Lens Sharpness occasionally oddly has zero effect in PL2

DxO PhotoLab Windows topics
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I’m having a strange issue with the Lens Sharpness effect in Photolab2, on my fully-updated Windows7 x64 Sp1 machine and DPL2, that isn’t having any other problems, and wondering if anyone else is too or has some insight.

Once in awhile, seemingly at complete random, an image will have zero effect from Lens Sharpness, on the preview or on export. I have the modules installed, program updated, and it will be in the middle of tons of other images from the same lens/camera where Lens Sharpness does work normally.

I’ve tried closing and reopening the program, and even deleting the database file under \AppData\Roaming\DxO\DxO PhotoLab 2\Database and reindexing, and it still happens to the same images.

Any insight would be appreciated, hopefully this is the right place to make a bug report. Thanks.

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Hello @w.sylwester and welcome to the Forum!

Could you, please, provide us with some images for the analysis? Please, upload them + sidecars (.dop files) to upload.dxo.com under your forum name (instead of support ticket number) and let me know when ready.

Thank you,
Regards,
Svetlana G.

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Svetlana,

I had an issue in PL2 which was similar to Will’s in a couple of respects. I did not report it at the time because it happened infrequently, was not repeatable and, unlike Will’s experience, it was easily fixable. I don’t recall having this issue in PL1 and I have not seen it so far in PL3.

I believe my issue may have been the result of a temporary memory corruption, probably in the viewer. On those occasions when it occurred it was primarily the sharpening control that had no effect, However, on some occasions none of the sliders had any effect.They moved as normal, but no changes were visible.

When it occurred, I found that going to the PhotoLibrary and a selecting a different folder, and then returning to the folder I had originally been in, fixed the problem. I could see all adjustments that previously had no effect and the sliders worked as normal.

This anomaly probably occurred about 20 or more times during the year I used PL2. That may seem like a lot, but I use PhotoLab almost every day, and sometimes several times a day. It was just an easily fixable minor annoyance, Based on Will’s description his problem may likely have a completely different cause, but since there were some similarities I thought I would share my experience.

Mark

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Hi guys thanks for the response. Apparently my general knack for coming across strange problems that no one else experiences is holding true here. I have kind of a long strange story for you now.

My post-process procedure involves doing culling and processing on my primary SSD drive, and drive-space being a concern I archive things over to my other regular hard drives and delete from the SSD as I get through it. The past week I’ve been doing 100 images or so a day and this Lens Sharpness strangeness would occur 5-10 times a day. I had just compensated with extra microcontrast and less noise reduction and moved on. Like I said, rebooting and deleting/reinitializing the database hadn’t changed anything before.

I remembered a couple particular raw images where it had occurred, and went to load them with DXO from my archive on the standard harddrive. To my bafflement, I just spent an hour paging through 1000 images with a correction profile applied that only would apply 100% LensSharpness to test, and not a single one of them failed to apply it.

Wondering if there’s a problem with my SSD (I’ve never had a single problem with it as far as I can tell), I copied 1000 back to the SSD from the archive drive, deleted the DXO database file under AppData, indexed the folder and applied the same 100% lens sharpness correction profile, and none of them presented the problem either.

I’m kind of new to DXO, the past month has been my first fullon production project with it, and even given this strange occurence it’s an amazing program and I’ll totally be using it anyway, probably upgrading to PL3 next paycheck. Nothing else has been an issue. I’m sorry I can’t be more help with making sense of this but I thought this might be interesting data nonetheless for you.

I’ll upload 2 files anyhow: DSC_0072 and its DOP with my normal baseline custom correction profile applied (the one I used before) will be the one where the filter failed to apply, and DSC_0066 is taken a few minutes earlier on the same day/camera/lens/settings/DXO settings, but which did successfully apply lenssharpness before. They both work now for me.

More info if it’s helpful: I’m running a Windows 7 SP1 updated OS, on an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X processor and MSI RX 570 GPU, and my SSD is an Intel NVMe SSDPEKKW51 512GB. I religiously update all my software/drivers/firmware. The camera in this case is a Nikon D5500 with a Nikkor 10-24mm attached. Camera/lens dxo modules are installed and working.

The only other thing I can think of is that I do my culling process with Lightroom, and these files were scanned into a temporary Lightroom database before I worked on them in DXO. I never ran any save or export commands from it, and as far as I know they shouldn’t have been affected in any way, I just use Lightroom for its quick comparison functions, but maybe Lightroom did do something to these SSD files that made them different from my archived untouched raw files in some subtle way? Some occasional hiccup it might do to corrupt a file in some bizarre fashion?

When you guys test the program I wonder if you do it on SSDs? I have the program and all working files on one like I said. It does also very occasionally seem like if I drink too much coffee and “get ahead” of the program as it’s trying to catch up, it’ll get stuck and the preview will blur, but like Mark said, going back to another folder then back to the working screen fixes that.

Thanks again and sorry for this long and strange report!

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Hello guys,

  • Yes, we do the tests on SSDs and HDDs.
  • Please, be aware that PL3 cannot be installed on Win7 (the support of Win7 has been stopped).

Will, one more question, what is your PL2 version and build number?

And most probably, Mark @mwsilvers is correct and it’s a memory consumption issue (I remember we fixed something similar).

Regards,
Svetlana G.

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Good to know, thank you Svetlana. I’m running DPL2 v2.3.2 build265 ELITE.

I’m loathe to jump into Windows 10 but it seems everyone is jumping ship from W7 real quick now. It seems a bunch of strange issues are cropping up for all sorts of people with W7 “coincidentally” with Microsoft trying to move everyone off it since the support end a few weeks ago.

One last update, since this has me so confused now I did one more experiment. I copied a couple hundred originals from the archive back to my SSD, including a few I know I remember had the problem, and tried to replicate the original process. I imported them all into Lightroom, opened and compared a few of them, ran the “automatic settings” function on all of them, moved a few sliders, and closed out. Opened/indexed in DXO, applied 100% lenssharpness to all, and again, not one had the problem.

At this point I’m out of ideas and very confused, so I will keep a lookout in the future and let you know if it crops up again, and not delete the files in question next time. Might have been just one of those arcane inexplicable things computers can do sometimes. So many variables here. Thanks again for the attention and great program!

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For what it’s worth, I only experienced this problem once or twice and haven’t seen it in a while now with PhotoLab 3. You’re definitely not the only person to run into it and DxO seems to have fixed it. If it’s still happening with PL2, maybe it can be fixed without having to upgrade?

I’m glad to be using Windows 10. Unfortunately, updates from Microsoft have been very problematic lately, but not for everyone and hopefully not for much longer given all the bad publicity.

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Thanks Greg. Yeah I did some soulsearching and decided I’m going to just bite the Win10 bullet, suddenly having other random “coincidence” issues cropping up with my Win7, and reading Reddit threads about many others having them too, I think there’s no choice but to upgrade at this point even if it’s racketeering level coercion from M$. Getting notifications from Adobe about impending loss of compatibility too. The times they change for good and ill both. DirectX12 will be nice, hopefully I’ll find some ways to turn off all Microsoft’s less desireable new “goodies” (*spyware). Maybe Linux will someday get a boost of compatibility :frowning:

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One of the reasons I use Mac computers is because, they might cost more to start with but, OS upgrades are free, as are upgrades to their equivalent of Office along with their Photos app, Music app, etc.

The only time I have had to spend recently is when they released macOS Catalina, which would not run on my ten-year-old MacBook Pro. Even then, if I were not developing software for iOS and macOS, I wouldn’t have had to do that.

Oh, and I don’t keep getting almost daily security updates like Windows :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I keep reading that we can still upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 for free. Subsequent updates have all been free, and despite their being automatic in the standard edition, some more controls have been added. Security seems better to me, also: Windows Defender plus Malwarebytes works very well without slowing things down. I don’t know if Mac is better - but Windows is improving despite the ongoing installation issues.

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Sorry in advance for the rant.

I’ve been using Windows on a variety of computers since Windows 3.1 in the early '90s and have never had to pay for an operating system upgrade. Of course, one of the reasons for that was the desire to upgrade my computers after several years of use, and new ones sometimes came with a new version of Windows installed. However, the upgrade to Windows 10 was free for over a year and I upgraded all my Win 7 machines at the time to Windows 10.

Many people didn’t take advantage of the free Windows 10 upgrade when they had the chance. Windows 10 is a more stable operating system then Windows 7 ever was. Of course, there were logical reasons for some to stay on Windows 7, for instance, due to lack of continued support for some older software, hardware, and drivers, or occasional other issues which affected a small number of users. And the hardware in some very old Windows 7 machines was just not compatible with the new operating system, Of course, the biggest reason for some large corporations and mid sized companies was the very large cost and effort required to upgrade or replace thousands of desktops and laptops to Windows 10, including all the testing and training.

However, for many people, the decision not to upgrade to Windows 10 was simply short sighted and predicated on a desire to remain in their comfort zone and avoid change, or their belief in the negative anecdotal ramblings of some angry and vocal naysayers. And, beyond my comprehension, many people continued to purposely install Windows 7, rather than Windows 10, on new machines despite the very clear warnings that support for it was approaching its end of life. Were they thinking that Microsoft would change their mind and continue to support Win 7 forever?

Operating systems do not last forever and we can not expect Microsoft or Apple to support older versions into perpetuity. When support for Windows XP ended there was also a lot of grumbling. The reason that the issue with the end Windows 7 support is such a big deal is a result of the success and popularity of that operating system. But the end of support for Windows 7 was far from a last minute surprise. Everyone knew this day was coming quite some time ago. On the Apple side a lot of folks have also been unhappy with some of the changes that Catalina has brought. But we have to move forward. Otherwise, technology will be stifled by a requirement for unlimited backwards compatibility, and the continued support of old technology, and outmoded hardware, software, and operating systems.

By the way, with regard your comment about MS Office, I have a subscription to Office 365 for $99 a year that allows me 6 installs. I have 6 machines, so it costs me only $16 per machine a year to have the most updated version of Office loaded. For some that may not be a good deal, but for me, its a absolute bargain. In the past, the cost of multiple standalone copies, and upgrades to stay current, was prohibitive. MS Office is the industry standard so using alternatives is not always a good choice depending on one’s requirements. True, there is a lot of Office compatibility in other software offerings, but they are far from 100% compatible and don’t have all the same features and functions. That can cause major collaboration issues if you are sharing documents with a number of other people. But, for many people 3rd party alternatives to Office do meet all their needs.

Mark

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It’s true that many compact cameras do allow close focusing, but they only do so with the lens at its wide-angle setting.