Local adjustments, for me, are one of the most marvelous aspects of PL. I love how simple they are to use and apply.
However, I find that I regularly apply very similar setting repeatedly. For example:
Darken a skyline, and add some contrast to it as well
Lighten a face, along with adding some contrast
Reducing the exposure of a highlight area, as well as bringing the highliught slider down a bit
Etc.
I’d love to be able to create presets for these, similar to how it is possible to create presets for the gloabl adjustments in PL.
DxO could conceivably make it possible to save certain combinations of settings for the Local Adjustments section in presets but the masks would never match and would have to be redrawn anyway. So, I fail to see the point.
Local Adjustments are based solely on specific masks. @CHPhoto seems to want the ability to save equalizer and other LA settings which could then be pasted to newly drawn masks on other images. I suppose it might be possible to implement a feature like that although it is not likely to happen. In any case they would not be presets in the normal sense but rather saved data in some format which could be selected and applied to individual masks.
I think it’d be a great feature to have local adjustment presets, working much like the presets do for global adjustments. A user-friendly implementation would be in the context menu of the local adjustment masks themselves. The current menu shows these options:
Add “Apply preset adjustments” and “Save as preset adjustments” to this menu, so I can apply my hair preset and then tweak the sliders as needed, for example. I’d at the very least be customizing presets for certain often-repeated tasks like skin smoothing/shine, eye sharpening, reduction of dark circles, brightening the shadows of faces, darkening skies…
The current workaround some people use for this missing feature is very cumbersome. With that little bit of tooling described above, this would be useful for everyone doing local adjustments.
[Edit to clarify: I agree with @mwsilvers, the presets would be for the sliders and HSL tool, not the masks themselves. The workaround people use involves saving as a preset which includes the mask; inconvenient as that needs manual rework each time as the mask isn’t the relevant part here]
I am a new user, having had Lightroom since before it was Lightroom (anyone remember Pixmantec?), but being fed up with the Adobe (short version). I’m fine with creating masks using the PhotoLab tools, in fact I’m finding these better in a lot of ways. However, I’m coming unstuck with just this issue. Yes, I can create a Preset which includes my local adjustments, or just copy them, to a new photo, but it would be much better to just be able to paste the adjustments made to a mask from “photo 1” to a newly created mask in “photo 2”. Adjusting the copied mask that comes across is proving troublesome when it is specifically an inverted mask of one of the others. I can adjust the original mask OK, but trying to then adjust the inverted mask is just not “clean”. At the moment I’ve gone back to just copying down the adjustment settings from “photo 1” and then rekeying them to the new masks in “photo 2”. With pen and paper. And as a dyslexic person, this is also proving hit and miss (chalk that one down to user error…). Other than that, I’m really happy with the DXO suite!
Working with inverted masks can be tedious. Without remembering the actual use case, I temporarily reset the mask to its normal state and was able to handle it better.
Experiment with it a bit… it might help you for now.
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Feel free to ask further questions (preferably with an example of what you as a new forum user need to upload via Google Drive, WeTransfer or similar).
This is perfectly doable using AI generated masks, such as “Select Sky”, Select Subject, Select Background, etc. These may not be perfect but they provide a good starting point, easily improved by simply editing the generated mask where needed. That is something DXO will have to get into one, hopefully in PL9
One interesting point could be, if the LA mask for e.g. “sky” will translate correctly if the Preset has been defined from a landscape oriented image and then applied to a portrait oriented image. This does not work as I expect in DPL8, e.g. with a gradient that, instead of going top->down is applied right->left.
with AI masking like many apps do, like Lightroom, there is not gradient. The engine looks at the image and find the sky, whatever the orientation. Photolab has no AI masking capability at the moment. But other apps do, so Dxo is lagging many other apps.
You are right in a way. But it all depends on what data is saved in the preset and if orientation of an image matters. In case of the gradient, DPL does not what I’d expect, but then again, a gradient is not an AI mask.
I also tried with a control line mask, and here, the orientation of the image was not taken into account, although the mask covered the image completely.
We’ll see if DPL9 will come with AI masking and if, how it will perform. If DPL9 is published at the usual time, we don’t have to wait too long either.
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
14
That was my thought too. How is that going to work?? All masks are area dependent and will be different from picture to picture.
The way they have done it in Capture One is using a “master image” and using its “style” to influence the “style” of a selected set of destination images but that is AI.
The beauty of AI masking is that, if done properly, things like “sky”, “subject”, “background” etc. can be found by the AI, no matter how the image is oriented. In order to make it work properly, the AI masks need to be orientation agnostic, masks like a gradient or u-point must be re-orientable and/or re-locatable and every other mask or mask correction will be, hmmm, unusable? Depending on how one sets rotation in camera, image (content) tops can point up, left, down etc. If the AI could find the correct orientation without considering orientation tag values, we could have some automation for “NI” (natural intelligence) masks.
Otherwise, we could at least get working presets for AI-only masks.
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
16
We need an AI based platform in Photolab before local adjustments masks can be a reality I guess. Soon we will see if version 9 will add another lost year without that platform or not.
(chalk that one down to user error…). Other than that, I’m really happy with the DXO suite!