Photolab 2.1

Sorry you have not convinced me and you never will. Selling something that just does not work is…well I have already said it. So I have now unsubscribed from this thread as it really does not matter to me what those who are in the industry think any more than it matters to them what I think. Time will telI and I reckon that it will not be too long before something is done to reign in companies selling stuff that cannot actually perform as advertised.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything. That is an impossible task and it’s not my job to educate you, although I hope you now have a greater appreciation of the complexities involved. I did, however, find your comment insulting after a lifetime of involvement in software development, and felt the need to respond. It appears unlikely you will every be fully content with what will always be a less than perfect software development process. You may just be what would be considered a difficult customer who will never be happy with less than your expectation of perfection, although I hope that’s not the case.

Mark

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In the case of the release of “Luminar3” aka Luminar2019, I agree with ColinG.
The company has been hyping that “Luminar3” would have a DAM, bug fixes and MAC parity. The promise to the purchaser was to purchase “Luminar 2018” now (November) and get the updated version on December 18 with improvements, fixes and their DAM for free and all updates through 2019 for free. By December 19, after the initial release, it was apparent that the software failed to install, the DAM crashed computers, the DAM catalog system failed after one use, etc etc. People on the Windows and MAC community boards are furious and demanding refund instructions on the community boards. On December 21, the support team acknowledges there are some minor troubles and ask users to post their issues in the community board. Effectively making paid users beta testers. The promise now is that an update will be issued before 12/31 for some of the “minor” troubles (v 3.01) but another update will come out end of January or early February to address other issues, possibly passed the refund time frame. I would classify all that as possible criminal or at least deceptive advertising. The software is not in working order for many.
Take a look for yourself at only the Windows community and keep in mind that the MAC community is not happy either.
https://community.skylum.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360000143112-Luminar-for-Windows

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None of that makes it criminal, which has to do with committing an unlawful act. That is what I was responding to. And apparently not everyone is affected despite the number of complaints. I know this because on a different forum a number of people were pleased with the new version. Additionally, here is a short review by TechRadar in Britain, which gives the latest version 4 stars.

I am not a fan of Luminar and frankly never liked what it did and how it did it. My software of preference is PhotoLab Elite. If I understood him correctly, I believe Colin in earlier posts has been implying that there should be legally enforced industry standards for software development to avoid bugs and serious functional issues. The assumption that it is possible to do that indicates a lack of understanding regarding the software development process.

What could be in place are regulations to ensure refunds or other damages for software that fails to work properly or as advertised. However, the suggestion that buggy consumer software is a crime is just silly, and the creation of legally mandated development standards is not a practical reality and will likely never be until software developers are replaced by AI. Even that will not guaranty bug free software.

Mark

I see Nikon Z7 now supported but I see only the 24-70S/f4 lens supported as well! Neither the 35S/f1.8 nor the 50S/f1.8 are recognized!
When do you believe will those be added?

You might find related information in here: https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/sections/360002221511-Module-FAQs

The area seems to be under construction. I get a loot of OOPS and COMING SOON when I click the respective links

Mark, I had decided not to bother replying to the thread because sometimes ignorance will not give way and it is clear that ColinG is not prepared to appreciate the realities of the world he lives in. However, for anybody else that is interested then Mark is completely correct. I am a developer by training but for many years I have earned my money by being regarded as a an expert in the global software market. In my experience people do not appreciate that the ‘humble’ PC is unprecedented in that a so called ‘commodity’ product is so extensively configurable to be able to achieve many diverse capabilities. What other commodity can? It is subject to extremely short life-cycles requiring continual renewal, and the cost of testing software exceeds the cost of development. For a retail package such as PL which operates in a relatively small market, to genuinely achieve the levels of new functionality and robustness demanded within this forum it would require the purchase price to be a minimum of TEN times, and more like THIRTY times, what is is now. I wish the user community understood that we have all made a decision to buy into an excellent fringe product that will only grow market share if we get behind it, and we have not chosen to buy the assurance of established market ‘gorilla’ such as Adobe. Some of the language on here is outrageously over-the-top. Some of the analogies are amazingly ignorant (comparing software to a car - seriously? I don’t expect a car I buy to receive quarterly upgrades on the latest engine, fuel management, driver interfaces, sat-nav etc.). So I feel frustrated by the unreasonable level of noise about some user expectations, whilst I am also hugely impressed by some of the technical knowledge shown by others. I think I’ll just focus on the latter in future. Rant over.

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Wait for it and

is become your present day.

This is a strange thing: The inbuild sat-nav is a bit overdue. atleast overhere.
it’s a option for some hundered euro’s and the maps needs to be accurate in the never ending changing roads as new or in max speed or direction. And my mobilephone or a 150 euro navkit has traffic and “livetime” map update.
I have lease car with inbuild satnav (got it as a package of a bunch) and i can update the system myself downloading from the manufacturers website and do some things(legal). But if you can’t do it yourself the garage can do it for you. (for a cost ofcaorse)
Most satnav’s in cars you can update til the second year. then you have to pay extra. so no one is using that anymore and uses his mobile G…maps.
The only way this incar system is surviving is when the maps are updated by “home-wifi”/ 4g or every service moment. or as some cars already do just second screen the mobile phone so using G…maps. long live harvesting data! If you don’t want this buy a paper roadmap and old car of before 1990.
And i think this is the split we are in. We want that “freedom” and longer livetime of the old systems and on the other hand the convenience of a self updating learning system to help us around.
(we even forget that because of the modern software the car is calculating its next maintenance check depending on your drivingstyle and km/day. and in 1990 you needed every 10.000 km a maintenance now its 30.000/40.000 km) My car has giro’s and G-chips which knows i brake hard wile turning a corner and it “prepairs it self for impact” wile braking as hard as it can for you and keep the movability of direction alive even on four different surfaces. modern cars are helping you more then you think and i know they upgrade firmware when its command by manufacturer.
See the Tesla; it’s sees a emergency brake in front of you before you do, but that old truck behind him not. so your front will be fine but the back? :yum:
So if you want it or not that car is becoming a self driving hollow (place you sit) computer on wheels!
:joy:

sorry coulden’t resist… :wink:

Wait for what exactly? If you read my post I was saying the comparison to software and a car is wrong - not software IN a car. When I wrote sat-nav I was referring to the hardware. Everywhere else I was referring to the mechanics or physical parts of the car. My point is that I do not expect quarterly updates of the physical parts of a car. Maybe I could have been clearer, but given one side of my example was software, then the other side can’t be. In order to get the benefit of the new technologies in a car, you normally have to pay, and normally it’s a complete replacement. So the purchasers experience with a car (a commodity) is accepted as different to software (which is not really a commodity). Anyway, thanks for your good humoured reply. :slight_smile:

Actually perhaps comparing it to a car is somewhat valid as both are highly technical products which contains significant numbers of unresolved bugs. The main difference is that unresolved bugs in a car can kill you. But, we are in complete agreement other than that. The issue though is that the consumer doesn’t need to know the complexities of software design, merely that it is complex and far from error free, and that in order to make any software package more bug free than it may currently be would be prohibitively expensive.

Mark

LOL.

This latest upgrade was sold entirely on the basis of upcoming functionality. But if you enjoy plugging your ears and listening only to the guy waving around his big expert…opinions, have fun.

I don’t think any of us were happy about that. I started this thread and complained about the lack of functionality from the beginning. The current conversation though is unrelated to that and was in regards to earlier comments by Colin about bug mitigation in not only current and future versions of a vendors software, but in past versions as well and included a number of comments, arguments, and suggestions by him regarding how software should be supported and a call for legal standards for software development. As a retired programmer and software development manager I attempted to explain the complexities of software development and more significantly the effort required to test and implement upgrades which generally make fixing software bugs in older versions of a vendors software untenable. He then used the word criminal in a reference to buggy software, and we were off to the races.

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Yes and they use the carrosery more then few years only modify it a bit so its looks new compared to the on you bring back. and you go for thousants after few years wile paying every year for maintenance.
(so software is miles cheaper!)
My point was that “we” see the pc as a appliance and it’s software the same as the more fixed software in your TV, oven with touchscreen and helpmenu, CV for that matter, but we forget for the sake of ease that those don’t do “complex” things by turning in a other appliance every time we start up a new application. (sometime more then one at the time.)
I am not a programmer but i "programmed the old Z80, pre ibm 8086, in HEX. and did some other things at school in that line so i know how much work you need to do before a simple action is done by the “pc”. (didn’t liked it, have no patient for programming…LOL) So i started to repair the hardware around the software.

But i agree with you, we not helping bashing against things, we help by being constructive like a EAmember, bringing idee’s thought’s new point’s of view. And a program a isn’t finished product, it floats, evolves.

I think this was triggering this side vork, the upgrade without any visual new things got most people with wrong feet out of bed. I am convinced that “they” didn’t liked it either but needed it to do for that hars time that they announced. And they come true, yes i know a DAM, but evolving is there and they work hard for us.

Your welcome :slightly_smiling_face:

hmm, this post started about DPL feature impromement and increase. We have come a long way.

We are at an early major release 2 stage, which usually means that changes tend to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

My main concern about DPL is that, in search of technical perfection, the labs fall behind in offering a sensible set of choices to us users. Choices that enable speed before accuracy, to give you one example.

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Mark, I have two Mac Pros (home and office) and a MBP 2011 17" (I choose an older i7 quad for the 17" screen as it’s the last model with anti-glare 17" screen). As I mentioned, the Mac Pro which is really slow is the 6 x 3.46 GHz sporting an Nvidia GTX 980 graphic card and running El Capitan with DxO PhotoLab 2.0.0 build 9. I’ve had better luck with my 12 x 3.33 GHz with a Radeon RX 590.

There are not a huge number of background processes running, the disks are all SSD, the computer has no other issues. It seems directly related to the Nvidia card. It would be nice if DxO would come out and give some more detailed performance guidance on both Windows and Mac.

Perhaps the issue is with the 5DS R files. I have a bunch of Sony A6300 files to process from the holidays which will give me some insight into file size. If DxO PhotoLab has performance issues with large files (5DS R, Nikon D850, Z7, Sony A7R I II III) and/or Nvidia graphic ards, it seems much more important to solve those performance issues than start to add huge new modules (DAM). That’s my point - DxO has built a very nice core to a RAW developer. Spending all their resources on new modules is disrespectful of their existing customer base and, to be quite honest, running after fool’s gold.

Will a half-baked DAM sell more DxO PhotoLab licenses? I don’t think so. Can the DAM be more than half-baked for the next couple of years? Given the development time over in some case decades which iMatch, FastRawViewer, PhotoMechanic and Adobe Lightroom have consumed, I doubt it.

Will slow and laggy DxO PhotoLab sliders on large files drive away existing customers, anger new users and garner bad reviews? You betcha. More and more as high resolution cameras become more common. Or no hardware acceleration for Nvidia video cards for instance.

In an ideal world, DxO would be able to run after all of these issues at the same time. We are all aware that right now DxO is not in an ideal space. DxO is rebuilding the company and the software development team and managing revenue very carefully. Neglecting the core application for some distant green field would be misguided.

I remember canoeing across huge lakes in Canada and the distant green fields would look like soft meadows where one could just lay out one’s sleeping bag and lie blissfully staring at the sky. We’d paddle hard to get to the other side. When we came closer, it became apparent that those meadows were the same rocky, lump filled mountain sides we’d left behind on the other side of the lake. Hopes for an integrated DAM which will somehow improve workflow are as naive as our dreams of soft meadows on mountain sides as teenage canoe trippers.

Great idea.

A fast mode for previewing adjustments in real time would be most welcome. I can see there’s some work been done on fast preview but it could go much deeper and be completely real time.

“This latest upgrade was sold entirely on the basis of upcoming functionality.”

Was it? I missed that. I thought they delivered what they advertised for the latest upgrade. Separately they have revealed their development plans. But if you say they lied I guess they lied.

They didn’t lie, they just didn’t meet the high and hopeful expectations of many of us.

Mark

Mark I get that. I count myself amongst the disappointed that there wasn’t more. However, it was not sold “…entirely on the basis of upcoming functionality”, nor are the bugs “criminal” as per our earlier debate.

Why do I care? Because I have time and money invested in this product and I very strongly want DxO to be successful so it is not wasted (as it was with Aperture and other dropped products). The people making overblown and inflammatory comments threaten that success and therefore my personal investment.

By all means people should complain about what they don’t like, and if they believe that the communications from the company need to be better. However I would prefer it they get some perspective first before they put off prospective buyers with ill-considered statements.

I’ve said my piece. I allowed myself to be dragged into this debate because of some outrageous comments, but I’m not getting any further into it.

You are preaching to the choir. I agree 100% with every word you just posted. That’s why I was an early adopter of Photolab 2.0. It was to show my continuing support of this software. I’m invested in PhotoLab as well as Viewpoint, FilmPack 5 Elite and DXO’s NIK Collection.

I enjoy using their products more than any other post processing software I’ve ever tried, and I’ve spent considerable time with almost all of them. I love the interface, their implementation of the controls and the feature set. I’ve tried the competition, even those with far more features, and still prefer using PhotoLab, primarily for the ease and speed of applying edits, their implementation of the controls, PRIME noise reduction, and above all, the quality results I’m able to get from it.

Apparently some users don’t care about it that much and would have no problem dumping it, or seeing DXO fail as a company, if PhotoLab doesn’t improve and rise to their frankly unrealistic expectations. I wonder how they would feel If PhotoLab ceased to exist… I want more as well, who doesn’t. But I think I temper my demands with a realistic understanding of what is possible for them to accomplish with a small staff in the short term, and what is not.

Mark

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