DxO, Please; layers!

Don’t forget the ostrich, lion and black eagle. All from one rhino! :face_with_spiral_eyes: :magic_wand: If that’s no magic then what is?

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The main problem DxO seems to have is the two camps of “believers” of how to design Local Adjustments.

  1. The U-Point design that insists on placing an “equaliser” on the image, at the point of “editing” - severely limiting the number of tools that can be applied to the point/area.
  2. Those who want to have something like the pipette or brush on the image but all the tools on the side palette, thus allowing any tool to be applied, but at the cost of having to switch focus between the image and the tool being adjusted.

Personally, I am all for N°2 because then we would have a far more equivalent way of working in layers like in other apps.

I get the feeling that DxO don’t know which camp to upset.

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There is not necessarily a limitation to just have the tools in menues at the side. Some uses short commands and/or makes it posdible to dock/undock whole side menues as well as pipettes and the possbility to convert such selections into real layers too. On top of that much smarter, faster and more efficient AI- driven masking tools.

… and it’s not just about Local Adjustments. It’s about Adjustments as a whole both global and local.

Just now I have never seen the development of Photolab so out of sync with the competition. It seems like the fear some people had at that time, that the focusing on the development of the Picture Library in version 5 (and 6) would demand most of DXO’s
developing resources, wasn’t all that wrong in their expectations.

It might be a good idea for DXO to reconsider to make something like others have done before and give us a substantial update between the yearly ones in October that closes this gap. Can DXO really wait a whole year to do something about this?

And at the benefit of not being distracted by a huge array of sliders and thingies :grin: I’d also love to see your version 2 become reality. But I also understand these who stick to version 1 like glue as it’s something no other app does.

One wonders why… :thinking:

Of course it’s cool to drive with a three wheel car. Although it’s not exactly a majority.

The god news is that you can both drive a three wheel Morgan and use a converter with a smarter AI-driven layer functionality than the ones limited by the U-Point layer limitations.

But that’s my point. The only reason Local Adjustments are so called is that they can be masked and, at present, have that horrendous “equaliser” getting in the way of making fine adjustments.

If all adjustments were maskable and the relevant tools were on the sidebar, then you wouldn’t have to work so differently and all adjustments could be masked, not just so called “local”.

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Thanks for sharing this video! There are a lot of things I use(d) to do in old PS with layers and manually of course.

I do hope that DxO will take notice.


@DxO_Support-Team – please pass it on

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@Joanna
It’s not just about the sidebar. At least som of the Windows-applications have a possibility to call the relevant sidebar tools via a right click on the mouse and that it’s floating so you can move it if necessary. I don’t know how it work on Mac because I don’t know if there is a possibility to right click on their mouses. Apple usually have chosen a more minimalistic approach in nany of their oroducts than Microsoft.

The problem with the “equaliser” is that it’s stuck there in the middle of the mask.

Look at the Adobe video of Camera Raw above, there are a few other ways too to control the tools besides via top or side menues without losing focus that is the real backside of using the menues.

At least, this statement make me laugh… :joy:

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Apple mices/meeces might look like they do not support complex actions but, apart from the very first (rectangular) ones, they support right and left clicking and when scroll wheels came in for Windows, Apple provided a small ball in the middle, which would scroll in any direction, not just up/down/left/right.

The latest Magic Mouse is just a single touch surface, which hides all sorts of possibilities, including all of the above and more, including multi-touch gestures.

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@Pathal

You are welcome, it’s on me.

Well in many many years Mac in my country and many other countries too had about 5% or less of the personal computer OS-market. Windows was the overwhelmingly dominating industry standard. In the industry they were at best seen as something odd and kind of a problem or a toy and I can say that after having been working as a product manager for just Microsoft products for the biggest distributor in the Nordic countries for more than 20 years.

Later in our DAM in the City Museum of Stockholm they were tolerated just for a few photographers but sometimes they created problems since they used a slightly different characterset then the rest (legacy of no unicode). The agent of the DAM did not recommend a mixed environment of those reasons. The City of Stockholm had a pretty strict Windows standard these days - at least until 2016 when I left the place.

Everywhere where I have worked since the nineties there has been strictly Windows. Still today in many branches in the industry there are few or none business applications running on Macs (I mean Mac OS). There are many many computer users who never uses a Mac in their entire lives. You have to understand that you are the exception here and not I or they :slight_smile: … but glad to have given you an opportunity to laugh in these terribly sad days :slight_smile:

An Apple Magic Mouse as Joanne describes it might probably keep many Windows users from laughing, because the Windows-mouse interface is a very important interface especially in some of the new layer functions of the more advanced photo applications these days. Apples one button interfaces has never appealed to me. Even I had once an I-Pod and the City of Stockholm gave me an Iphone too but I have never liked that gimmick like one button interfaces. I guess that’s why I have had Samsung Phones the last 10 + years.

But, as I explained, Apple’s Magic Mouse has two buttons: left and right. It’s just that they are hidden under a monocoque top. There is no need for a scroll wheel because the entire top of the mouse is a scrollable area, which can detect finger movement (both single and multiple) in all directions.

And I gather some enterprising folks have actually written a Windows driver for the Magic Mouse

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With only 17 parameters to set up and define battery low level and bluetooth channels and … @Stenis, I regularly change my work environment from Win 10 to Mac OS 12. There are far too much little details were Mac users need to do less to get quicker and better results, or at least half the amount of mouse clicks I need on a PC.

Simple example: I’m searching for a PSD file, Photoshop is started but it’s easier to use Explorer or SpeedCommander. Find the file. In MacOS Finder, I just need to click “Open” in PS and drag the file onto the open button. In Windows, I need to navigate to the drive, folder, subfolder, clickclickclickclickclick, endless. Yes, it’s only few seconds of clicks more, but during the day they add quickly to half an hour. Or saving a document in a recent used folder - nightmare on windows, one click on Mac OS.

It’s worth mentioning the advantages when the OS manufacturer has rules for interface design and interaction between apps and apps have to obeye them. On Windows, everybody can gameboy-programming an app and use his (mainly males are this kind of stupid) crude idea of user interaction.

You’d be very surprised how much easier life in front of a screen can be. But on the other side: why changing habbits or convictions after retirement?

You don’t need to convince me about some stupidities in Windows and they never seems to go away. The most interesting is some lack of intuitivity when it comes to such an important thing as just turning of the computer. That is astonishing from a usability standpoint. A long time we had to klick “Start” first in order to “Stop”. As an old teacher I have never understoid the logics in that.

… but what I focused on was Joannas writings about the alternatives to the U-Point interface was mainly top or side menues/control panels. I think the mouse interfaces are very important when it comes to an effective use of the layer tools of for example Capture One and what it also looked being the case with the new Camera Raw. A right click in CO always gives you the relevant tools in a popup and the mouse is even used to change the size of the selected brushes. It’s good even Mac users can chose a differnt mouse than the one button gimmick they had during many many years.

IF a user will rely on a simplistic one button mouse interface there are ways around a limitation like that but that used to be solved with combination of a mouse action + one or more simultaneusly pressed buttons and that has always a cost ergonomically with solutions like that.

Once there was Windows standard and it was pretty strictly followed by almost all but Lotus and WordPerfect. Both these fomer giants ported their applications from OS/2 and did not bother about that their mark and apply was completely opposit to what was the Windows-standard. WordPerfect had even their own printer driver system. The menues always came in the same order with File, Edit …and Window I think and Help to the right and between the manufacturers could place their proprietary menues.

In the menues there were even the use of “…” three dots to mark that there was submenues.

…BUT it was Microsoft themselves who definitely destroyed it when they changed the interface completely when introducing the banner interface and their wizard system. The reason was that the applications had become so overloaded with complex functions that they had to be redesigned. The situation reminds a little about when the MS-DOS character based applications like WordPerfect reached the end of the road.

Then in the beginning of the ninities some actions in WP or Word for DOS for that matter had to be carried out to press three buttons simultaneously. Both WP, Word and the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 came with function key templates that we could place around the function keys, because no one could remember them all by heart.

Please, not layers. The layer approach of PS and Gimp and others is at odds with PL being a raw developer, and not a comprehensive photo editor.

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Aha.

And what is the current stack of local adjustments and repair tools else than layers? I believe your idea of a photo editor might need some updates :grin: Or do you think, geometrical changes, local adjustments and a tiny start for a DAM are part of an “only raw developer”.

I think that many of us have overlooked a difference between converters like Photolab, Capture One and Lightroom when it comes to usability and ergonomics.

I was a long time user of Lightroom, since version 1.0 and I happened to buy a set of presets from SLR Lounge that I came to love and when I started to use it and the Local Adjustment in version 4 and later 5 I realized that even Lightroom actually had layers - it was just that there was no layer management interface just a possibility to add cummulative layers automatically each time you opened the Local tools. SLR Lounge added even a set of very usable special local adjustment brushes for retoch of for example cloth texture, hair eyes etc. that helped me a lot with portrait retouch. With that plugin I rarely needed any more sofisticated editors.

The really smart thing Adobe did was abolish the treshold for using layers and Adobe did it so clever that we didn’t even noticed they existed. Compared to Capture One that really had and still have a substantial treshold it’s virtually non existent. I think that has been a key factor to establish Lightroom as an industry standard.

Extensive layer support like in Capture One is very nice if you have the skills to use it but it comes with a cost too. I found that I got less efficient than with Photolab that didn’t and doesn’t have the same sofisticated layersystem like CO have, but the new thing now with more and more smart AI-driven tools is that these are beginning to even out these differences.

You can group several Local Adjustments so that one set of tweaks applies to all points. Or have I misunderstood what you’re after?

Hi Steve,
just saw your question coming in.

At present, one can neither group nor move anything in the local adjustment tab.

One can ‘group’ adjustments with a local adjustment tool to then be saved in one ‘layer’ – but that’s something completely different.
Wolfgang

I think a lot of people are confusing the list of local apartments in the palette as layers.

They are NOT layers but just simply a list of adjustments that can be selected, turned on/off, inverted and deleted.

As with all PL adjustments, they will be applied in a pre-determined order when you export your photo.

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