A couple of weeks ago I discovered a bug in the integration of Photomechanic Plus and Photolab 4. I was surprised some one hadn’t complained earlier since the “Edit”-function is a real key-function when it comes to seamlessly transfer selected images in Photomechanic to Photolab. The “Edit”-function was only able to export one image at the time no matter how many images I had selected for export to Photolab 4 for editing.
Since Camera Bits has one of the most responsive support organisations in the industry, it didn’t take long before we had a test build ready for downloading and testing. So now we have a corrected version available that works as I expected it to work from the beginning. Kirk Baker who is the head engineer has also promised that this fix from now on will be present in all the new releases in the future.
Below you can follow the discussions we had and there is also a discussion about the best practises around the integration and work flow. One thing that Kirk stressed was that it’s a good idea to use Photomechnaic as the mastersystem when it comes to metadata maintenance. You will see all data in the fields Photolab has the possibility to display without any manual “import” and Photolab has no problem exporting this XMP-data to for example JPEGS correctly. Photomechanic is also able to export both the image-rawfiles together with the sidecar-XMP and also the Photolab DOP-files, so we don’t risk any splits of the complete filesets.
If you want to try the fix be sure to have both Photolab and Photomechanic opened. This fix will work both with DxO Photolab 4 and DxO PureRaw. Just select the images you want to transfer, right click your mouse (Windows) and select “Edit” and all the selected images will appear in the filmstrip with the first one opened for editing in Photolab.