I think I covered that in my previous response. I’m not sure how I can explain it better, but I’ll try. I also used the history list when I was a lightroom user, and I use it extensively today when I’m in Affinity Photo. It’s not unlike using the older undo stack except its current ease of use greatly expands how I use it on a regular basis.
It gives me infinite possibilities for developing the same image with different branches. It allows me to quickly go back in time on the fly to change or remove earlier edits or to create a VC snapshot and then move forward again.
I may have anywhere from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred edits in an image depending on my goals for it. With the application of that many edits I am still able to work very quickly. There is a huge amount of interaction between various sliders so your approach simply would not work for me in a complex editing situation and would not allow me to quickly return to an earlier state with a specific combination of edits and settings. A visual history list is obviously not important to your workflow, but it is a very important component of mine. .
You are very much entitled to your way of doing things but what surprises me is that you can actually tell which edit out of several hundred you want to go back to, especially when the setting of one tool may have been changed tens of times, in both directions - all you end up with is the final value because all the previous alterations were overwritten.
I remain firmly in the camp of those who just go back to a tool and readjust it, because that doesn’t undo all the changes to all the other tools on the way back to the point I thought I wanted to be at.
Not an issue. I was a computer programmer and analyst, software designer, and system development manager for over 35 years. In my earlier years I programmed and managed several large systems for JPMorgan Inc. mostly written in IBM 360/370 Basic Assembler Language (BAL) and was responsible for maintaining and debugging several million lines of assembler and PL/1 code. I have always had excellent attention to detail, although as I get older it is not as good as when I was young. Working with a couple of hundred edits for an image and knowing where in the list I want to step back to is a piece of cake.by comparison. I have also spent hundreds of hours playing with slider combinations and I am very comfortable with the relationships between them. Being retired gives me plenty of time to learn the nuances of PhotoLab.
Yikes! My time was spent in the higher level languages: Pascal, C++, Clipper, Delphi, C#, Objective-C and finally Swift.
As time went on, I really had to write more comments in my code; it was just too complex to remember and the folks that took it over wouldn’t have stood a chance
I worked mainly as an independent consultant who had to write a lot of code to show the developers how to implement my designs. I reached retirement age last year and occasionally I write my own apps for macOS and iOS, just to keep the brain from ossifying.
But I still prefer version control (virtual copies) to a history list
Funny.
I started wirh RPG2 in a time when monitors didn’t exist yet. For myself later on with Pascal, Clipper for the dbase functions and tried VisualObjects. I still use for my administration the clipper programs, althoug I had to move them to Harbour, a window shell around the dos based clipper progs.
In my earliest job we did not have monitors either. I wrote all my code on coding sheets and we had a bank of people typing the program instructions to Hollerith punch cards. In that job most of the assembler programs I worked on had almost no documentation comments in the code to help me understand the functionality. Trial by fire.
It seems we have a bunch of old programmers gone out to pasture Being very analytical with a lot of attention to detail can be both a blessing and a curse!
In lower machine languages like BAL sometimes I would need to write around 10 instructions just to format and print out a line on a report. It required a huge amount of coding for not a whole lot of functionality. I had to identify the address of the data and load the data to be printed based on its hexadecimal address in memory, calculate the length and displacement of the data to format the print line, move characters to the print line, and so forth.
Unless someone is learning the program there are rarely hundreds of steps, well, there shouldn’t be that many if it weren’t for the problems of PL’s history, especially with local adjustments. Also, it does not take too many steps to see if an edit is going in the wrong direction.
You are one who, it is obvious, has a profound knowledge of PL. Maybe, probably, you do not need to experiment as much as I do.
There are easily hundreds of edits that could be applied. In any one photo I may make multiple changes to most of the available adjustments in Photolab, including those for Viewpoint and FimPack, dependfng on the complexity of the image and what I want to achieve.
I might make as many as 50 separate adjustments just using the repair tool alone. I may play around with several crops. I may try a number of different Creative vignetting scenarios, I might apply several different FilmPack film types.
I may make numerous adjustments to the various contrast sliders of which there are seven, including ClearView Plus, when you have FilmPack installed, and the make adjustments to sharpness and the unsharp mask in concert with the contrast settings
I may play with color settings and white balance and dozens of other things, and I haven’t even mentioned Local Adjustments which I use extensively for numerous reasons including local dodging and burning.
I can easily have 200-300 adjustments before I’m done.Even though I am very comfortable with the toolset and features I still need to visualize things to determine if I’m achieving my specific goals for my images and often tweak settings to get exactly what I want. I’m guessing most people end up with far more edits then they realize
It is too much. I haven’t even read all your message.
Seriously though local adjustment are murder, it’s true.
It would be nice if PL’s history would regroup, under a droplist, collections of successive edits using the same tool.
Writing code,
I am more a eye hand guy.
Use of history.
Comparing, present state against earlier states., inprovement would be quicksave markers. Workaround is now create a vc and go further with that one. The is master is then safepoint 1. Need a safepoint2? New vc and go further with that one. VC1 is then safepoint2.
Backtracing? Throw the one’s you don’t want away wile migrate to master or one of the vc’s.
other history function could be “making how to” 's
By storing steps of editing you could store the steps you made creating a certain look.
A preset is a compressed history to one step, endresult. And sometime’s i would like to have some “screenshot’s” of the road to it.
My problem is in the present function my impulsive mind.
I look at a image and think some steps back that seems to be better, so i go back find my image stage look at it and impulsive think what if i do this… Pooof history eh future gone. Dammn why didn’t i make a vc and safe the latest state…
So best improvement for me is Savepoints.
A autosave of latest editpoint when going back if using the historylist, and when change something down the line a heads up in are you proceed a new route? You loose the other progress…
Markers in the editing route to pinpoint important moments.
And if posible a export of markers screenshots.
All this is already build in the VC’s toolset. Except renaming vc name in say “step one perspective” step 2 contrast and exposure step 3 colorrendering step 4…
So a “make vc named … From this point” command will connect the toolset of VC’s with the history window…
Then hit printscreen would make a how to.
Interesting to see how many of us have an IT/app.dev background … Not at all sure whether that helps or hinders, tho !
Yep, me too … Simple and obvious, from my personal perspective.
I’m fine with there being a History feature, because there were regular requests for DxO to provide one (esp. from users coming from other tools), so it was an appropriate marketing response, if nothing else. However, I reckon there are a lot more deserving features on which the DxO team would be better be expending time and resources.
We differ on that a bit. I probably spend much more time with the history than most other tools, the exceptions being the color wheel, the tone curve, local adjustments, and repair clone since those tools are more labor intensive. While these and other tools are obviously more important for the overall development of the final image, just in terms of time spent, most of them individually take a small fraction of the time I utilize the history list in a long editing session. So from that perspective I would like the history list to be updated with the other features that DXO committed to early on.
What about grouping the history by Tool? As order of applying different tools does not affect the output then you can see history grouped by tool. Easy to find your edits and make further changes or go back in history just for that tool.
While we are at it please only add the final result of moving a slider rather than fill up history with all values in-between. (I know who’s had been requested before!)
The history tool is based on the common undo stack used by almost all software with an undo feature. What you are suggesting would require a completely redesigned feature which is unlikely to ever happen.
And every edit is based on he actual status of the image. I still don’t believe in that the order doesn’t matter. It might as long they are the result of global multiplications.
An improvement might be to save the result of edits within the use of a tool. Now every mouseclick is registered. Playing with by example the contrast slider is mostly the result of different changes by mouseclick, arrows,slider. Just the end result will do for me.
Beside that I would like an ability to work on an image and not saving the edits. I was used to that in CaptureNx and made a lot of use of it.
When you open pl you will get that, only not as part of history but by the values of the tools. History is kept only within the life time of the program.
My reaction is, if someone can’t be bothered to make virtual copies at various stages, why would they bother to make Savepoints? Although I agree that Savepoints could be a good idea, I still feel that saving the state of the image, as you do with a virtual copy, is better than saving all the multitudinous steps that it took to get to that state. I would like to see a “create VC from here” button in the history list palette.
If i am thinking it through yes.
use the programming which is already there to use.
make some commands to bolten/backcolor/color the entry’s with a “marker of interest” so you can find a certain point faster after a 100 or more entry’s in fine tuning.
A command “make a VC named xxxx from this point”
the function is already there: Video
here i show the weakens and strenght of the present history tool.
i can backtrace and create a VC if i like. (no naming what i very much would like in VC making in general.)
So it’s already all there only some finetuning. because see my latest move,
i didn’t go back to the top and i just turned off HSL, no adjustment(in the editting manner) only off.
This is p…ing me off. imaging you are did a massive local repair and local adjustments and are reviewing your entries to see if you have got it all right. then in a impulsive moment you decide to hide a entry and make it visible again. (no adjustment in my book) poof gone are your work efforts.
Same as my good mood by the way.
Test this your self, also just hide un hide in Local adjustements list is deadly for the histogram.
That’s why i relay on VC’s most of the time as i am in a need of “go back points”
(i just copy all corrections to the master if i am re-route my endgame or delete all not good one’s and keep the right one which become the master.)
What if they create automatic a “vc of latest point” when you go back in the history to proceed an other way. (make new entries). you can easy delete this AVC if not needed and it automated a multi editting route of a image and it’s a failsafe for accidental chopping of entries of the history chain.
it’s all there, they only need to release the functionality.
That explains why it is as it is - however that doesn’t change that it appears somehow braindamaged when changing settings by mouse wheel or arrow keys…
Anyway, after having collapsed the “advanced history”, it doesn’t bother me anymore.
Being very analytical with a lot of attention to detail can be both a blessing and a curse!
