Wow, are these “tools” built into PL4 ? Is there a write-up someplace of how to find, and use, the tools you show? I had no idea PL4 could do this - or were you using a different program to analyze?
I would like to follow along, but I have no idea yet how to do so…
Simple answer, I originally ingested the images using PhotoMechanic Plus, and thought this particular image was the best one to start editing with. I applied the two-star rating in PhotoMechanic, to mark the image as my pick. I then copied the image to a new folder in my PhotoLab image tree, then started PL4. The image still had the two-star rating, which I expected.
That should answer your question, but unless/until PL4 accepts star ratings from other software, I guess I should not do any ratings until the images are opened in PL4. Sounds like a “bug” to me.
Another question - I never heard of ExifTool before now. I just found it - https://exiftool.org Fascinating, maybe I can open up the EXIF data in my Leica M8.2 images, and change it to M10 ? Maybe that will trick PL4 into opening the image?
Back to your post, should one of us post this as a “bug report” somewhere, that PhotoMechanic ratings don’t work properly with PL4 ? PhotoMechanic ratings are supposed to be compatible with Lightroom, so maybe the same problem would occur were I to import a Lightroom photo into PL4.
No, it’s Fast Raw Viewer. And it fit’s right in front of PLv4. If it’s ment to be.
I use it always to check and culling. Use rating for my favorites of a bunch.
That shadow lift is a click on click off. (if you would like the HDR look of it which i know you don’t.
then it’s a very nice version.)
Gee, while I don’t get excited about images like this (reminds me of the millions of filters people download, which I never use), you clearly showed me detail in this image that I had no idea was even there. The island, the water, everything - amazing!
All those filters (to me) are a waste, they just exaggerate things in one way or another, but whatever you did, and however you did it, it is just honestly showing all the detail the camera captured. Your image shows an antenna or something on top of a building towards the right, that I never noticed before. I’ve been looking at that rooftop with my binoculars, and I have no idea what is showing up in your image. Bizarre. There is an antenna there, but nothing like what your version of the image shows. I’ll try to figure this out later.
! image|690x459Where or how do I get “Fast Raw Viewer”? It’s not in the App Store.
Oops, found it: https://www.fastrawviewer.com/purchase
It’s only $15, which is reasonable.
I think I should wait a while before buying it though, so I can better learn PL4.
It is not overlapping PL4’s toolset.
it’s have some real advantage’s in culling.
creates XMP file four me, you use photomechanic.
detail red, edge detection, green usm Unsharpmasking, all great find the sharp infocus bits in the rawfile.
when you set in preferences your camera’s Dynamic Range of the sensor the Shadow and highlight button shows exact what’s possible in shadow raising or what recoverable in highlight section.
histogram is the raw version not the colorspace of srgb or adobergb so it shows the real exposure channels and the underexpose and overexpose % which you can check with exposureslider to do a ETTR or ETTL and then you know the window the raw file has for exposure adjustment for every channel separate RGB .(camera colorspace!)
As i wrote if DxO use FRV as a plugin a tech checktool it would be great. it works really fine together.
No need to invent the wheel again. 
and as you say it’s a reasonal pricetag. 
Purchased, downloaded, and about to install. I got this error message from PL4:
What, if anything, do I need to do about this?
Is this Mac?
Didn’t have any of this problem when i installed FRV.
Win10.
What does FAQ say?
I think I can ignore it - I don’t have two drives from the same manufacturer, and everything except my video files get stored on the system drive.
I just started watching their information videos. Wow. I am very impressed. Thanks for suggesting this.
Hey Mike,
Photojournalism can be a noble and sometimes dangerous profession. If I was a photojournalist I most likely would be shooting jpeg rather than raw and would distribute my images without additional edits, or at most I would shoot raw and and make minimal changes to white balance, contrast and sharpening in Canon’s free raw editor Digital Photo Professional (DPP). I might even adjust the exposure a bit and use the shadows slider if detail I could see with my own eyes was lost in the shadows. But that would be all…
However, I am not a photojournalist and therefore I am not constrained by any rules other than those I make for myself. My one rule is that I add nothing to an image that the camera did not capture. That means I don’t make composite images. I don’t add or replace objects in my images. I don’t replace a featureless sky with a more exciting stock one or a even a sky that I captured myself. Other than that, there are no rules.
While I will not add anything to an image I have no problem removing visual distractions such as a power line crossing over an image or a distracting tall transmitting tower in the background of an otherwise pristine and bucolic landscape. My processed images are often geared more towards emotion and telling a story rather then an absolute adherence to recording a scene exactly as I think I saw it. I try to create a mood and look that is pleasing to the eye and which highlights what I believe are the most important elements of an image. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don’t. .
This image was captured in Randolph Vermont. The first version was as the camera saw it and is probably a little closer to what I actually saw that day than the second version But, the second version which I created at home a week later reflects how I wanted to see it. Assuming you like the image, which version would you want to hang on your wall?
.
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Trying to figure out how to use PhotoMechanic Plus, along with FRV, along with PL4.
…at least that’s the plan for now.
Sounds ok.
I use this workflow because i need xmp files for keyword,tags.
1 my camera app to import files from sd. (can do more but i close after import.) then all double oocjpegs in subfolder which i sometime use as “reference”.
2 cull images with FRV, give starrating which DxOPL can read. XMP is made then.
3 until DxOPL can write keywords in XMP i use adobe Bridge to tag ,keywording and such.(xmp file is updated or created.)
4 then is it ready to open in DxOPL.
5 if need extra tech knowledge, reopen FRV on that file and take note’s of what i needed to know. Because rawfile is untouched it doesn’t matter to open file in both.
6 if needed to change a tag or key word i reopen Bridge and change, and update folder in DxOPL to update xmp data. As long as you don’t change filename it’s ok.
7 if i have doubts of how i proceed i use master and VC’s and make an VC from a general point which i see as base. So i don’t need to run back and forward on the historylist when i don’t like the result compared to say VC2.just starrate vc2 and proceed. Could change my mind so VC1 is not deleted yet.
8 if i need extra view in detail, all sharpening, CA, denoising is better viewed in exported jpeg i export with suffix named as “40 denoise” or “20 clv 25sl” in a folder named Test. Then i use Faststone image viewer to compare side by side to see which would be my pick. (dxo can be still active.)
Note FSIV is also usable to generic render rawfiles for side by side viewing as culling tool.
9 all marked green dot are ready for export in a shotdate, event named folder. Suffix is eventname.
10 rawfilesfolder, cleanup folder in DxO filmstrip of rejected images not exported VC’s.
Copy dopfiles in a internal subfolder as backup.
11 move folder to rawfile archive. (delete oocjpegs which i don’t need anymore.)
It looks a bit of a hassle but it’s all non application (except dopfiles 
) depended.
And it’s easy adopted by new applications or it’s easy to cut Applications out this workflow if they are obsolete.
Like when DxO can handle reading writing in XMP hierarchies keywording and IPTC editing fully independed of the Database, adobe bridge can be cut out.
If DxO offers side by side view fully rendered, FSIV isn’t need to use for that anymore and can be cut out my workflow.
If DxO has the tools working like FRV offers and is as quick as FRV is well, an other knip.
You have photomechanic i don’t know which that covers of my sub applications.
Damnnmm! Forgot about that, i use the smart Auto White Balance of Silkypix mostly for when dxo’s WB mishit of what i want.
I shal see if FRV is just as acruate. 
Gee, I can’t find anything different between the image you posted, and what I remember seeing (and not seeing) last night!!! But for one small thing (thanks to you guys!!! …and gals) I would say this is “finished”. That one small thing is that I can’t see the details that others have brought out, and now that I realize that they’re in the photo, somewhere, I miss them. For my original goal, wearing my “photojournalist hat”, this is perfect. But I’m sitting here wondering which is better to show to the world as my “photo”.
Next time I won’t use “exposure+2”; I’ll try to calculate the appropriate exposure, and then bracket. I thought I knew how to bracket last night, but it wasn’t doing what I expected. Now I can set it to 5 images, 1 or 2 stops apart, corrected in the shutter speed.
There’s a saying “Be careful what you wish for, as you might get it.” Maybe I need to switch hats from now on - this image has me re-evaluating what I’m trying to accomplish. If I take a photo when things are dark, that is “natural”. But if I put a flash on the camera, that’s still accepted as “natural”. I think I’ve been wrong about this. Lightening up an image to show more details still produces a “photograph”, not a “photo illustration” (unless I go crazy with burning and dodging, and even that is considered acceptable.
I think you’ve all taught me a lesson here, and the above photo proves it. It’s exactly what I thought I wanted.
Having said that, I’d like to be able to do what you did, when I really want something to look like what I saw. PL4 Optical corrections, Deep PRIME, -100 highlights in selective tone …why Photoshop???..Nik for detail extractor, and adjusting white and black points. Can’t PL4 do the same, along with an adjustment in Nik?
PL4 reads Ratings that have been written by other software, but doesn’t write changes in Rating back to the image file or the XMP sidecar file. That topic has been the subject of a lot of discussion here. Personally, I don’t use the metadata features of PL4 at all, depending instead on a stand-alone digital asset management program (the Windows-only IMatch https://www.photools.com/). Metadata management is a very deep and complicated issue made more so by camera companies and others who insist on proprietary techniques…
ExifTool is indeed very powerful and provides a very deep look into the metadata that’s generated by many different camera makers and camera models. It’s possible you can ‘trick’ PL4 into thinking your M8.2 is an M10, but it’s likely to be quite complicated and depends very much on how camera names are stored by your camera maker in so-called maker notes. Only try this on copies of the image file!
Based on what I learned from the previous night-time shot, I wondered if I could get a decent photo of the Port of Miami cranes that load/unload the container ships. This was to be late at night. I found by trial and error what seemed to be a reasonable exposure, and then set my Leica up for bracketing - five images total, with each being two stops from the next.
So, I’ve got five images to upload, and I suspect the middle image might be the best one to start with.
I’m no longer thinking that the final photo should be the same as what I saw, as once again, I didn’t see very much. By looking at the image that is greatly overexposed, I see that there are lots of things there that might look great in the image, regardless of my not seeing them when I took the photo.
As for taking, they were all done on a tripod, no exposure correction. I set up the camera to take 5 images, one at my guess for the best starting point, and then +/- 2 stops, and +/- 4 stops.
I’ll see what I can do as well, but considering it’s almost midnight here, I’ll do this tomorrow.
I also did a screen capture of the middle exposure - will upload that as well.
L1001736 | 2020-12-05 | Miami Container Cranes.dng (15.6 MB)
L1001737 | 2020-12-05 | Miami Container Cranes.dng (18.0 MB)
L1001738 | 2020-12-05 | Miami Container Cranes.dng (20.7 MB)
L1001739 | 2020-12-05 | Miami Container Cranes.dng (24.0 MB)
L1001740 | 2020-12-05 | Miami Container Cranes.dng (27.3 MB)
I have a similar workflow:
Aha! a crack in the armour of the “pure” photographer 
And it is all down to what Ansel Adams called visualisation, where, essentially, he worked out in his mind what he wanted the image to convey and then worked out in practice what it would take in terms of exposure and development to realise that “vision”. Something that involves far more emotion than just pure record photography 
If by trial and error you mean assessing the exposure on the back of the camera, then you need to remember that you are looking at a jpeg image that is a “best guess” of what the RAW could look like, made by the camera.
Once again, I can’t emphasise how useful it is to know the dynamic range of your camera and to try to avoid over-exposure at all costs. The problem with this type of shot is that you almost bound to get over-exposure on the actual points of light (similar to trying to meter the sun 
)
Personally, I would have spot-metered the lit wedge-shaped building on the right and placed it as 2 stops over-exposed.
To completely avoid blown highlights, I found 1737 was fine but you might have been able to add 1 stop to that. What are known as specular highlights, such as points of light or bright reflections are “allowed”
Interestingly, if you use FastRawViewer, you will see that it is almost impossible to achieve blocked shadows - even the lowest exposure only shows a few dots here and there. In fact, if you had exposed in 1 stop increments, you would find that halfway between 1738 and 1739 seems to be about the sweet spot between not enough shadow detail and too much noise.
It would be very interesting to see what result you get by spot metering the brightest part at +2, which should be at the limit of your sensor.
DxOMark shows your sensor as having 13 stops of dynamic range at 100 ISO, so I would expect you to be able to place highlights at around +2 without too much problem, leaving the shadows to fall anywhere around -11 stops, which is pretty dark, and still recover details.
Oh, and my attempt at “perfection”, based on 1738
L1001738 | 2020-12-05 | Miami Container Cranes.dng.dop (11,4 Ko)
