Some users are not interested in the color management enhancements. Others may only occasionally use local adjustments or don’t care for the way local adjustments have been implemented in PL7. Some users don’t own a FilmPack license and have no desire to purchase one. For users who fit in these groups, I can understand why they feel that PhotoLab 7 does not have much to offer them. over version 6.
Mark
Requirements vary from person to person. It’s therefore wise to check out the free trial before deciding if the upgrade is worth its price. IMO, it’s better to base one’s decision on one’s own experience than on forum feedback/opinion or marketing material.
curves adjustment – that’s missing
and why … maybe to mimic what was there so far
it doesn’t mean you have to upgrade every year. if you feel the improvement isn’t much for you, then you can wait for next yr version.
As a mostly bird photographer; there is nothing in PL7 that I crave for. I wish PL7 could have run faster.
Correct, I skipped PL4 and PL6, i.e. I had PL 3 and am now running PL5. Very cost effective for me as when I went from PL 3 to PL 5 DxO considered me a ‘current user’ so the upgrade cost was a sizeable reduction on the ‘new user’ price. The same is true for me this year, my upgrade price for PL7 is much less than the ‘current user’ price.
BUT…
This policy may not hold true in the (near?) future. See my post here for why I am speculating like this:
https://forum.dxo.com/t/be-aware-dxos-upgrade-pricing-policy-has-changed/34923
NB note my emphasis on ‘may’ and ‘speculating’.
For me PL7 best thing is speed improvements. I don’t know if this is just on my PC or everyone, but compared to latest PL6 I’m getting roughly double the responsiveness and speed on everything, including DeepPrimeXD. I didn’t see the speed improvement being advertised so I don’t know if its just how it works with my hardware or what, and at first I though something is wrong, because the preview for DeepPrimeXD is now almost instant, where before it took 4-5 seconds. That for me is pretty big improvement. And in day to day work this is the biggest thing for me. Everything just runs about twice as fast, from image preview, slider responsiveness, local adjustments to export.
Second thing for me probably is the local adjustments, when I need them and also the calibration tool. I shoot sometimes, paintings on the wall and need accurate color, and now I get it directly in DXO. So for that use case, the ability to calibrate the shot using color checker is really easy and welcomed, As for local adjustments, nothing that I couldn’t do before, but its just a bit more easier to do now, so great, but not as critical as speed improvement for me, personally.
I can understand the UI interface change for Local adjustment, mainly because if the HSL integration that was not really possible with the big button, but I think they messed up the new UI interface making it over complicated, especially the masks visualisation, a true nightmare. I wrote myself a full-page document just to understand the behavior of the masks and it is not good. DxO will have to seriously review this part. LUT is a nice add, but the supplied LUT cubes look is questionable. The new Color Rendering is either too much or not enough, like they cannot decide if they want to integrate FilmPack or just make a marketing honeypot to sell FilmPack. A lot of good things but frustrating at the same time. Not the best PL upgrade.
PL 7 is still a work in progress. Because local adjustments are a radical change from the past, DxO will be adjusting things on an ongoing basis as needed. I suspect that over the next couple of months most of the issues regarding the usability of the new local adjustments paradigm will have been resolved.
Mark
Probably true. The way to show the mask is convoluted and not convenient, so I hope that will be resolved. In the past one could simply click “m” for black and white mask preview, and now its more steps to go trough menus to set it up. I hope they revert that.
I just got the 7.0.1. No doubt they will improve it
Every time!
The M key always has the same function as before being displayed or hide the mask.
Another interesting little quirk I just noticed. There is HSL wheel “vibrancy slider” added that was not there before. And yet it can only be applied to master color wheel, but in every individual color selection it remains as a slider that is grayed out. As if it will be added later or its a part of the interface that was not cleaned up. I hope they add it to each individual color in the future.
Yes, but “M” does not work unless you toggle little flyout menu in the image, because there are two masks now, the semi transparent color overlay and traditional black and white mask. Until you check which one you want, M does not work by default to black and white. And even then the way it behaves when you move the mouse on top of the image or to the interface, it changed from last versions.
As someone pointed out to me yesterday, it’s the correct behaviour.
While saturation incresases… well, saturation of the colors, Vibrancy acts by increasing the DIFFERENCE in saturation between DIFFERENT colors. So, it’s correct that it only acts on the master color wheel.
If that is the intended behaviour. than one must ask, why is there a visible slider that is grayed out in the user interface. If there is no use of it, why not simply remove it from the interface? This way its either feature they will include later so they are getting the slider in place and will fix the code, or the slider is not supposed to be there since it has no use for it, but its a unpolished user interface that needs to be cleaned up.
Well, it’s not grayed out unless you explicitly select one of the color channels…
And while the ? (help) does not explain the reason, it DOES say that you can only apply it to the master channel.
Hence my question. If there is no use for it with individual color channels, than it should not be there in the user interface. Either its an UI designer error, or its meant to work, but code for it has not been implemented yet and its waiting for that to be finished.
Could you please indicate what are your PC specs (and graphic card(s?) driver version ?).
This looks like a big improvment !
Yes. This is a nice feature. Straight in the box.