Pixelated preview impossible to work on magnified

I usually use Lightroom but fancy a change so have Photolab 6 on trial

When viewing an unedited raw image in PL6 and magnify it is badly pixelated. So bad that no detail can be seen and therefore impossible to asses how much adjustment is necessary or to work on.

When viewed unedited at the same magnification in Lr or Photo AI the issue is not evident, it’s not the image.

When the image is saved as a jpeg back to disc then viewed in Paint or reloaded back to PL it’s fine

It feels like PL6 is ignoring a percentage of data / pixels

Is there something in settings somewhere that I’ve missed?

Hi Steve and welcome,

There’s a bug in PL5.6 and PL6.1 that causes it to work on the embedded JPEG instead of the RAW data on some RAW files. It’s being looked at but will take at least a few days to correct. This thread concerns PL5.6 but the same problem exists in PL6.1.

Thanks for the welcome, appreciated

It’s a strange one, I’ve never seen this before. I hope it is resolved before the end of my 1 month trial

I’m just getting used to the software. There are some things I don’t like…I can’t find how to set the white point, or how to merge HDR brackets / stitch a pano, and I find it odd that the noise removal and sharpening can’t be viewed in the main panel, just in the magnifier. I would much prefer to see that in the full panel. It makes it guesswork for tweaking detail. There are some things to like though. The noise removal is excellent and DeepprimeXD works very well. I also think the local adjustments will be easy to work with when I get used to them

It’s a great program, it’s pretty much all that I use(occasionally I use Affinity Photo 2 when I need a pixel editor). Unfortunately White Point and HDR/Pano stitching do not currently exist in PL and while NR is only visible in the small magnifier all other corrections(including Lens Sharpness) are visible on the main preview screen when magnification is greater than or equal to 75%.

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No doubt it is a great program. It will be all I need 95% of the time once the bugs are ironed out. The work-around for the bits PL can’t do is just to pop the image into another app that can.
I understand why DXO haven’t gone for all adjustments, specifically Deepprime, in the main panel, it is extremely resource intensive and would bog down. Topaz have gone down this route with Photo AI and the result is a very bloaty process and it isn’t useable on less powerful machines. Perhaps the happy medium DXO could reach would be an option to expand the magnifier to 4x as a pop-up…just a thought.

Others have had the same thought, it’s been requested for years. There is a workaround for this too. You can export to DNG(Optical corrections and NR only) and then work on the exported DNG file(cleaned up and lens corrected at any magnification) as if it were RAW. If you are concerned about storage space then you can delete the DNG after you’re done(it can easily be reproduced), but remember to keep the DOP file to save your edits. This is the workflow that I use at all times.

Thanks again for the tip. This is exactly what I was trying last night…running the images thru with “standard” corrections and saving back to a sub-folder in the original folder. It works really well and speeds things up enormously. It gets me to about 80% there on landscapes. On average it takes about 20 secs to process each image for this “first pass”, not bad at all.
I have found that if you try to process too many images in one go the software crashes. Six at a time works every time. If I try to do 12 it crashes sometimes. It doesn’t appear to be my hardware as I monitor it and it is not stressed.
The more I play with PL the more I like it!

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