I am finding in doing some tests that the old closing of local adjustment was much easier to use than the new way. After a long time I found you have to deselect which ever tool you had been using of as well as closing the local adjustments. Why has it been made so much more complicated? If you close it why on earth is the tool still left active? The older clearing of the masked area when making adjustment worked now how do you see what it doing other than manually closing off masks?
With a control line I can find no way of geting back to normal editing. The control line is deselected as are local adjustments but there it sits any selection becomes a new contral line.
This feedback also corresponds to my experience and I had already pointed out this fact in the beta test.
The Local Adjustments can be ended simply by pressing ESC or ENTER, but that means switching from the mouse to the keyboard, which has never been a good usability.
Apart from that, ESC or ENTER are not exactly the keys I would expect for closing the LA.
Why don’t they leave us the big button in the toolbar, like in previous versions? What’s wrong with that? The status of the button also signaled quite excellently that the panel is still active. I just don’t understand something like that (like so much about the update).
Which “Close” button?
Clicking on the selected tool in the LA panel is the only viable workaround, but this is no comparison to the button from previous versions.
Thanks. My my DxO not listening to BETA testers how surprising! The new screen is an improvement but local adjustments has been made a difficult to use mess. I have been switching between 6 and 7 how much easier they are in 6 with the automatic blanking of the overlay when adjustments are made and it closing when local adjustment closed rather than the messing about in 7.
I anticipate a lot of confusion related to this - Especially now that the “big LA button” has gone …
Note: I am not advocating for its return … but, the new implementation is a very poor & confusing alternative - esp. when it could easily be much better & simpler.
As far as I can see to use local adjustment now you need to select the one to use, use it and either do M or click on display mask. To make changes un click display mask or use M. In 6 the black option kicks in if relevant in 7 you have to remember to select and deselect it as it’s a pain with some local option’s but worse when making changes you have to turn the mask off to see the changes which happened automatically in 6. They have basically made a fairly simple process, if you remembered M for mask, to a much more complex one to achieve basically the same. I just cant see what on earth they thought they were doing in messing up somthing that worked well befor!
That was one of the reasons why I stopped applying as a beta tester, but I was still hoping for the learning ability. Has the user interface actually become more readable and adjustable or not?
The basic problem is that DxO listens too much to its users and beta testers, but only to some of them, mostly those who inexplicably have a lot of time to test and express their opinions in detail. I can already hear the screams and look forward to their feedback
I can only recommend again and again to get a real UX expert, UX designer on board, who can classify the user feedback and also has an eye for software standards and operating concepts.
If only users or developers decide on operating concepts, in my experience a lot of crap comes out, because often not enough mass of users comes together and therefore individual feedback is taken into account.
A good example is the activation of the LA mode via the tab: this is a good idea in principle, but what about the work environments where the LA panel is always visible (like in my case)? When does the automatism take effect there?
I would like to hear a good argument against the big LA button?
Capture One does an excellent job of this, by the way. Here it is always visible which tool is currently in use, although not very noticeable, but since it is always done in the toolbar, you know where to look. Here, DxO Photolab is still inconsistent, there are tools whose active status is only visible in the panel, again for others in the toolbar. This is often confusing and completely unnecessary. Why not consistently in the toolbar for all tools?
Indeed it is - see the screenshot below. Not only does PL7 Windows not have a Close button, the layout of other items is different (Mask display and colour, B&W mask, Show cropped areas) and there’s no visible “negative control point” option (which I can see in the MAC version) - instead you need to read the CP Help panel telling you that Alt-click can be used to protect an area.
So much for reducing the diffrences between Win and Mac. I have been strugling to find the negative control point. The online manual is less than helpful saying “You can apply a protective Control Point, which prevents another Control Point from applying its correction to a portion of the image. In the toolbar below the image, click on the Control Point icon with the “–” (minus) sign, then click to place the protective Control Point where you want it. Make your corrections with the Equalizer: they will not be applied to the protected area.” I can find nothing like it and the imige they show doesn’t either.
That’s good.
But any well thought software takes into account that some users only use the mouse, while others prefer the speed of keyboard shortcuts.
And the 2 possibilities MUST coexist.
Sometime it is better to see effective change of local adustement when adjusting the mask rather than the blue representaion of the mask.
I’m not sure I completly understand how this is implemented in v7, but being able to only see the effect and not the blue representation of the mask must still be an option.
(I can’t imagine doing some dodge and burn with the blue representation of the mask visible. I need to see how the effect evolve when adusting the mask, not the mask).
