Masks that change with geometric adjustments

Hello,

I really like the new local adjustments but they don’t follow rotation or perspective corrections, and that’s more than annoying, especially, if you don’t know about this.

Attached you will see what I mean. I masked the big chain in the foreground but upon rotating the image (just as an example, it’s the same for other geometric changes) the mask is not congruent with the formerly masked object any longer.
This behavior limits your own work flow a lot. In addition, I would like to change the color of the masks, sometimes the contrast to the picture background is not very good with the blue one.

IMO this is an error, not a missing feature

2 Likes

Hello,

No, it’s not an error but the expected behavior for now. It’s supposed you first do the global geometry corrections and then apply the Local ones.

So it’s a feature request and if the suggestion will get a good number of votes, we’ll take it for the analysis.

Thank you
Regards,
Svetlana G.

Hello,
I also ran into this problem. After having done all (read: ALL) corrections and having spent some time on drawing the perfect mask for an object, I noticed that the whole image was not exactly horizontal. It was below 1°, but the effect on the masked object was horrible. After that, I always check H/V aligment first.

As this happens way too easy, I support this request.
(Even if I acknowledge your current approach and its limitations.)

Regards, Tilmann

3 Likes

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I always perform perspective changes very early on in my process flow and well before I apply any local adjustments. While I appreciate the frustration this may have caused for some people, making sure that perspective, distortion, and image rotation modifications are applied before applying local masks seems like a fairly minor change to one’s workflow.

I agree one has not to change one’s workflow a lot, and normally, I also correct perspective and so on early in the process, but sometimes you want to optimize things, that’s fairly common. And in these cases even slight perspective changes make the set masks useless and deliver strange effects in the photo.
I just don’t want to be forced by DxO PhotoLab to do the whole masking process again when I suddenly feel I could tweak the perspective just a bit.

Well, it may be easily expected by the developers, but consider this from the user’s point of view.

Until now, I thought I can apply any setting in any order.

Are there other settings to be applied in a certain sequence?

Where Is the required order documented?

Oliver

3 Likes

BTW: The repair tool uses also a mask, and this mask is rotated, IOW it can be applied before or after rotation.

I don’t see why local corrections should do different.

Oliver

2 Likes

Is it possible to select a repaired spot and move it away or change its size, like it is possible with local adjustments?

The difficulty I see is, that if you apply global transformations on local adjustment vertices, they could be moved into each other, so that one local adjustment point covers the other and it is not possible to select the covered one. To make this work, one would need new functionality to select and move these covered adjustment points.

In addition, if you apply global transformations to local adjustments, the local adjustments change their shape. So a U-point circle is projected as tilted oval and must be adjusted in ‘3D’ with the global transformation in mind, while others remain 2D, because they were created after the last global transformation was applied.

All this can cause certain complications.

since I have no ViewPoint license, I’m writing only about rotation, no perspective correction.

Yes, but problems have to be solved in general. The worst case is the important one, because no one will write code to handle special cases, where the tool behaves differently in dependency of the currently applied global transformation. If you would buy ViewPoint next month, you would expect it to work with every perspective. This includes the rotation around all three axes and also for tilt and flip.

i can’t vote but yes, it would be a good thing that the mask is pinned on the spot and that this layer is also adjusted in shape and size when the image is shifted in shape and size.
it is easy to forget something and a readjust for final view can ruïn you local correction efforts.

Repair masks are handled by perspective corrections: You can draw them before or afterwards and they are transformed in both directions.

They can be selected and deleted in any state.

Therefore the coordinates of “Local Corrections” should be transformed the same way as repair masks are.

I don’t think that this is a much bigger deal as with repair masks.

“Oval U-Points” would make a difference only for massive perspective transformations, since they don’t represent sharp circles at all. Transforming just the center is an acceptable method IMO.

Still unresolved in Photolab 2.1.0:

The repair mask is rotated, but the “local correction” mask not.

Oliver

Unfortunately, despite all the improvements with local adjustments in PL3, this hasn’t changed. :frowning:

True, but once you’re aware of the limitation it’s easy enough to work around it. Just make sure that you don’t do your local adjustments until after you’ve taken care of geometry adjustments. .

Mark

4 Likes

What is the point of naming this trivial workaround already mentioned above?

It’s bad that DxO doesn’t fix a known bug.

If anyone dislikes to call it a “bug”: At least it is a discrepancy as shown above: Repair masks are handled by perspective corrections.

And it is an annoyance. You should not impose unnecessary restrictions (here: order of processing steps) on your users.