PL5 Repair creates "surprise" straight line selection elements while attempting to create a circular mask!

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

sgospodarenko
I thought that would be the case because I was unable to recreate the problem the following day.

The first and second photo had to be taken with my finger on the mouse because otherwise the mask becomes an outline as shown in the third photo. That mask outline in the third photo appeared lower when I let go of the mouse button and I dragged it upwards so that it was more visible. Capturing the selection photos could only be done with a camera because as soon as the mouse button was released the highly visible mask selection turns into a mask outline.

The second photo (the “crazy” photo) was actually a different photo (it is actually the prior picture to P1088583.RW2, i,e, P1088582.RW2) so once the glitch was in action it occurred on all the photos I tried it on. I cannot remember what happened when I took my finger off the button, it should have turned into a mask but … sorry; I was just “dabbling” when I was supposed to be watching TV with my wife!

I thought that further investigation could wait till another day but the “glitch” occurred because of something that had happened at some point during the session and cleared once the session ended.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

sgospodarenko
Thank your for your feedback, in my “diatribe” above with respect to the rather “pointless” (in my opinion) display of the ‘Applied default preset’ rather than a more useful (in.my…) ‘Last preset applied’ I stated “I am not sure that this field actually contains an up-to-date copy of the DOP and may simply be an “obsolete” remnant of a bygone design of OpticsPro/PhotoLabs)” when referring to a field in the database.

The only way to verify that fact would have been to compare the contents of a number of fields and although I have software to access the database I wasn’t prepared to go to those lengths.

However, in order to try to reproduce the “glitch” I moved all the DOP files to a subfolder and went to start again but was struck by the fact that the photo appeared to be in an edited state, and appeared to be that way when I applied a preset, closed PL5, deleted the new DOP, opened PL5 etc. etc.

Repeating the test with PL4 (4.3.3) also shows the extreme “fix” I applied to one photo on the restart of PL4 in spite of me repeating the close, delete DOP etc. routine. Renaming the PL4 database and re-opening the files showed no discernible edits, i.e. they were “lost” along with the database!!

So please confirm to me, others may already have been fully aware of this fact (I was certainly aware of the field in the database) that in the absence of a DOP sidecar file PL uses the last edit stored in the database in lieu of the edit stored in the (absent) DOP.

I presume(?) that DOP edits takes precedence over the edits in the database? Is that process controlled by date/timestamps or simply by the existence of the DOP?

[sgospodarenko (Svetlana G.)]

Hello @BHAYT ,

The feedback about changing the behavior of History will be analyzed by @StevenL .

As for this one:

@BHAYT

So please confirm to me, others may already have been fully aware of this fact (I was certainly aware of the field in the database) that in the absence of a DOP sidecar file PL uses the last edit stored in the database in lieu of the edit stored in the (absent) DOP.

I presume(?) that DOP edits takes precedence over the edits in the database? Is that process controlled by date/timestamps or simply by the existence of the DOP?

• Yes, I confirm it. As the user can enable/disable the sidecar creation all the corrections applied to the images are stored in DB as well. And yes, it’s controlled by date/timestamps.

Regards,
Svetlana G.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

Many thanks sgospodarenko for your response and update. The “of course” comes to mind with respect to the database but it was only recently that I read in the forum that you could just use the database and forego DOP sidecar files.

My previous use of DxO products (from OpticsPro 8 onwards) was very much as one of a number of editors I would launch directly from FastStone Image Viewer or FastRawViewer with no use of the PL PhotoLibrary features at all.

The way I used it meant that I never bothered to investigate the wider features simply concentrating on the editing features that worked for me (and/or that I could make work for me!). That started to change at the beginning of 2021 but I still have some way to go, sorry for my ignorance and thank you for your forbearance.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

@sgospodarenko Can I please ask you to clarify one issue with respect to DOP versus database timestamps that control which set of data is used, i.e. use the database edits or the DOP edits.

@sgospodarenko

Yes, I confirm it. As the user can enable/disable the sidecar creation all the corrections applied to the images are stored in DB as well. And yes, it’s controlled by date/timestamps.

My question is whether the timestamp that is compared is one of the DOP file timestamps (if so it would be useful to know which one) or is it the one of the timestamp fields actually held in the DOP as shown below (if so it would be useful to know which one) or is it one that I have not even considered (if so it would …)!?

Sidecar = {
Date = “2021-11-12T09:45:53.8315848Z”, <---------------------This one perhaps?
Software = “DxO PhotoLab 5.0.1”,
Source = {
CafId = “C61004a”,
Items = {
{
Albums = “”,
CreationDate = “2021-11-12T08:57:18.3327101Z”,
IPTC = {
}
,
Keywords = {
}
,
ModificationDate = “2021-11-12T09:45:53.8295854Z”,
Name = “P1088587.RW2”,
OutputItems = {
}
.
.
.
verrides = {
NoiseRemovalMethod = “DeepRaw2RGB”,
}
,
Version = “16.0”,
}
,
ShotDate = “2021-10-30T15:54:00.6040000Z”,
ShouldProcess = 2,
Uuid = “48D0254B-7E6C-4D86-AB8F-0D3FA8530E88”,
}
,
}
,
Uuid = “DB3540AA-AE6C-44BF-8422-876B2CED2941”,
}
,
Version = “16.0”,
}

[sgospodarenko (Svetlana G.)]

Good morning @BHAYT ,

We compare the ModificationDate between each VC in the sidecar vs database.

Regards,
Svetlana G.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

Is there any way of improving the navigation of presets:-

@sgospodarenko thank you for the update.

While playing with DOPs I encountered a problem when I wanted to apply a basic preset to a photo. In order to do the test I had moved PL5 to the smaller monitor to the left (1920 x 1200 vs 2560x1440) and when I went to apply the preset I could not make the selection because the menu was on the left (no space on the screen to put the second menu to the right!) and moving the cursor left immediately made the preset menu vanish.

On the main monitor this problem does not exist and on the smaller monitor the only way of achieving the selection is to take the mouse across the monitor on the right until it wraps round to the menu!! This may well be a feature of WIN10 and the DisplayFusion software I run but it is a little odd. For future tests PL5 will be on the larger monitor and the other software on the smaller monitor!!

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

Strange horizontal Line when using ‘Highlight’ adjustment in ‘Selective Tone’ & in a Linear Gradient:-

@sgospodarenko I am not sure where this post belongs or whether this is a bug or an inevitable consequence of interaction between editing settings. The photo was taken yesterday in varying light conditions and I applied a previous preset that helped bring out the sky before making further modifications.

The current settings are a “little” OTT (over the top) but caused a “strange” line to appear across the photo. This line moves down the photo if the ‘Selective Tone’/‘Highlights’ setting is reduced further, i.e. from -56 down to -93 and it moves up the photo if the correction is decreased.

The linear gradient also contains some “extreme” settings but should this line exist!? It is also present in the exported jpg.

The exported jpg was made from another variant which brightened the foreground.

The final settings cause similar lines on other images with a “big” sky.

P1088789.RW2 (23.1 MB)
P1088789.RW2.dop (12.0 KB)

P1088789.RW2.dop (11.2 KB)

[Wolfgang ([ Win10, PL+VP+FP, Nik6 (+3) ])]

Hi Bryan,
the “strange line” you observed is caused by your settings. And you not only see your line moving up or down with pulling the Selective Tone’s Highlight slider, but also with the one in the Local Adjustment / Gradient.

Your adjustments are indeed over the top – and also contradicting.

As your exposure was fine, there was no need to bring it up that far. With the Tone Curve you enhanced the contrast, lifted the Selective Tone’s Midtones, but reduced the Highlights heavily. Then in the Local Adjustment / Gradient you pulled the Highlights almost down and exagerated the contrast with ClearView. The result is far from a smooth gradient.

Suppose you are on PL5, I tried something.

VC1 → P1088789.RW2.dop (112,1 KB)

Apart from changes to the vignetting and removing a few sensor spots

• I adjusted the exposure with the Smart Lighting / Spot Weighted Tool,
• brought the lower part up with a Gradient (mask corrected with manual eraser),
• adjusted the thornes in the foreground with a Control Line (mask corrected with negative CL),
• manipulated the sky with a Control Line.

While I tried to keep it more believeable, you will adjust to your taste
(don’t judge from the Forum’s rendering).

[sgospodarenko (Svetlana G.)]

Good morning, Bryan!

@BHAYT

@sgospodarenko I am not sure where this post belongs or whether this is a bug or an inevitable consequence of interaction between editing settings. The photo was taken yesterday in varying light conditions and I applied a previous preset that helped bring out the sky before making further modifications.

• You see this ‘split’ line because this option is enabled:

You can get rid of the line if you switch it off.

Regards,
Svetlana G.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

@sgospodarenko The split screen option that you show, with the sliding bar, is currently only available in ‘Local Adjustments’ and ‘Full screen preview’ but not in the normal view (on my Win10 version of PL5.0.1) and is not then transferred to an export. The line(s) I encountered are horizontal and rather “arbitrary” in position.

I hinted that they could be “artefacts” generated by PL5 as a result of the “slightly” OTT settings I had been playing with and while this may be the case I would still like PL5 engineers to investigate whether they could be avoided if the algorithms were changed.

In the meantime @Wolfgang has kindly pointed out how badly edited the photo was and then undertaken a lot of carefully balanced edits to improve on the original photo while avoiding going over the top as I had.

Wolfgang, you are right that the rendered image on the PL5 forum was not showing as well as it should and it appeared much better when I set up a directory with the original RAW and your DOP which contained my original edits and your edits as a Virtual Copy. I have uploaded a jpg from your setting (reduced to 1920 etc.) to see what happens!

With respect to you comments and settings I would like to ask a few questions now before studying the changes further later. The photo was actually taken at +0.66EV because someone didn’t check the settings, it then changed a few photos further on (when I realised)!!

1. You commented on some sensor spots! How did you detect these? The UV lens filter has some dust inside and out and should have been cleaned before our walk. However, this lens became heavily contaminated with dust and has only just been cleaned by Olympus so I need to check that out and check the sensor (It is a second hand camera!?)

2. You state “The result is far from a smooth gradient.” How did you determine that? Certainly the high peaks for red, blue and green in my OTT edit are just that (OTT).

3. You made a change to the ‘Vignetting’/‘Preservation’ setting from the ‘Auto’ of 50 to 90, why?

Many thanks for your valuable feedback it is appreciated but I want to get closer to your result with (just) a fraction more OTT but without the need for as many ‘Local Adjustments’ so that I can create a preset that will be useful for all similar photos (snapshots) taken during my walk. I need to be careful with the OTT aspect because the older I get the more my perception of contrast will change (decline).

I originally went to PhotoLab (or its predecessor actually) because I could “improve” my photos quickly, ‘Local Adjustments’ provide a lot of adjustment features particularly for those “special” photos but I am looking for a “quick(ish)” fix mainly because I am rarely able to pick the “best” time to take a photo so suffer with respect to the light available, the direction of the light, location of the sun etc…

My rendering of your version, reduced to 1920 in FastStone viewer.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

@Wolfgang Why?

Sorry my response reminded me of our 3 year old Granddaughter and her Why… Why … But if you don’t ask you don’t get told so Why!?

[Wolfgang ([ Win10, PL+VP+FP, Nik6 (+3) ])]

Also not being young any more, I suggest to use the best monitor that fits your needs (you can afford).
→ How many of you uses a big or dualscreen mode and hoe many is working on tablet/laptop? - #82 by Wolfgang – It’s Your interface to the digital picture world.

Concerning presets – there are some tips in this Forum about ‘full’ and ‘partial’ presets. As I never made one, you’d better start a search → Search results for 'presets' - DxO Forums.
– Maybe simply choose a ‘representative’ pic for your series, apply some basic adjustments and copy them to the other ones.

and / or

Ok, enough of the preface – PL’s histogram shows your exposure was fine (well, some leeway left to the right – could have had more exposure compensation in your cam). But been an afternoon shot, I tried to keep the ‘mild’ light in post.

• ‘sensor spots’
  When I pulled the exposure to see what’s in the pic, I could spot something – and repaired it.
  Now, as I copied ‘my version’, deleted those repairs and scrutinized them carefully / compared instantly, I could identify tiny bits of clouds in the otherwise blue gradient.
  → I’d better be careful with late night editing!
  Completely forgot about your UV-filter – no, at F5 you shouldn’t see anything like spots (maybe some general diffusion like from a dusty front lens and not using a lens hood).

• ‘far from a smooth gradient’
  Well, how to explain? … [ May I ask you to also check → Understanding Selective Tone control - #61 by WitheringtonM ] … The Selective Tone sliders do overlap (not sure, but I think also those in the Local Adjustment tools). Anyway, this functionality can lead to confusion.
  Interestingly this “strange line” appeared first roughly in the middle of your gradient – a result of your settings. It looked like a tone value separation, similar to when reducing tonal values and turning a linear gradient into steps with slightly pronounced ‘edges’.
  

  
  
  Luminosity 255-0 in steps.tif (1,1 MB)

• ‘Vignetting/Preservation’
  Checking the blue sky at some point, the corners appeared brighter. Instead of adding an additional vignette, I checked the auto-vignetting-setting and changed that to taste.
  – Make a VC, set it back to Auto and see, what you prefer.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

@Wolfgang thank you for your response I currently use a old Dell U2515H ( 25" 2560 x 1440) as the main monitor and an old HP Z24i (24" 1920 x 1200) as a second monitor

Creating presets has never worried me and at the time of OpticsPro 11 I created a large number of presets (now a total of 560 including DxO presets) some with titles like

051-10 - SL(7St) CV(50) C(40) Mc(5) Ca(-10) LS(0).preset.
051-20 - SL(7St) CV(50) C(40) Mc(5) Ca(-20) LS(0).preset
051-40 - SL(7St) CV(50) C(40) Mc(5) Ca(-40) LS(0).preset
051-60 - SL(7St) CV(50) C(40) Mc(5) Ca(-60) LS(0).preset
051-80 - SL(7St) CV(50) C(40) Mc(5) Ca(-80) LS(0).preset
053 - SL(7St) CV(20) C(40) Mc(5) LS(0).preset
054 - SL(7St) CV(0) C(40) Mc(5) LS(0).preset
055 - SL(7St) CV(20) C(0) Mc(5) LS(0).preset
050 - SL(7St) CV(50) Mc(5) LS(0).preset
051 - SL(7St) CV(50) C(40) Mc(5) LS(0).preset

I will leave you to figure out what the settings are but it is not very difficult. However, with the coming of PhotoLab new features started to arrive and it became harder to use these cryptic mnemonic acronyms, plus PhotoLab tends not to like handling long preset names.

So I am not unhappy creating presets and the partial application gives the opportunity to apply part of a preset. This may help with creating a “library” of ‘Tone Curves’. The strategy you suggest is the one I typically use i.e. starting with a preset from a similar type of shoot.

The reason for my post was that after starting out that way I pushed the adjustments a little too far (just a tad!!) and encountered a problem!

I am glad that the sensor spots were not what they might have been.

With respect to the gradient that is something I need to understand and experiment with further but I am still concerned that while avoiding the problem I encountered is an acceptable solution I am still concerned that there actually is an underlying problem that could be “fixed”?

I understand the vignette issue and will keep an eye on it in the future.

One issue that I have with PL is that the histogram does not revert when undertaking a comparison between the original and the new render. It does change when comparing between VCs but with other packages that I have used a ‘before’ and ‘after’ compare includes the histogram.

I will use your settings to provide a reference in this case and see what I can do that is a little less extreme! Thank you for the time spent developing my photo, sadly it was not a particularly exciting photo, I have much better (as in more interesting) photos from a longer walk up the same path which ends at Cissbury ring, the site of a Neolithic flint mine which later became an Iron Age hillfort.

Just out of interest I have included 3 rendered photos of a scene taken from Cissbury ring. The first uses a variant of your settings, the second a slightly too strong variant of mine (the sky is too blue) and the third a lightly modified JPG image from my Pixel 4a (mods were horizon and CV(20)). Unfortunately PL5 does not handle Pixel RAW images at all!!

[sgospodarenko (Svetlana G.)]

Good morning!

@BHAYT

@sgospodarenko The split screen option that you show, with the sliding bar, is currently only available in ‘Local Adjustments’ and ‘Full screen preview’ but not in the normal view (on my Win10 version of PL5.0.1) and is not then transferred to an export. The line(s) I encountered are horizontal and rather “arbitrary” in position.

Okay, got it. Then can you provide me with the screenshot?

Thank you
Regards,
Svetlana G.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

Svetlana (@sgospodarenko)

The original JPG export and the original RAW and the DOP (s) used are in the original post above but I have also included the JPG export in the attached zip.

As the discussion with @Wolfgang in the posts above indicates this was probably caused by the rather “extreme” settings I was playing with but the result was not what I expected and was reproducible on other “big sky” photos taken on the same day albeit to a slightly lesser extent (using the same settings).

@Wolfgang

Hi Bryan,
the “strange line” you observed is caused by your settings. And you not only see your line moving up or down with pulling the Selective Tone’s Highlight slider, but also with the one in the Local Adjustment / Gradient.

Your adjustments are indeed over the top – and also contradicting.

Thank you for your attention.P1088789_DxP5R.zip (11.7 MB)

[sgospodarenko (Svetlana G.)]

Okay, got it now

You are talking about this line produced by Selective Tone corrections:

Regards,
Svetlana G.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

@sgospodarenko yes that is exactly the line I was (am) concerned about.

[sgospodarenko (Svetlana G.)]

Hello @BHAYT ,

It’s an intrinsic limitation of our selective tones – and in particular the highlights slider – and the way they are applied. So we cannot provide an actual solution, at least not in the short term.

We can, however, propose a workaround. In the local adjustments equalizer that you applied on the sky, you applied strong negative values on highlights, midtones and shadows. If you put back all of them to 0 and then apply negative exposure correction instead, you get a similar result but without the disturbing line. The upper part is a bit too dark, but you can compensate that by applying a positive value to the shadows.

With values: Highlights -100, Midtones -86, Shadows -80 is replaced by Exposure -3.5, Shadows + 60.

Regards,
Svetlana G.

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

Thank you Svetlana (@sgospodarenko) I had suspected it was something to do with the process used and my rather extreme settings. @Wolfgang had suggested that my edits were a “little” heavy-handed and made suggestions to achieve a more balanced result which also avoided the problem.

I will take both sets of advice and try to produce a more balanced preset that can also be applied to other photos from the walk with or without any further tweaking for each photo.

I typically seek to develop a minimum set of presets for any set of photos (typically based on previous presets). There are 140 photos taken with the G9 (JPG and RAW) and also 140 taken with a Pixel 4a (also JPG & RAW but the Pixel uses Computational photography for the JPGs and DxO cannot currently handle the RAWs) and the sun was where the sun was (i.e. the weather was fine and we decided to take a walk whether the conditions were good, bad or indifferent for photography; but that is where PL5 comes into the picture!)

Thank you for your time and advice.

Regards

Bryan Thomas