
This lead to a situation were until 3-4 years ago, Photolab was a serious option. Now Photolab is, for my market, a no-go - especially now that some competitors have improved a lot on functions like denoiser/lens correction functions that makes the usage of DXO Prime insignificant in a lot of cases.

That’s why we ask for this request.
If DXO don’t want to implement it, that’s not an issue: first we don’t know their strategy and insight, and more important we already switched to competitors and have no shares/financial interest on DXO.
But at least please don’t tell us that we don’t need that in our business - at least our use cases: this is only denying the reality of the market and the adaptations we have to do.

Hi Stenis
I agree with the main thrust of your argument.
The world of photo editing has changed drastically over the years as is what is expected of photo editors. In the early days there was a clear distinction between a raw converter (LR) and a pixel editor (PS). Today the raw converter has basically taken over as the main editor of choice. This is due to many factors but being able to process many images with ease, storing edits as meta data (parametric editors) so that new files are only generated when needed, and the greatly enhanced functionality of these raw converters, which now can incorporate significant pixel editing capabilities (layers, compositing, HDR, pano etc) are significant factors.

This evolution is most starkly seen in the Adobe world where the king of pixel editors has been basically replaced by LR. For those not old enough to remember PS was the only “real” game in town and Adobe could sell a pixel editor for $600 and that was for the basic rather than enhanced version :slight_smile: Contrast this with today and Adobe give away PS with LR.

This means that any talk of photo editors need to recognise the world of today and not yesterday. The customer expects to be able to carry out most of their editing in their raw converter which is why talk of a “niche” product or “concentrating on core functionality” is simply wishful thinking.

Photo editing is basically a 2 part process, first global edits to adjust exposure, contrast etc and this may be enough for some images and then selective editing to fine tune the image. Selective editing requires, by definition, “selection” of certain parts of the image. Therefore a programs selection tools are a critical function of any program.

The development of new AI tools greatly enhanced the ability to easily and quickly make that selection. You give the example of C1 and the reality is that there is a significant difference in the power of the selection tools in C1 compared to current DXO. For those thata re unfamiliar with C1 I will attempt to describe the difference in process.

In C1 you mouse over the area you want to select and the area that will be selected is highlighted and if it is what you want you simply left mouse click.
In DXO I left click on the object I want to select with a Control Point and a point is dropped and a circle of influence (from the last use) is outlined. I then adjust the circle of influence, luma slider, chroma slider and add more control points if necessary to obtain the selection I need.

No matter how much word salad you add, or quotes from gurus there is no way that DXO can be considered as effective as C1 in selective photo editing. Just as clear is that C1 is far inferior to DXO in noise reduction.

I hope DXO will become competitive in selection techniques by introducing, as all of its main competitors have done, by introducing AI masking. I fear that if all they do is add a diffuse slider for CP/CL, shape change, polygon tool NIK), this will not be enough.

The last time I looked Capture One and DXO had similar numbers of employees so theoretically resources means that AI masking should be doable. However, C1 is focussed on building their best raw converter, whilst DXO spread their efforts over numerous products, Photolab, NIK, Viewpoint, Pure Raw, and Filmpack. This naturally must dilute their development time/management focus with regard to Photolab. I have always assumed Photolab was their primary product but only DXO know if this is actually so? Their current marketing strategy also means that you have to purchase 3 products in order to have a fully functional, at today’s standard, of raw converter in order to have a competitive product. This makes C1, which has always been criticised for its high price, look attractive :slight_smile:

DXO Photolab is a great product but it needs to remain competitive, V8 will be out this year and I think it will be a critical release for DXO going forward, and they need to get it right. Fingers crossed.

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Wow, just watched this video. I would love this functionality, I’d use it in pretty much every set of editing I do (event photography coverage, which often has mixed lighting (ie mixed WB) within the scene of a single image which I currently even out using Local Adjustments).

I am not compositing, just evening out the colours in a scene so they complement one another.

An edit of images for a client typically contains between 80-180 images, depending on the type and length of the shoot. Any automation available is welcome imo.

I have been experimenting with AI plug-in tools with Lr recently. Sadly Photolab has no option for plug-ins as far as I’m aware, so I guess they will need to either add it themselves or not at all.

I know there is some sentiment within this community of ‘if PL doesn’t work for you, then don’t buy it’. However, if more and more people choose to not buy/recommend/upgrade PL, then their sales will experience a steady decline until the product is unviable to continue. I think that would be a big shame and I hope this doesn’t happen.

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So I asked GPT 4 to summarize this thread since it’s so long, but are people really not wanting AI masking in DXO photolab ? This makes no sense if thats the case, it’s like asking not to implement an Undo function in this day and age, it’s a feature that will be so common place for any decent photo editing application, even my copy of Topaz and ON1 does it, not perfectly but still pretty darn good. DXO already uses Deep Learning for the DeepPrime noise reduction, obviously they see the benefit to such AI techniques, so why stop at noise removal and also not add masking, why limit the masking tools to manual only selection ? I can only see AI masking improving peoples workflows in Photolab.

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This devide over AI is much along the lines of going along with blocking phone DNGs. There is regreably a lot of refusal to accept change but with out change DXO will face all the problems outlined by those wanting AI and DNG changes

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Very good point @rdy2snp. Why would it be totally out of scope to expect DXO:s developers that have developed Deep Prime XD and XD2 that is state of the art noise reduction using deep learning being uncapable adding AI-driven masking in Photolab?

… and another thing: Software companies have for many years hired external competence to develop functions and services that the own company hasn´t had the competence for in house. A long time ago even Microsoft had to hire competence from I think it was Digital to develop a new safer and more stable and modern “kernel” in Windows. … and they still do or just acquire the companies that owns tech they need to use.

IBM turned to a company called Vision Solutions who made a product called Symbiator to be able to add fast and reliable replication between their mainframes and AS/400 / i-Series machines to Windows Servers and SQL Server-databases. I helped personally IBM in Sweden to solve the problems they had with Symbiator to handle the special Swedish character Å, Ä and Ö.

These days I was the Product Manager for Microsoft-products and the growing Windows software segment at the biggest IT-products distributor called Scribona in the Nordic countries that had its main base in Sweden.

When AI gets more and more mainstream development platforms like the current Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 will get more and more support for AI-development both direct in VS and also through different thirdparty developed function libraries etc.

Here is the answer from a question about this that I sent to Bing Co-Pilot:

Does Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 support AI development with AI-classes and tools of some sort?

Copilot answer:

Certainly! Visual Studio 2022 provides excellent support for AI development. Here are some ways you can work with AI in Visual Studio:

  1. Python Development: Visual Studio has robust support for Python, which is widely used in AI and machine learning. You can create Python projects, install packages, and use popular libraries like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn.

  2. Azure Machine Learning: If you’re working with cloud-based AI solutions, Visual Studio integrates seamlessly with Azure Machine Learning. You can build, train, and deploy models using Azure services directly from the IDE.

  3. ML.NET: Visual Studio supports ML.NET, a cross-platform, open-source framework for building custom machine learning models in C# or F#. You can create ML.NET projects, train models, and integrate them into your applications.

  4. IntelliCode: Visual Studio’s IntelliCode feature provides AI-assisted code completion and suggestions. It learns from your coding patterns and helps you write better code faster.

  5. Debugging AI Models: You can debug Python-based AI models directly within Visual Studio. Set breakpoints, inspect variables, and step through your code to identify issues.

  6. Extensions: Visual Studio’s extensive extension marketplace includes AI-related tools and extensions. Look for ones that enhance your AI development workflow.

Remember that AI development involves a combination of tools, libraries, and frameworks. Visual Studio provides a solid foundation, but you’ll likely use additional tools specific to your project.

So, I don´t find it likely that DXO: s developers would not be able to develop AI-driven masking like Capture One have done already. Even Capture One is a pretty small company and still they have developed a software that in many respects is more advanced than Adobe’s Lightroom. CO does AI-masking even better in some respects than Lightroom because it has a mask refinement tool with which we can control the precision of these masks.

You write a lot @MSmithy but your conclusion in the last rows of your text is just so out of synch with what is happening today right now. Not long ago I read about a publisher publishing books of art that totally had stopped depending on photographers and other artist that had exclusively started to publish art generated by generative AI instead.

Every single day right now there is a tremendous structural change going on worldwide that totally threatens to depreciated the value of ALL pictures that hits the marked and photographers and other visual artists have harder and harder to live on their art despite they see their own art as the very definition of uniqueness. People who don´t see this I think is stuck in som wishful thinking. Pity them when they wake up.

We have always heard that computers can´t replace humans but the truth is that algoritms can be used today to control even a lot of processes no one believed was possible just a few years ago.

How many jobs for photographers postprocessing pictures have vanished when DAM-systems workflow processes at the newspapers and publishers have totally replaced these humans. A publisher in Sweden publishing weekly and monthly magazines using the Norwegian DAM-system Fotoware started with two parallell photo workflows. The first was totally automized where the pictures were automatically postprocessed by a module called Smart Color. The other flow was semi-manual and gave a possibility to correct pictures in the case the automatic flow should fail. After a month they took the semi-manual flow out of production. I have this story from a person I know very well that worked for the general agent for FotoWare in Sweden.

What people like you and many visual artists have to understand is that it is not at all about that “state of the art” is ruling any more, if it ever have - its “Good Enough” since there is far more money to make in “Good Enough” than in “State of the Art” because “Good Enough” is “mass market” and “State of the Art” is not.

We saw the same happen in the seventies when the big newspapers digitized the production processes in that first digitizing wave. Most of these papers sacked their proofreaders, typesetters and printers and reduced the workforce a lot in a very short time despite the critics said the quality of the papers would decline. The owners replied that “people will get used to the new reality” and the thing was that exactly that has happened. They continue to sell their miss spelled papers with often terribly oversaturated pictures - and nobody seems to care about that either.

With very much of today’s AI-automated it is not even the case anymore that AI is inferior to many believed manual “State of the Art” workflows. Often the quality AI can deliver often surpasses what humans can achive over time - humans get tired very quickly and when that happen the quality of their work drops rapidly.

@CHPhoto
The developers at Capture One was pretty heavily criticised for building a software with far to high learning curve for beginners used to for example Lightroom that has a far lower learning curve than CO. In these days I often felt CO far more cumbersome and ineffective to work with than Photolab. Just to administrate all those layers was very time consuming.

The last say three years Capture One had gone through a very strong development where they really have focused on productivity. We have got smart and efficient Style Brushes that automatically creates layers in the background making us save a lot of time and making it possible for us to focus on what to do instead of how to do it. Smart Adjustments lets portrait photographers process tons of images of humans in no time with excellent consistency in exposure and white balance throughout the set.

We also got Magic Brush which is a great tool to make selections of areas with similar colors and on top of that we got this very smartly designed AI-masking. Sometimes Magic Brush and AI-masking can solve masking challenges that even AI-masking can´t solve. I think especially if we want to mask a sky through the branches of a big tree. That is when Magic Brush is shining and can save a lot of time.

Capture One is the state of the art software for tethering. Now photographers using these functions even have got a possibility to work wireless and on top of that there is a function that let you work totally without both cable or wireless and later just get back and synch with the computer automatically.

I don´t see any of that thinking at DXO and that might be why there has been impossible to see any efforts to give us a more productive Photolab than the one we have for the moment.

Hi I an!

I think you wrote a very good summary of where we stand now!

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I think you have bought into tech bro’s AI speculation bubble, more than reality of what it is and what is not.

Why do you think I don´t know how Photolab works and the limitations it has? It is because I really do that, after so many years using both Photolab and Capture One in parallell that I now never use Photolab anymore for more important precision work. Photolab is fine too but for me it is just a more rudimentary tool used for quick uncomplicated work. If you don´t watch up you might have to swallow your laugh and sarcasm in a few minutes.

My stance when it comes to Color Wheel in Photolab is that it looks nice and smart but isn´t and it is not at all that efficient as one might think if using it for a while. There are a few issues/problems.

  1. We have one global Color Wheel and one Local and they are strangely enough constructed so differently that it takes two different processes to use them. That is breaking one of the main designing rules when it comes to user interface development.

  2. I guess all other Local Adjustments tools in Photolab creates layers but not the local Color Wheel. I have never understood why because there ought to be a layer somewhere behind. It just happens to be hidden for us users.

  3. There is a global Color Picker but not a local one and, in my opinion, all “color picks” are really local so I just can´t understand why they have left it like they have done.

  4. The precision of a certain color pick in Photolab just isn´t precise enough and the scoop of a pick can just be adjusted after a pick and not set in advance, which makes color jobs in Photolab extremely time consuming. I think this is the problem that bothers me most.

  5. There is no possibility to do cumulative picks which is a must today I think.

When I wrote that I might as well not use the picker at all because it doesn´t really add anything substantial, I really ment that most of the time the effect of a pick doesn´t make much of a difference from just clicking one of the color balls. Don´t confuse that with me not knowing how to use the Color Wheel. When I use Photolab to work with colors I prefer just to use the color balls because then I can stick completely to the right panel and not grabbing the color picker and then click one color and after that continue to increase saturation or whatever. For me that is far more productive and the work processes are the same both for global and local mode.

Here is a lot of shoes in a Marrakesh store. I have just picked the color from the orange shoe as you can see both in the color ball row and in the wheel. The problem though is that that pick isn´t precise enough as it is and there is nothing you can do in advance in global mode to counter act that.

If I increase the “Saturation” this pick will affect almost all shoes in this image which is absolutely unacceptable. I also often finds that when I want to change the saturation of a blue sky other blue objects changes as well like i blue shirt, a window with blue frames and maybe the water in the sea. In Capture One that is fixed with one click and AI-Select.

In this case with the shoes, you really just need to draw a long rectangle over the orange shoes in Capture One in order to limit the adjustments to just that row of shoes with just that nuance. It takes about a second or two. Wouldn´t that be nice to have i Photolab too? Maybe you see now if you can lift your eyes from your Swiss Army Knife-solution, the Control Lines in Photolab, why Capture One is the preferred industry standard for pros and why they are not using Photolab?

@MSmithy / Milan, your old Peter for sure would spin in his grave if he could see what you actually can do these days to increase productivity with modern tools and I also think he would be surprised that some people of today still are so blind that they can´t even see the befits they can get in modern workflows and continues to perseveres to use unnecessarily unproductive tools of some strange reasons.

I agree with you completely. The tools available and their ease of use in Capture One are far superior than what is offered in Photolab. As a Fuji user I also get better image quality in Capture One. With Topaz noise reduction software I no longer see DXO as having the edge that it once had.

A thread that has a problem for every solution. Interesting. If only this much effort was put into actually working on images. Oh, my.

Oh its all right! People using all these far smarter and more productive tools in Capture One doesn´t need to put in “all that much efforts” Photolab users needs to do when trying to do the same in Photolab - if it at all is possible.

With so much reliance on automation for your work, I wonder what is the value of you as a person, when all can be automated. Why would anyone need you, when they can just use Capture One?

With these kind of arguments, I don’t even understand why you are using a software like Photolab when you could be using argentic camera and dark room to have a full state of the art man-made photography work