PL7 ruined my PL5 photos

DxO PhotoLab
21

Sounds promissing, Mike.
I can’t help suggesting this free raw editor Darktable as an alternative to the not so free PL7 and its not so free addons.
I compared this forum to pixls dot us because the “issues” here catch me each time I visit - as opposed to the home of Darktable where people predominantly are playing and having fun.
But I must not “rant”.

A small PS:
The natural noise reduction in Darktable is not better than the old ones in ACR, C1 and others before AI. That’s where DxO PureRAW 4 comes in - as a pre-treatment of more noisy raw files. I forgot to change the preset exposure time and aperture last week in the forest and provoked 40,000 ISO! But, after the PR4 treatment the image was absolutely magnificent, a noise-free and still detailed DNG file ready to be touched up in Darktable.
I love this combination, and in 5 percent of the cases it’s further combined with Affinity Photo. With those three I am totally covered and stay independent of the more greedy providers.

22

Ah, you mean the providers who pay employees so that they can afford to live and contribute taxes to a nation’s economy, so that the citizens can have decent health and education services?

Free always comes with a price - somewhere along the line.

23

Wow… Joanna (let the flag go just before your feet get off the ground)
Do you really think that such an ideal model has anything to do with providers like DxO and Adobe?

24

DarkTable is not “free”. It is open-source, meaning there are a huge number of people working to make it better, donating their time. There is no cost.

Can it do everything PhotoLab can do - nope.
Can it do “enough” - certainly.

I had no complaints whatever about DarkTable, and enjoyed using it. I prefer PhotoLab, but DxO is a company, with all the expenses, including payrolls, and I’m certain they hope to make a profit.

I don’t know if I would use the term “greedy”, but to get all the benefits of PhotoLab, there are several add-ons that one wants to buy, more $$$.

DxO is designed around RAW files. DarkTable is for anybody/everybody. I need to spend a lot more time with DarkTable to catch up with all the available features - but I need to do that with PhotoLab.

Or, there is all the Adobe software, which we can no longer even “buy”, now we need to “rent”. A lot of people consider Adobe to be “greedy”.

When Adobe went to “subscription”, I switched to PhotoLab. PhotoLab does a lot more for me than DarkTable, but then I also have been using PhotoMechanic for decades, which does much of my organizing.

I didn’t buy PhotoLab 7, as I didn’t see anything I needed to add to PhotoLab 6. No idea if I want to spend the $$$ to get PhotoLab 8. And if I do, I will likely wait for the “Black Friday” sale pricing that a very good friend told me about, along with all the other help she has been giving me.

Agree with Joanna - “free” eventually comes with a cost, but Open Source provides a lot. Among other things, they have “GIMP” for an image editor, but I never understood it…

25

Mike: Which are the 3 major functionalities you use in PhotoLab and miss in Darktable?

“Free” means free, i.e. no payment, and so far I have not had any unexpected costs in that connection.
What would such costs be (Joanna)?

26

So far, none. PhotoLab and DarkTable both do the same basic things.

Scroll down the list of tools in PhotoLab - does DarkTable include all of them? Eventually it might.

Free? Open Source? Lots of people are putting in lots of time and effort to create and improve DarkTable. They are donating their time and ability.

So yes, technically it is “free”. But the word “free”, as I see it, doesn’t really apply. …and when you have an issue, there is nobody to call for help.

27

Since it seems you’ve become a professionnal using those softwares (despite your very genuine and repetitive questions), could you tell what photolab can do that darktable can not ?
(Forget noise reduction at high iso and auto lens correction (specially sharpness), which is obvious and are the only 2 real interesting points of photolab).

And since it seems you manage that so well now, can you tell, say 2,3 points darktable can do and photolab can not or not as well ?

28

If you think those are the only 2 real interesting points of PhotoLab, there is no point in answering.

If you think that PhotoLab, including my add-ons (HSL tool, Geometry, Local Adjustments, FilmPack, and so on, are available in DarkTable, than you know much more about DarkTable than I do.

As to my being a “professional” at any of this stuff, you are being silly. There are only two or three people in the PhotoLab forum that I think of as being experts.

Being professional is meaningless. Anyone doing this for a living, earning money, is a “professional”. Perhaps you think of yourself as being a “professional”; I don’t. And as for “professional”, does that imply art? That someone understands how to use a brand-x camera, or repair it?

If DxO vanished completely tomorrow, and wouldn’t run on my computers, I’d be using DarkTable. Personal opinion, and I’m pretty sure other people have their own favorites. :slight_smile:
But thank you for asking.

29

so don’t answer.

30

To the contrary. You submit a report about the malfunctioning and within hours or a few days, you will have the responsible people answering. Either you will know if the observation is new, or you will be linked to the main report. Anyway you will know that the problem is taken care of.

Look under Issues here:

If the problem is due to wrong handling or something in your setup it can often be solved via pixls.us

31

I’m not ready for that yet. I’m still “learning”, and I’ve gotten DarkTable to do most of what I needed already. If PhotoLab was turned off for a week, I’d use DarkTable. Most of my past questions were answered in their forum.

Thanks - at some point, I may need to do that. I wasn’t aware of this.

32

Wow, great to see my original post going off the rails. As a ‘pro’ designer who has been using various tools since the early 90s including film tube scanners and correction software, I will add my two cents.

  1. The tools are irrelevant. most tools do more or less the same fundamental things with some having propriety features such as DXOs lens corrections and noise reduction.
  2. Industry standards and file sharing is what makes certain software ‘stick’. Adobe can charge whatever they want because millions of creative professionals and agencies need to share and access propriety (locked) files.
  3. Open source is great if you are an individual and willing to take certain risks. In saying that, roughly half of the internet websites run on WordPress, an ancient PHP open-source platform.
  4. Digital photo files (raw and compressed) haven’t really changed in the last decade. We are moving to more AI driven and corrected images straight out of the camera. This makes content production processes, including DAM far easier and shorter and sometimes more reliable. Do you really think a photo journalist has time to fxxk around with finding, correcting and publishing content?
  5. DXO is a great tool for what it is. However, I am just as happy to use Mac Photos or my Phone’s free apps to do 90% of what I usually need while also adding DAM which PL doesn’t do (or doesn’t do well).

At the end of the day, it’s a tool and every tool is a compromise. If it’s too expensive or not right for you, there are always other options.

in the meantime, I sorted out my original post issue. :slight_smile:

33

How did you solve it?
And maybe you would like to add something else to the thread title.

Yes, it’s a shame that reports about problems and their solutions so often get out of hand.

34

Hi @Wolfgang
I reported the ‘fix’ somewhere in the thread a few months ago.
I also recommended for DXO to create a better ‘upgrade’ on-boarding process as my issue was fixed by doing some manual work in ‘library’ deleting db files not before changing the correction defaults in ‘Settings’ (to none).

35

Re-read and checked everything (excluding this Darktable bla+blub nonsense …)

  • from your screenshot
    grafik

  • exported in PL5 a raw-file (camera = AdobeRGB)
    as jpg with color space set to ICC Original
    Screen Shot 07-25-24 at 09.16 AM
    ( from jpg )

  • opened that jpg file in PL7.8.0_254
    where it appeared with
    Screen Shot 07-25-24 at 09.17 AM
    ( from jpg )
    which is the same thing as the original camera profile

  • but when in PL7 manually set to
    Screen Shot 07-25-24 at 09.18 AM
    indeed it changed to more saturated colors
    [ in PL7 – set to Classic (Legacy) – only the Default color profile is available ]

So …

updating to PL7 may have hijacked your PL5 database and/or as you stated the upgrade process did not recognize your custom(?) preset.

[ I have (pre)set RGB files to “No correction” and export JPEGs as sRGB, while for this experiment I used AdobeRGB to exclude possible color space clipping. ]

36

Yes, the upgrade did no recognize my custom presets and since the ‘fix’ is to disable correction in PL settings, a person first needs to open PL which will override all the photos that were corrected in previous PL versions, change the corrections to ‘none’, close PL, go to Mac OS library folder and deleted all the db files and reopen PL. Another issue is that custom presets are not imported to the new PL so you need to import them one by one.

This is not a good experience for people who use presets or custom presets on large batches of photos which I used to do on occasions like fine art, experiments or just bad exposure batch.
To be honest, the entire ‘preset’ feature is kind of bad and dated.

37

Well… I’m using the “DxO Standard” preset, but it’s already happened to me that PL accidentally hijacked the previous database during the upgrade.

For those who might not be familiar with several changes …

In PL6 DxO replaced AdobeRGB by DxO Wide Gamut as their internal working color space and dropped the former choice to also select a “Generic Profile (sRGB) - for display device with no specific calibration”
… which caused some headache when not using a calibrated screen.

Along with these changes we got

  • monitor gamut warning (blue overlay)
  • destination gamut warning (red overlay)
  • and are advised to use Soft Proofing
    … which was very new to quite a few users.

Also the Lens Sharpness (DxO lens profile) default setting changed from “0” to “1”
… which was to strong for quite a few users.

In PL7 DxO replaced the default preset by an additional “1 - DxO Style - Natural”
… and renumbered the others.

The “Lens Sharpness” (DxO lens profile) was renamed to “Lens Softness correction”.

PL5
grafik

grafik
grafik
Screen Shot 07-26-24 at 09.40 AM

grafik

PL6
grafik
grafik

grafik
grafik
grafik

grafik

PL7
grafik

grafik

:man_shrugging:

38

with every upgrade from PL3 to PL5 to PL7, always had to reset my auto-apply preset.

The best way is to set it to DxO standard and add preset(s) (multiple) based on your camera profiles, so what ever images you working on, you just have to click on that camera profile preset to get off dxo standard. because with every upgrade so far, your presets are gone and you have to set new one, sorry dxo but this is an annoying thing you bring with every PL upgrade, and your every PL upgrade come with a different DxO standard :face_with_raised_eyebrow:.
this is based on my experience with those 3 PL version upgrade that i can remember, PL1 was probably in the same boat but that’s too long ago.

1 Like
39

Thanks @Wolfgang and @mikerofoto
Your replies really help solidify this issue!. PL is not good for retaining photo presets from version to version. The on-boarding process for users who are upgrading doesn’t include a simple question like ‘do you want to retain your previous presets or corrections’.

PL is great for many things, especially price/features but it is a bit dated in some areas. Presets is one of them and maybe it is not a core feature PL users care about.