Please don’t shoot the messenger. Jim Nix revered to the new Control Lines as awesome and I think they are great. However, DXO’s marketing of the new feature could have been better and the simple addition of a “filled” mask option, the equivalent of setting a control line passed the image boundaries (what a kludge), would have made them even better for very little coding time.
Jim’s point was that he reviews all the software titles, expectations of a new version are high and metadata and Fuji, although important are niche, filling in holes in Photolab, but not providing much meat in the new version. Had Photolab implemented pano and hdr the review would have been an upgrade for sure.
I want DXO to flourish but you can’t exist in your own “bubble” without understanding what your competition are doing. Where DXO go in V6 will be critical and I think they must be seen to be meeting market expectations. I might not like the direction, I use dedicated software for pano/hdr, but DXO is not just for me. So yes DXO need to plug some long standing deficiencies as you gave example and this should be done in point updates of V5, but they also need to go where the market expects.
I have said before that DXO should fold ViewPoint and FilmPack into Photolab to make Photolab stronger. I personally don’t think DXO have a viable business model without Photolab and they should recognise this and double down on making it the best product available. Add-on sales were the right strategy 5+ years ago but in business change happens, adapt or…
I don’t know what is a DAM but as a Fuji user, i’m glad that X-Trans was (at last) considered for PL5.
Now, I would love to have a focus / pano / HDR option. The best would be like VP or FM, stand alone products which can be integrated seamlessly in PholoLab. Plug in are maybe cool but having an integrated workflow is much better.
There has been no feedback on that functionality, but I doubt that those features are even being considered in their current plans. Both of those features would require a significant redesign of the browser functionality.
In the streaming 2 or 3 days ago, they said they are working on some of those tools (don’t remember which one(s)) but they are not yet happy with their result because they don’t want to deliver a product not as good as what already exists.
They didn’t say if this will appear soon or not (it seemed to be not soon).
They also told that HDR is now beyond current possibilities of photolab, because of the precision needed (HDR needs to use floating point precision numbers and photolab isn’t coded like this). They didn’t tell if they are looking at this now.
m-photo
( Marc (macOS Sonoma on MBP16" Intel))
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Where did you hear this ? I mean what do you mean with « in the streaming » ?
I have already asked for panorama stitching for three years (Panorama Stitching).
I am currently using Autopano which a great software but a dead software killed by Gopro.
Some suggestions to answer to other comments :
this year new features are a little limited ; I sustain “His advance on optical corrections or noise management may no longer suffice.”
many stitching software are based upon free software libraries ; why not DxO ?
DxO could buy Autopano code to Gopro, AP user interface was great
stitching from RAW was available in Autopano : is it interesting to work from RAW source, it is possible ?
I feel that pano stitching, HDR and focus stacking have common operating modes ; that would have sense to work on the three subjects ; marketing consideration would could spread the output over several years (stitching first of course !)