PL7 web pages still referring to U-Point

If you go to La Technologie U Point™ you get images of the U-Point widget and equaliser instead of the new LA palette.

Yes, the material is pre-DPL7.

Maybe DxO is expecting most users to stick to DPL6?

Moreover, the DPL7 manual is not ready for download yet.

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:crazy_face: :crazy_face: :crazy_face: :crazy_face: :crazy_face:

Yes, tongues hanging out after a rushed GoLive phase :zipper_mouth_face:

Hello,
Our teams have been working hard to prepare beautiful tutorials for you, which can be found in the Larning Hub, also accessable via the menu Help in DxO PhotoLab 7
There is also one about local adjustments:Vous voulez en savoir plus sur DxO PhotoLab 7 ?
You might want to enjoy the tutorials and the onlne user manual while our webteam is still working on updating the last webpages.

The PDF version of the user manual is only available for “old” versions. For versions still under development, namely the current commercialized version, only the interactive online version of the user guide is offered due to possible developments over the course of updates so that you always work with the most current status.

However, if needed you can always save as a PDF or print single pages and chapters via your browser.
(https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/articles/6780401282845-Where-can-I-obtain-the-user-guide-and-how-can-I-print-it-)

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I’m a new user of DxO PhotoLab 7, purchased in November, 2023. I have no prior experience with earlier versions of the software. As such, I’m finding it extremely difficult to understand your approach to masking. It is absolutely unacceptable that learning to use the latest version of the software, which contains significant differences to earlier versions, is constantly undermined by frequent references to features and approaches that either no longer exist or no longer operate in the manner stated in the documentation.

Overall, the documentation is lacking in depth and is rife with typos and grammatical issues. It appears rushed and provides little more than a bullet list of functions with no guidance as to how to achieve specific results.

I’ve struggled now for months to mask real-world images, none of which contain straight, unobstructed horizons easily masked with control lines. I’ve found that most landscapes contain fairly complex tone and luminance transitions that make uniform adjustments very difficult to achieve.

Most of the videos I’ve seen online demonstrate masking with highly contrasted images, bright skies and mid level foreground, etc. And, though they demonstrate the placement of control points and lines, very little discussion is directed to why it works as it does for the image being modified.

I bought this software after being thoroughly impressed with the demo of PureRaw 3. I’ve since begun shooting using Auto ISO, letting the ISO values fall where they may, trusting that DxO’s noise reduction technology has my back. And I continue to be impressed and very satisfied with that aspect of the software.

But I need considerably more reference material regarding masks, their relationship to layers, how to effectively use negative control points and lines, etc. That, without having to constantly trip over references that don’t apply to the software I purchased or the platform that I’m running it on (I’m a Macintosh user).

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imho better than the manual (website design is clearly not their strong point but PhotoLab is):

Careful - they use animated gifs in some places and haven’t replaced all of them. So sometimes an old screenshot appears. Their static screenshots for the menus and so on all appear to be correct.

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Please note, although this forum is hosted by DxO it is a user forum, DxO rarely respond to posts here, i.e. you are not actually talking to DxO by posting here.

If you wish to raise an issue with DxO you need to submit it via this page:
https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thank you very much. This looks like a step in the right direction. I’ve been pushing pixels around on computer screens since the early eighties with an Apple II and Koala Pad, long before digital photography was a thing. I was slow to enter the digital photo market, the Canon S80 being my first digital camera.

It wasn’t until 2019 that I purchased a Canon M6 II mirrorless camera capable of producing RAW images. Until I purchased PL7, all my photos have been managed with Canon’s Digital Photo Professional. PL7 was meant to both allow me more flexibility with processing of the images as well as some measure of asset management, which Canon’s software doesn’t do at all.

My experience and understanding of masking has been limited to Apple, Adobe and nearly everyone else’s approach. Very pixel oriented masking that does not work well with low contrast transitions.

I’ve recognized the potential of PL7 to transcend the limitations of competing software to produce accurate masks, but too often, somewhere along the way I end up shooting myself in the foot, so to speak, and fail to achieve an acceptable result. Too often, tweaking one area of an image alters an already processed other area.

Anyway, thanks again. I’ll spend some time with the TuTo DxO tutorials and see where they take me.

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Thank you. I landed on this site during a late night Google search regarding DxO’s woeful online documentation. Perhaps I haven’t dug deep enough into the issue, but I’m actually very surprised that DxO hasn’t been taken to task more vigorously regarding their lack of attention/interest to providing more detailed and accurate information about their flagship program. The post I responded to is from September of last year and there does’t appear to have been any progress made since then.

Anyway, I understand your point and will endeavor to avoid directly addressing DxO in this forum.

When you have a concrete problem / question e.g. about masking, don’t hesitate to post an example, the corresponding dop-file and a short description and we (the users) might give you a proposal how to handle it.

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OK, thank you.

M6 MII was what I got two years ago when I decided to get back into it. Regretted getting it a bit when I learned EF-M was dying(now dead)… though I recently got used EF-M 28mm for the price of a used EF 28mm. I really like it (wish it was a bit faster though).

How do you find the language used on that tutorial site by the way? I had to keep in mind, that it wasn’t written by a native speaker. Though in the end that is probably one of the things that kept me interested (bit more flowery than standard English).

This issue seems to have been resolved.

Mayb. I’d still prefer to get an offline manual.…and less words like smart or intelligent. After all, do we still need convincing that we’re dealing with the best software out there? Ooos, that was more sales talk agan :grin:

Regarding the M6 II, I have a love/hate relationship with it. It took me years to finally step up to a digital camera that could shoot RAW and allow lenses to be changed, etc. Years earlier I had owned a Canon EOS 620 film camera. I really loved that one. When I switched to digital I settled for a compact 8 MP Canon S80. It served me well. Life was busy and had little time to be creative with the camera. When the S80s optics became contaminated I moved to an SX260HS, another compact that served me well for years. I knew I’d eventually own a DSLR, but wanted to hold out for one with a full frame sensor. I still had a couple EF lenses that would work with Canon’s DSLR cameras. And I was put off by the notion of crop sensors and their effect on focal length, etc. In the end, though, The M6 II appeared, with very positive reviews and I was very attracted to the smaller size of mirrorless cameras. Plus the cost, back in 2019, though still pricey was considerably less than full frame models. Not to mention the general buzz in the industry that mirrorless was the future. So I took the plunge and, from a performance and features perspective, have not regretted it. But Canon’s unforeseen decision to kill the line so soon, without ever really giving much support to it is painful.

The language on the tutorial site - how timely and fortuitous for you to mention that. I had been wrestling with whether or not to honestly share my initial experience with that site. I’m, clearly, not alone though with my initial reaction of bewilderment. Following are a couple lines of text that definitely tempered my initial enthusiasm. The text appears within the subject " Create a Local Adjustment Control line"

When the angular position of the straight lines is close to horizontal or vertical , the system experiences a floating moment indicating the exact positioning

Huh?! Still don’t really know what that means. Here’s another one:

With 0% chrominance, almost all of the pixels in the hue, folded down or saturated, are embedded.

Folded down? Embedded in what?

In addition, I find it really annoying that I can’t pause the graphics during cycling to have time to fully understand what is being presented.

Finally, regretfully, all references are to a previous version of the software that I have no experience with and the entire thing is PC centric, I’m a Macintosh user.

Having said all that, I intend to stick with it as he’s clearly quite experienced with the program and seems to genuinely want to share his knowledge of it.

Don’t get stuck on explanations that give you an idea of ​​how to start, experiment for yourself to really get your head around it. And then just ask …

I believe I may have just stepped onto the path toward unstuck. Had a late night epiphany with a control line, tweaking the Chroma slider to perfectly isolate a distinct section of an image with a mask. I had incorrectly expected the Chroma and Luma controls to directly act on the part of the image beneath a mask rather than modifying the mask itself to select a specific contiguous area of pixels. So many new ways to think about and interact with things in this program.

Maybe it means that when your gradient is very small (the 2 lines close enough to each other) it is absolutly impossible to adjust tiny angles from horizontal or vertical because the angle snap to horizontal or vertical (lack of precision).
Not a good feature. A real problem !!! Some gradient positions are impossible to acheive (not only near to horizontal or vertical in fact) … (This is a one of the DxO unique and jealously guarded features - no other software is able to do this).

But hey, maybe DxO people only use it for skys on photographs done with tripod and a level ?

@brainfarts
to make it a little easier … pull the ‘dashed’ line further away to then → adjust the angle
Screen Shot 02-14-24 at 12.18 PM

note – the B&W mask is temporarily shown