Features/improvments I'd like to see in PL

@mikemyers and @rrblint, for more about Temperature and Tint, check out this post:

Summary: While Color Temp adjusts the White Balance along the Blue-Amber axis and the Tint adjusts the WB along the Green-Magenta axis at “normal” temperatures, but these axes change with temperature.

You can easily verify it, if you set Temp to extreme values. The tint slider will have different effects then.

The advantage of using ExifTool over a regular hex editor is that ExifTool understands and makes available many Maker Notes. This is due to ongoing work by Phil and an army of volunteers.

Of course, this would be unnecessary if manufacturers didn’t think they have a competitive advantage by encrypting this information…

2 Likes

More importantly, a hex editor doesn’t give you any idea of which tags you are touching and which and how many characters are valid :sunglasses:

…which is no problem in our example case with the M8 files. Using a hex editor provides an unaltered view on the file’s content, while exiftool proposes an interpretation which can a) help to understand the tags, but could also b) deliver a faulty value because of the reverse engineering involved.

Nevertheless, info can be stored in clear text or in the encrypted sections - and exiftool will help to find the occurrences in those “private” parts…which leads us to another discussion: Why would manufacturers encrypt metadata, if it can be decrypted so effortlessly (from a user point of view)?

…you could file this as a bug or as a malicious attempt to get more money out of less features :wink:
(we’ve seen this lazy trick with perspective tools moving to ViewPoint…)

Well, apparently…

…which means that there is a >3 year gap between what is shown in supported gear and reality…

1 Like

One can but hope that DxO are as good as their word.

Here’s a D100 shot from 2005 that shows, with a quick model tweak, conversion to DNG and the loving care of PL5 (minimal edits), just how good an old 6Mpx RAW file can look…

4 Likes

Hi,
made in Berlin 2005 with a Canon Ixus 400, my first digital camera.
Only JPEG, but also 6 MPix

That is indeed a really good question. But it seems that they prefer any and all ways that help lock users into their proprietary world(s). I suspect, though, if they did a rigorous cost-benefit analysis they’d find it wasn’t worth the trouble and expense of doing business this way (as opposed to letting information go free).

1 Like

Indeed, if you import your images into LR from an existing HD directory it does not move your images, but if you import your images from a card reader off your SD card directly into LR it will automatically create a catalog and place those images as I mentioned in my post, deep within LR install on your program disk. Anytime you create a catalog without manually designating it’s location, the default action will put that catalog in the LR program installation. Finding them later without using LR is very cumbersome. The “Photos” program on Macs does the same thing. Although LR does not move your original images, it does store the images you worked on within the catalog deep within LR file structure.

“deep within the Lr file structure” is not what I see on my Mac.

When I use Lightroom to copy files from the card to my computer, I define the location of the new files. This location is completely independent of the folder surrounding Lightroom’s catalog or preview files. Previews are just that, previews, they are created as needed and can be deleted anytime. Lightroom will recreate the files when this is necessary/when I work an image.

If LR allows the same line it’s old and now irrelevant competitor Aperture does, both options are possible. Storing images outside or inside the database structure.

Aha, and using DxO edits without DxO is easier? Actually, it’s rather easy to move images from inside the package to the “normal” finder structure. But some prejudices stick around long after the apps are gone…

Thanks for pointing this out, Mark … It’s made obvious in the slider scale; but I’d not really “clocked” that before.
image

John M

1 Like

May I ask you to remind me, Joanna - What’s the benefit of intermediate conversion of RAW to DNG ? … and when is it best to take that approach ?

John M

I would say that, mostly, it’s useful when you have a noisy image that you want to work on without having to see the noise right until you finish editing, when the DeepPRIME usually gets applied. Exporting a lens corrections and NR only version to DNG gives you the next best thing to a RAW image, with all the RAW adjustments you might need but with a clean full sized preview.

2 Likes

An intermediate DNG is a copy that you can hack, if you want to change the camera model in order to make DPL process an image from an unsupported camera, all while keeping the original RAW file alone.

Using a DNG also “standardises” metadata if you always use the same DNG converter. This might make hacking metadata easier than having to handle stuff from different camera brands and models.

1 Like

Ah yes - hacking… :crazy_face:

Among other reasons, many older cameras didn’t support lossless compression of raw data. DNG conversion allows for applying such compression, cutting file size nearly in half. I’m not sure what Adobe uses under the hood (LZW, ZIP, etc.), but it’s not a lossy compression like JPEG. All the original information is retained, it’s just represented in a more compact form.

Presumably, PL users would always use PL’s Export to DNG process - - No ?

John