When is comes to ClearView Plus settings, less is more. If used inappropriately it will way overcook an image. It is primarily intended as a haze removal tool but depending on content it can sometimes be useful on other images if used with great care. There is no specific use case for that. In my experience newbies tend to significantly over use ClearView Plus on inappropriate images and at high settings.
Mark
I don’t understand anything about that photo, what it is, what it does, or how it does it. I have enough on my mind trying to sort out the things I’m already working on here (and more so with bullseye shooting). I also have no idea what I’m seeing in the ceiling photo??? Yes though - at the end of a not-long-enough-day, I find it very enjoyable to fire up PL6 and search for an appropriate image to try to improve to not only where I like it, but where others do as well. I did capture a few boats in motion, but I’ve posted too many of those already.
Unfortunately, you are SO right!!! When I was starting out with PhotoLab, ClearView Plus seemed like a magic tool to bring out all the detail in my images. Then I looked at the images at full size, and they turned to mush. Totally fake. I painted the ClearView Plus button with poison, so I would never use it again. Now I’m finding that in moderation, it’s an interesting tool.
Along with that, for a while I used to use “MicroContrast”. It was at the top of the list, so I figured I would naturally use that much of the time. Then @Joanna told me to never use it, and to use Fine Contrast instead. To be honest here, I’m not sure what the difference is, or why to use one and not the other. But adding a little Contrast, and then a little Fine Contrast usually had a nice effect. As of today, I still don’t “understand” the difference.
It’s like taking a bite of a great steak. Next thing you know, I want more, and more. The more I turned on ClearView Plus, the better my small image on my computer screen looked. Wow, this is great!!! But back then I didn’t zoom in on the image to see what it was doing to the full-size image. Gack!!! …and ouch!!! It’s like stepping barefoot onto something very hot. Ouch! Never again!!
For me, if there are new images in my camera, I find it hard to go to bed without viewing “the day’s catch”. Unfortunately, at that time I want to start editing. Of course, I eventually look at the time, and realize I should climb into bed. Un processed images are like an “itch” to me, and they need to be “scratched”!! Of course, then (or first thing the next morning) I like to post at least one of them. While everything is fresh in my mind, I like to get feedback as to whether I did things acceptably well. This seems to lead to taking new photos almost every day of course. Then I get side-tracked. My mind is like a rotary switch, and it can be set to image processing, or bullseye, or searching for new gear.
…and then too, I love it when one of you posts an image, along with a long explanation. Some explanations I get right away. Others (like from @Wolfgang ) require a lot of time to figure out, because I don’t think fast enough. Like what Joanna just did - so I need to look at the whole thing, step by step, and learn which tool did what… and I immediately need to find one of my images to test it on.
Micro Contrast is another very useful tool when used in moderation on images that will benefit from it. Unfortunately it can easily be set too high. On soft images it can sometimes create an illusion of greater sharpness. I generally prefer using the four fine contrast sliders.
Mark
Hy Mike,
There where just phone photo’s of the status of my rebuilding a house interieur.
The old sand box is a fusebox but with the old fuses: porcelain case filled with sand and a silver wire and a spring with a cap wich smelt if the current is to high. And if it’s fused the wire is snapped the spring is released so the cap is nolonger seated in it’s cavity so you know it’s blown.
So i decided to replace that for the one in the image.
This has full protection for gear and people.
Fast re-useable overcurrent protection, human protection bij 30mA currentleakage detection. 3fase power 3x16A for in the future to be placed electrical heating when gas is nolonger available.
Sunpanels provide up to 12A “free” electric.
The hal image are demolision states. I take them so i document for later how it was and how it wil get.
In the inbetween states with rebuilding i can review how i construct something.So i know for instance where my electrical wireing is hidden behind the wall.
Or where a stut is so i can drive a screw in that to get enough grip.
My photographic hobby as getting images of things i stumble in to wile walking around is idle for now due lack of time.
That same lack of time is preventing me from developing images new or old.
Awell when winter is comming i have more time to play with my computer.
For now it’s just reading forums for short moments to keep up and relaxing.
Today i reconstruct the ventialtiontubes, then refitt the beams on the walls 10cm higher then they where😁, then reconstruct the electrical wireing of the hallway.
Create two new light points.
Tomorrow or later if the above isn’t ready, i start with isolation and covering the pipes with drywall plate’s. So my mind and focus is on this. In PL as subject i can Inimitable for you but i think i lost you complete in explaining tech. 
No worries back to images.
exactly that @mwsilvers, what you said.
I use micro contrast often as a form of saturation, dehaze.
Global or local but with care.
As explained before clearview plus is abit like dehaze, dropping blacklevel dots around in a smarter way then microcontrast dots are. So the sharpening is more selective.
The other type of getting a dull image vibrant, colorfull is using “clarity”. Often confused with the term dehaze.
Dehaze(microcontrast) has sharpening effects so it looks more clear but it can give unreal looks on people and dark/light edges.
Clarity, is a artificial kind of saturation of colors by dropping slightly bigger dots of black around so the plains of colors are less bleeched. In PL it’s fine contrast which does that trick.
Like making a stone wet to see it’s real colors. You darken the stonecolors due the fact there is more sunlight reflected instead of absorped/scatterd around, which bring out the colors.(reflection of a certain part of the hue means you see it as a color.)
Clearview is more like polishing the stone, you polish the stone so the kristals are getting flattend to one plain surface so the different colors are more in line. (less difraction of sunbeams due flatter surface means more visual colors.)
But when there arn’t any details to polish you just sand it down and make it less interesting as a flat piece of cement.
I hope i clarified the difference between fine contrast and microcontrast and the smart cousin clearview plus.
Owh and an other quick clearview/clarity/dehaze action is using the tonecurve.
Drag the bottom of the line a bit down so blacklevel is more present in more pixels.
I use often all three to see which does the job best.
Yes, you did lose me, but from what you’ve now written, I understand you are essentially talking about a “fuse box”. I remember those as a kid - lights and power went out, go to the fuse box, unscrew the blown fuse, and screw in a new one. What I’ve got now in my apartment is a “power panel” of switches that can “trip off”, and I need to manually switch them back on.
Since I know I will get this all mixed up in my mind, I just printed it, and I will see if I can use this effectively in a test image. I guess I’ve always been confused about this, and just blindly followed some suggestions from @Joanna.
I don’t remember there being a tool for “dehaze”, “clarity”, and some other terms you mentioned. It’s time for me to make several virtual copies of a test image, and try to see the difference between:
Is there a section in the documentation that compares all these things, and suggest how and when to use one or more of them?
No other applications often talk about Dehaze tool and Clarity tool.
I did a comparison between dxoPL v5 i think and Silkypix v10
Which is
Clearview plus ( smart microcontrast) vs smart sharpening in Silkypix.
Microcontrast vs Dehaze slider
Fine contrast vs Clarity slider
Tone curve vs blacklevel (dxo doesn’t have a blacklevel slider only close to it “black” which change the exposure of the dark side of the image.
It’s somewhere in the topic/header tips tutorials and resources i placed a test with fish in the water. That shows how different things react on the sliders in extreme settings. (this shows there function.)
I used the names dehaze and clarity because most people know them from lightroom kind of aplications.
Some info FilmPack Fine contrast question - #27 by rrblint
I did made an other one can’t find it right now.
True enough. Turns out I was editing in bright daylight, so overshot on the exposure in PL6. Dropping the exposure a few notches produces (I think) a more natural image. Pretty simple.
Mike, have you ever clicked on the ? help option next to each feature in PhotoLab? It will give you a brief descriptive popup of that tool.
Mark
ClearView Plus
Contrast Sliders
“Lightroom???” What’s that?
…er, seriously, I haven’t used Lightroom since the first time @Joanna responded to posts here.
I still make the monthly payment to Adobe, although I wonder why. Every so often I need Photoshop I guess.
I assume you’re using a calibrated display?
I got in trouble with that all the time, until I did a better job of calibrating my display, and try to not do editing with daylight streaming into my room.
The photo you just re-posted looks FAR more natural!
I have been struggling to never use any image editor other than PhotoLab. Otherwise I get more confusabobbled than I normally do, which is bad enough.
Don’t change the way you write just because of me. I suspect everyone else here understands you just fine. I often think I understand, only to realize later I was wrong.
I used to do that, but haven’t done so in a very long time. I obviously should start doing so again. For tools I think I’m used to, I expect some kind of result, but doing this would confirm things for me, or warn me off. I enjoy copying things many of you do, to see if I get a similar result.
Hmm, wow, was I wrong. I thought I understood these tools, but I was very wrong. I need to capture a test image tomorrow, even if it’s not beautiful, to try some of these tools again. I’ll probably use the D780 to prevent @Joanna’s blood pressure from boiling over… 
I started editing with Silkypix v5 pro for panasonic.
Which is as software calibrated, tailored, to panasonic and some other Japanese brands. I bought Silkypix v10 because of there stacking ability’s which PL don’t have and fore comparision user interface, quality level of tools.
I wanted to understand why PL didn’t had a “blacklevel” adjustment. Which i used as dehaze with shots through water of something.
Silkypix has a few smart things, which i like, embedded in the contrasttoolset, the tonecurvetool.
So in order to support my featurerequest i used those as examples to show what i liked about it.
That’s why i did a comparision between.
Silkypix toolset: Contrast balance(midpoint in tonecurve), blacklevel, clarity, Dehaze, tonecurve and some more as selective sharpening which is microcontrast. VS PL’s clearview plus, advanged contrast sliders, tone curve
Due that testing i discoverd that clearview a form of combination is between clarity and dehaze. But that blacklevel isn’t the same as microcontrast. For that you need to use tonecurve.
May I suggest you keep a favourite RAW photo, one you really like that has lots of different elements of composition, colour, subject (s), as an “always try something new in this one first” sample.
It will be an image you are familiar with, with both problems and great bits, that you have edited before and probably struggled with.
DxO is non-destructive as you know, so working with an old friend and knowing what you’ve tried before will give you a single, solid reference when weighing one tool against another without breaking anything.
It might be a more focused way of seeing how things change as you apply them, rather than new image, new tool
Completely off-topic… we had some discussions earlier about old wood sailing ships. I accidentally stumbled on this video, which I think many of you might find fascinating. I’m not going to say much about it, other than post the link:
How an 18th Century Sailing Battleship Works - YouTube
As for me, I watched a few minutes - will watch the rest later this week.
I will review what you wrote later today, but I don’t want to get even more confusabobbled by studying other image editing software. Right now, I want to stick to “doing”, more so than “understanding”.
My interpretation of what you wrote, is to create “virtual copies” of images I want to work on, and try different techniques, and compare. I think that would be a better way for me to discover what works best, for different types of images, and make comparisons.
That’s part of it, yes, but I was proposing something more fundamental. Don’t feel you need to take new pictures to test new tools or a new idea. You can have one favourite, familiar picture that you’ve worked on and already have some knowledge of what you’ve done before and liked or not liked. When you then use fine contrast tools (as an example) you will quickly see “ah, I see that John’s hat is sharper and I don’t have the horrible effect I didn’t like when I tried microcontrast, or Narandajit’s turban really pops with a tiny bit of clearview applied locally rather than what it did to his face that I hated when I used it on the whole image last week.
If you go out with your D780, take new pictures and go at them right away with new unfamiliar tools (that you suggest you don’t fully understand) without any reference to what you’ve done before then you make bringing the whole toolset together as a cohesive solution much harder I think.
The video is simplified because the subject is very complex, but it seems to be a good general overview with a reasonable amount of detail. This ship is a three decker (three decks of cannon) and would be probably be a “First Rate” ship of over 100 guns like Admiral Nelson’s “Victory”. Most line of battle ships of that period were standard “Third Rate” 74 gun two deckers. If I haven’t mentored it before that is where the commonly used terms, first rate, second rate, etc., come from.
Mark.
I will try this starting with my next image, probably tomorrow. Instead of jumping in with the tool-set I’m used to, I’ll start with a “virtual copy” and try tools I’m not yet familiar with. It will likely take me a lot more time, as I’ll be learning so many things as “new”.
I think of this as “painting” were I used to have a palette of perhaps a dozen colors to work with, compared to an experienced painter who may have 50 or more colors to work with. This is not like mechanics, where a few screwdrivers, pliers, and a crescent wrench (and a hammer) is enough for most things, compared to a mechanic with a huge toolbox filled with hundreds of tools…
As you wish, though I think you misunderstand me 
I probably don’t understand you perfectly, but I think I understand what you are suggesting.
There is a lot of learning that needs to happen before I can really do what you suggest, but isn’t the best learning tool actually DOING all these things and evaluate and compare the results? I may not yet fully understand you, but what you suggest I do sounds to me like an excellent way at improving my image editing.
I’ve got another concern. Before I post my own thoughts, people might want to read this from today’s news: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/17/photographer-admits-prize-winning-image-was-ai-generated
So, my simplified question for this forum is Does using the tools of Photolab to get rid of digital noise - turn the result into an AI manipulated image?
Or, maybe I should ask what tools, if any, in PhotoLab should not be used if we don’t want to be accused of using AI on an image?
Is AI enhancement the same as asking the AI software to create the full image?
DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD are AI based. Are you assuming that AI only exists to create or mimic reality? Perhaps you need to develop a better understanding of what AI actually is. There is a lot more to it than the results you got from that query program. There are also different several types of AI. Why don’t you spend a short while familiarizing yourself with the basic concepts.
Mark
Yeah, calibrated with Spyder Pro but since I wasn’t doing a ‘serious’ edit, I was on my laptop by a ceiling-to-floor window. Calibration won’t be of much help then. Things look fine to your adjusted eyes until you see it again under more conducive light. I do most of my ‘real’ editing at night, so it’s generally not an issue…
I still don’t know what AI exactly means.
George
