A special problem for Photolab (which is also a great advantage by the way) is that PL is always reading and rendering the files directly from the file directories and folders.
I agree with you. For most of us, simple interoperability between applications from different manufacturers is certainly important. This is where the local file system has its advantages. However, I am no longer sure whether a high-performance file system on a local computer will still be the goal of the major operating system manufacturers.
One of the questions that I have (coming from Lr 6, is:
what is the difference between operating in the Catalog vs Non-catalog environments of Lr vs PL?? I have PL set up now to receive my new images with a hard cut off date but I am not really understanding what the differences will be over time. It seems strange not to “import” my images now. I also played around with making changes to the folders and it seems that you can move and rename folders and files in PL as long as you do it from the PL program itself and it will track the moves and changes? Very much like Lr.
Am I missing anything? Is there an article that goes over this that I can read?
Are you sure import is mandatory for lightroom and C1 ?
Don’t know if PM integration works with them the way you like to use it. But import is not mandatory.
lightroom FAQ :
Do I need to import photos to Lightroom to access them in the Local tab ?
No, you don’t need to import or sync locally stored photos to Lightroom. The Local tab lets you edit locally stored photos without importing them into Lightroom.
And C1 can work on images in directories where they are without importing them in its directory structure.
They let user choice.
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
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When opening a selection with “Edit Selected Pictures With” Capture One you end up in the “Import”-Windowbelow :’
Yes it renamed the catalog "Monolitkatalog 1 to Monolitkatalog 2 which was first a little checking since there was no files shown just an empty space. Well the images were there.
When importing CO refused to open the selected files since they were already in the catalog. So I think I can say that integrating CO with PhotoMechanic is not all that straight forward as it is in Photolab.
So when I use Capture One I always use it in session mode and always have.
When doing the same prodess with Photolab it it is just to start working!
Another advantage with Photolab is that it keps track on the “External Searches” it I have done from PhotoMechanic or any other third party application used to “import” a selection from. To go back to an earlier “Selection” is just a click away and to create a “Project” from a selection is very easy too.
The reason Photolab fixes this is that it is working directly on the folders and files in the file system and that Capture One in this case doesn´t. Personally I think the way Photolab works here is a great advantage for the work flow.
The thing with Photolab is that it always tries to render/refresh the previews of the folder you are working in “on the fly” in the background and that has a performance cost. Applications like CO and LR likes to import-render previews in order to avoid the constant rendering process that Photolab suffers from when opening a bunch of pictures/preview but even they have scale and refresh the preview in say 1:1 when working on a specific picture.
So this is not about what you might be able to do in say Capture One. It is about what actually happens when a selection of pictures are selected and opened in the selected converters using the “Edit Selected Picture With” in PhotoMechanic Plus
Are you willing to wait for view of your photo the time it takes to render DeepPrime or DeepPrime XD?
In addition, many of the settings that affects rendering will probably make that wait a repeating occurrence. I feel you can have either the best rendering or many long waits during development of your pictures.
I don’t need DeepPrime/XD for the preview in the editor. And I don’t think anyone else does. We are not asking for this.
What we are asking is for an accurate preview at every zoom level of ALL OTHER settings which aren’t currently applied (chromatic aberration, sharpening, purple fringing), EXCEPT for DeepPrime/XD. And that is highly feasible, and wouldn’t cause any noticeable increase of refresh times on any current PC with a CPU that’s at least decent.
All modifications except noise reduction are almost instantaneous on my 7 years old i7. They are almost instantaneous even at 75% or higher, so they would just be as instantaneous at lower zoom level.
Current implementation of the viewer applies every correction except for noise reduction at 75% or higher. It would not cost anything more in terms of performance to to the same also for 70% or lower. That’s the request, and it would be so easy to do it…
The way to do it would be to always render the image at 100%, and then RESCALE it (which is a quick and easy to do, and it is what other editors do). No reason why this rescaling can be done at 75% but not at 70% and below: just plain laziness or because they think the difference cannot be noticed. It can, and sometimes it’s a HUGE difference, as I have proven several times with images:
If one can’t see the difference, well… I would check a good optometrist. It’s visible in the 1080 screenshots, and even more visible on a 4K screen.
But… tones and saturation are not affected. They are correct even on the “noisy” image. On the contrary, they are very much affected and wrong in a 70% preview.
The best proposal, again, would be to make it user-selectable from preferences:
as it currently is
all modifications except Deep Prime/XD always applied at zoom levels above XX (where XX is a user selectable value)
all modifications including Deep Prime/XD always applied at zoom levels above XX (where XX is a user selectable value) - FOR USERS WITH EXTREMELY POWERFUL MACHINES ONLY
Since saving a dng with optical corrections and denoising and then working on this DNG SEEMS (as some told on this forum) to be a workaround to this render time problem, it should be possible to do this on the fly and then be able to continue work at any resolution without waiting for those process to happen again.
Unless this “workaround” isn’t ok depending of processing needed on the image ?
So, is this workaround right ? (can we get same result with and without this workaround whatever processing applied on the image ?).
If yes, why not to cache on the fly this process (optical corrections and denoising) and only process it again if modifications are done on optical correction and denoising ?
And so have no major processing time problem when changing zoom factor ?
Current workstations have 32 or 64 GB ram, and current graphic cards have 8 GB vram at least, so memory should not be a problem to do this.
And a better option could be to write those cache on disk too (optionaly ? - for those with small drive configurations) for further work cession (it should be faster to read it once from disk than to process this again).
Anyway a well thought-out caching system should certainly make it possible to greatly limit or eliminate this photolab’s enormous latency which is not compatible with lot of professionnal workflows.
Reprocessing so often the same time consuming process could (should !) be avoided in a modern software. (Do it once. Not two or often lot more !!!).
Excusable or inexcusable, I believe what you see at 70 % is extensive Chromatic aberration. So, this is a bit of an extreme case.
Anyway, I agree that DxO should do something with their rendering before export, even if they cannot fix everything.
If you look at the file at 100%, even without activating the corrections, the chromatic aberration is actually not that terrible. It’s PL’s inaccurate rendering that makes it look that way.
Look here… This is the image at 75%, with NO correction for chromatic aberration or purple fringing:
The actually look the same, and both look exactly like the exported jpeg would look. It’s proof that it’s NOT chromatic aberration that causes the difference. It’s completely and only caused by a very bad rescaling algorithm at 70% and below: completely PL’s fault.
Look at how dramatically the saturation of the flowers and grass changes from 70 to 75%. How is one supposed to work on the full image to regulate saturation and vividness, if it’s so unreliable?
