PL7 Elite: Black & White channel mixer not working

sensoriser · September 30, 2023, 4:27pm

I was expecting to see “Channel Mixer” after selecting the “Black & White” option under Colour / B&W Rendering; instead I get the “DxO FP 7 - Channel Mixer” panel below the HSL panel and it has no effect whatsoever… Could anyone offer any help ?

Upon opening

Switched to monochrome

All to the left

All to the right

A radsom setting

None of the sliders have any effect on the BW conversion.

No “Channel Mixer” in the list of pallettes. The only Channel Mixer is the one labelled DXO FP7 - Channel Mixer, and I don’t have FP7. But the channel mixer should not require FP7 as per their help tool tip.

maderafunk · September 30, 2023, 5:10pm

It works for me without Filmpack (under windows 10). I see that you are using a jpg or tiff file, as the white balance is not displaying all the raw modes? Maybe the channel mixer has a bug and is only working with raw files?

Egregius · September 30, 2023, 5:17pm

Something’s wrong with your installation. The heading of the subpalette should be “Channel Mixer.” Do you have a custom workspace with your own palettes in it? That could cause something like this. I suggest making sure you’re updated to PL7.01, too.

It all seems to work fine for me.

sensoriser · September 30, 2023, 5:34pm

That’s what is puzzling me as well. The heading should have been “Channel Mixer” (without the FP7 prefix). I have reinstalled it, no difference.
Also tried with RAW files, no difference.

As for the version,

platypus · September 30, 2023, 5:36pm

Seems to be a bug in the Mac version, both the tool name and absence of functionality.

Attn @StevenL

Related to PhotoLab 7 - Evolution Compared to Versions 6 and 5

sensoriser · September 30, 2023, 5:38pm

Ahh thank you @platypus

sensoriser · September 30, 2023, 5:38pm

Just for the sake of reecording all the information… this is with a RAW file (no change of reported behavior)

platypus · September 30, 2023, 6:10pm

Tested again with a new Mac user account. still: No Do!

Tried all generic and film emulation variants…to, again, find that CM is dead.

nreyes · September 30, 2023, 6:45pm

This is quite strange. I’m on Mac and it works fine, but my Channel Mixer is not prefixed with FXP7 (even if I also have that installed). Might be a bug that occurs in the German version installation? Hope they find a fix for you soon.

platypus · September 30, 2023, 6:59pm

…this is because you have (most probably) activated FilmPack.

Joanna · September 30, 2023, 7:37pm

If you are choosing B&W mode, you need to, at least, select B&W film and whatever film you like…

The generic stuff converts the image to B&W and, thus, the channel mixer has no effect, as there are no longer any colours in the image.

The Channel mixer effects are quite subtle and depend very much on the image content.

For a more pronounced effect, e.g. for darkening skies, use the filter palette…

Here, I’ve used a strong red filter to darken the blues and some of the greens.

Colour mode, no filter…

B&W mode, no filter…

B&W mode, red filter…

mwsilvers · September 30, 2023, 7:39pm

He is probably using the Mac version. In the past I have noticed that the Mac version adds the extra text to a number of tool names.

Mark

Kaffeepause · September 30, 2023, 9:27pm

I have the same problem, the channel mixer does not work for me.
It makes no difference if I select generic rendering or a black and white film, the channel mixer does not work.
Here is an example with the generic rendering. First the basic settings.

Then all channels of the channel mixer to -100%, this should change the image significantly, but you can see that no change happens.

The same behavior with a black and white film.
The basic settings:

And all channels of the channel mixer set to -100 %, no change in the picture:

I have PhotoLab 7 Elite:

My Mac is a Mac Studio M2 Ultra, 60 GPU Cores, 128 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, macOS Ventura 13.6.
I can’t help suspecting that it could be a bug in the Mac version, because I couldn’t find any indication in the manual that a black and white movie had to be selected, and also on Youtube I saw a review where the generic rendering and channel mixer were used, but on a Windows machine.

How can I send a bug report to the developers? Or is it enough to describe this here in the forum?

Andy_Allen · September 30, 2023, 9:56pm

I have exactly the same problem - this on a Mac M1 MacBook Air. I suppose there’s also the possibility the problem is just on the M-series software version. I have a non-M-series iMac too, so I’ll install and check that later today.

Andy

Kaffeepause · September 30, 2023, 10:05pm

I just tested it on my Mac Book Pro 15 " mid 2015 with macOS Monterey 12.7. The channel mixer does not work here either.
It seems to be a bug on macOS that exists on both M-Macs and Intel Macs.

Joanna · September 30, 2023, 10:10pm

I am testing on a MacBook Pro 16" macOS Ventura.

Here is a screenshot of both PL5 (on the left) and PL7 (on the right)…

Both are showing the same changes for the same adjustments.

Here is an unadjusted screenshot from PL7…

sourcebased · September 30, 2023, 10:27pm

MacBook Pro M1 Max here, also same version PL7 in German. I have also FP7 active (both with trial licenses still). Label is only „Kanalmixer“ and it is working fine for me, regardless of the rendering. Both generic and film. Maybe it depends on the image file type? It is JPEG and ORF (Olympus Raw files) in my case. Could also be the MacOS version, I updated mine to Sonoma.

Joanna · September 30, 2023, 10:31pm

I get a feeling that the wrongly labelled palette (with DxO PL7) might be the problem.

Take a look at all the available palettes and see if there is one with just 'Channel Mixer" or localised equivalent.

sourcebased · September 30, 2023, 10:38pm

Yeah - interestingly, other than in the screenshots above „Soft-Proofing” is labelled „DxO PL Elite - Soft-Proofing” in my case.

Andy_Allen · September 30, 2023, 10:46pm

Doesn’t work on a non-M iMac either. Does look like a Mac version thing then.

Andy