This is a bit of a rant, but I noticed a while back that selecting the crop tool in PL5 on Mac automatically zooms the image in to fit the available space in the image browser. This isn’t the case on WIndows (another difference) and I’m fairly sure it didn’t use to be the case on Mac either, although I’m not sure when the behaviour changed. (Can’t test since I’ve lost old installations after changing computers, haven’t been using PL enough to notice when it happened, much less on Mac which I didn’t have at all for a spell.)
I find the behaviour quite irritating since I simply don’t want to crop at full magnification on my 30" display. Of course there are workarounds (smaller window, toggle when I actually want more real estate), but whether or not you like this auto-zoom behaviour will be personal preference. I also dislike it since no other tools are coupled to the magnification level that I can recall. There’s just no logical reason to couple zoom with crop and crop alone.
So I contacted Support to report the issue (the change, the difference, the fact that no other tools do this) and received the answer that the change was made because Mac users requested it (that old goto when there’s no rational explanation), and that the difference is because it hasn’t yet been implemented on Windows. (Obviously.) The latter at least implies that it could be on the way to Windows users as well, although who knows when at the rate other differences are addressed.
I think this way of changing things at random is just completely amateurish. DxO can’t simply change the behaviour of tools that aren’t broken because some users want something else. If some users prefer other behaviour then the solution is to introduce an option to enable it, not to just change it and create a new group of dissatisfied users.
Does anyone know when the change happened on Mac? Are Windows users now universally overjoyed at the prospect of auto-zoom crop coming to them as well?
On the Win version, activating the Crop tool leaves the zoom-factor at whatever it was before the Crop tool was activated. I would be annoyed if it worked the way you describe it for the Mac version.
Why don’t you convert this to a “What feature/change do you need ?” post (for Mac).
In PL6 / Windows one can crop and rotate. – The result depends on the choice made between “Manual” and “Auto based on keystoning / horitzontal …” → similar with the Horizon tool
My issue is with the magnification level when Crop is selected: the size the image is displayed at in the browser. On Mac in PL5, the size changes to fit the available space (aka zoom to fit) when Crop is selected, and this isn’t the case on Windows.
Possibly, but this is really something DxO has broken (IMO) since there was no problem with it before, although getting them to fix their random changes is a feature request I suppose.
I don’t really put much stock in the answer from Support to be honest. Whether or not the behaviour is reverted on Mac or implemented on Windows or remains a difference is anyone’s guess.
Completely understandable that not everyone thinks the same, but they’ve fixed something for you and broken something for me when they should have implemented a solution that allows us both to be happy.
I don’t think that they “fixed” that for me as I don’t remember having request something like this, and I don’t remember when this has been changed… but I simply like as it is today.
The issue has been here at least since DPL2 on Mac. The kind of magnetic effect sets in, when zoom level is at less than around 5 percent points away from what DPL considers to be “fit to screen”. See screen captures below.
Thanks, I’m surprised it’s that long ago. I admittedly use PL less and less, and do sometimes use a smaller display where it wouldn’t bother me as much, but PL2 is a long time for them to not have gotten around to implementing it on Windows, if that’s really the intention.
Unfortunately, the differences between Mac and Win are not decreasing. I think they’re even increasing as new features are introduced. Whatever plans DxO has had to normalize the feature differences seem to have been shelved in favor of more glaring bugs and feature improvements - and even those are queuing up in a rather large and long-lived backlog. Unless there’s a major UI redesign or a miraculous infusion of money and labor into the company, I think we can expect that these differences aren’t going away.
Greg, that is becoming a concern for me as well. A half dozen or so new or upgraded features every year is simply not going to get them out of this hole. DxO somehow has to up their game considerably and address the Mac and Windows differences, as well as various ongoing feature issues, and at least some of the growing list of backlogged items.
I’m hopeful every year that they will make some inroads into these issues, but unfortunately every year I’m disappointed. Even such a seemingly straightforward update to allow the expansion and contraction state of Smart Workspace palettes to be saved across sessions has still not been implemented since this feature was first added in PhotoLab 4. They gave us this productivity tool but they never finished it.
I love using PhotoLab, and I am a big supporter of this software and of DxO in general as many regulars here know. But that does not prevent me from getting frustrated by their lack of progress from version to version.
I was going to say I cannot recall it ever happening differently. In any case I am used to it and expect it. I personally think it makes sense because cropping is, by definition, choosing a part of the whole, and if you cannot see the whole then you cannot choose all parts.
But… I accept that if you just want to fine tune the crop, then there is really no need to zoom back out. I guess I understand why it is that way, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt not to, given zooming out to fit is as easy as one keyboard shortcut, should it be needed.
Seeing the whole is exactly why I don’t want to zoom on a large display. It depends on your equipment and personal preference. For me on my 30" display, I zoom out to view the whole.
Yes, there was nothing broken, and there’s not much logic in DxO saying that crop necessitates a zoom, but not (say) repair. Every time DxO randomly changes something like this they just annoy a new group of people.
I use Windows more than Mac these days though, so I’m at least spared the zooming on Windows … for now.
I suppose I can also alleviate my suffering by hooking my Mac back up to a smaller monitor.
Too many people fail to understand that it’s not the lens giving the distortion, it’s the distance between subject and camera.
In the context discussed here, yes. I think what doesn’t help is that word, “distorsion”, which can mean several things, and particularly people less familiar with the concepts are likely to use it without knowing the ambiguity. The thing is lenses do introduce distorsion—pincushion, barrel, mustache… In this case, “perspective distorsion” is the one distorsion that is an exception, since it is not caused by the lens.
Frankly, in a theoretical world, I’d be happy if we had a separate word for “perspective distorsion” and kept the word “distorsion” for optical flaws…
