I just downloaded the new Photolab 9 and immediately tried out the AI mask. It seems to work great on most of my wildlife photos so far except for some of the jaguar photos.
The first few I tried have the animal standing on a dead branch in a river but the software cannot identify the subject. I tried some other jaguar poses in various locations and some other ones fail as well. I think I had 100 percent success with birds so I will go on to some other species now.
Well it refused to identify a subject that is a big structure in the middle of an image here. Also when selecting the sky it ignores the parts of the sky behind trees. The image is attached although original is raf.
Interesting. Downloaded your .jpg for a quick test of a non-bird example.
the AI subject mask locked onto the cheetah quickly, but missed an ear and a paw.
Added a submask for the auto brush and was able to quickly add these in. Then used the eraser to remove the spillover on the branch in front.
just an idea…
I tried the JPEG file and it fails just like the raw one for me. We are both using the Mac version so I don’t know what else can be affecting the results.
Running a MacBook, but PL9 AI mask was able to quickly find the large stone object.
The AI sky sky was limited to the above the tree.
Tried to add a hue subtask and it sort of worked.
Found a possible bug in that the hue slider (to refine the selection) did not appear with the subtask. I added a standalone hue mask and the slider showed up. Deleted the standalone hue mask and the hue refinement slider stayed and worked on the subtask.
Tried a Control Point subtask and it worked well to pull in the sky bits behind the trees.
So far, the ability to combine masking tools looks great.
After creating a Subject AI mask then choosing subtask to add to the AI mask using another tool does not bring up the refinement sliders for that mask initially. This is true for the CP, CL, Luma, and Hue masking tools.
Toggling to the subject mask (now subtask) and then back to the other subtask does bring up the refinement sliders. Alternately, as noted above, creating then deleting a separate mask of that type does bring up the subtask refinement sliders.
Still playing with my keystroke sequences to find what works and refine masking workflow.
So far it’s good!
I noticed some differences in behavior when I try and reproduce the problem. If I use AI mask on the jaguar picture, I see a popup with a warning message “AI mask could not find anything matching your selection”. However in another bird photo, I don’t get any popup when I try and search for people. The mask operation just fails to highlight anything unless I choose Subject or Animal.
On an M4 iMac the Ai subject mask is not finding the subject (and the background mask fails too). The other selection tools seem to work on the subject just fine. As you say, selecting the sky is not good - fortunately the Control Line mask works well.
I found one other strange failure. The AI subject detect fails on the RAW file but works fine on the exported small JPEG. I tried creating a virtual copy and deleting all other local adjustments but that did not help AI find the subject.
I exported the file again as a much higher resolution JPG and AI subject detect fails on that image also. I keep seeing the same popup “AI mask could not find anything matching your selection”.
This is the same bug I was warned about when I was sent the Mac beta for review. The temporary fix is to disable Apple Neural Engine and GPU in the preferences and select CPU instead. It’s slower, but the AI masking then works correctly.
I just tried that, including a restart of PhotoLab. Unfortunately the problem remains.
I did play around with the masking and noticed something else. If I manually click the subject with the mouse instead of selecting Subject from the masking menu it does highlight the subject correctly. But once I select Subject manually clicking does not work again on the photo unless I restart PhotoLab. Even deleting all the local adjustment masks does not help.
The manual selection of the subject works regardless of the setting for Neural Engine and GPU.
I experienced same in my photos with the sky behind a trees. Results warry.
Exactly the same process I’ve been using in Lightroom recently. There’s often touch-ups to do and the standard tools do it well.
That did not make any difference here, Andy. Have now contacted support.
How did you select the subject? Using the mouse to select it works just fine, using “Subject” from the Ai dropdown fails here.
Have now tested over a dozen raw files and each time the select subject fails to find a subject and the sky fails behind trees etc.
It seems PL9 is touchy as to what it considers to be a subject. Everything I had tried so far had a building or other large structure as the focal point. Subject select failed on them all. Then tried an image with a horse as the main subject and it worked (although it did also pick up some people in the background). Have logged all this with Support.
I played around with it for about 30 min and was for the most part impressed by the selections on a Mac M1 Max. I have not tried sky selection yet, but every RAW converter can improve in this area. People and pet selection went reasonably well with a single or a couple of selections. Even my dogs whiskers were accurately selected against a low contrast background. Comparing to C1, my other RAW processor, PL9 does as good, better, or slightly worse. No surprise. C1 is still easier to use for me because I am not sure I like the subselection approach (generates a long list) and I can’t access all the image adjustments. I am not a programmer, but I fell DXO did a good job implementing AI selections. Nevertheless, I understand your frustration.
Well it’s worked exactly once for me, and now won’t work at all.
(That’s ANY AI masking - it doesn’t matter what I pick, I get the same error:
“Internal Error (Correction failed on the Execute stage)”
Do you have an nVidia GPU? If so, you need to downgrade the drivers, per the PL9 release notes.
