Two features would drastically improve my workflow:
Every time I select the Crop tool, PhotoLab 6 reverts to “Maintain Aspect Ratio.” I have to manually change the setting to “Unconstrained” aspect ratio every time. Please, please tell me I overlooked how to change this behavior. I found that if I hold SHIFT while cropping, the crop will be unconstrained the first time. Then if I adjust the crop, it is constrained again. So I get one unconstrained crop by holding Shift.
I would LOVE to watermark all of my images with PhotoLab 6. But here’s the problem: Because I always crop my images, a fixed-size watermark will have a different size from photo-to-photo. So I need to apply it as a Brush in Photoshop instead, manually changing the brush size. If there was a way to configure PL to insert my watermark scaled to, say, about 8% of image height, it would save me SO MUCH time. I’d be done with Photoshop if it did that.
The watermark scale is relative to the crop. Below illustrates one graphic (on the left) and one text (on the right) watermark on the same image, first at the full original size and then heavily cropped, which are the same size because I output to the same export dimensions.
If you output at the original dimensions, then yes, the absolute scale of the watermarks change, as does the absolute size of the photos. If it were to be as you described, then it would be me asking for an enhancement.
FWIW, my standard output for sharing is always scaled in megapixels. Aside from being wary of cropping smaller than that, it frees me from thinking about dimensions and scale and I get ‘perceptually equivalent’ sizes whether I crop 2:1 or square or somewhere in between. I find 6 megapixels looks great on any screen, even my 5K one.
The one caveat I have to address is the watermark scale cues from the image width and therefore I have different presets for landscape, square, and portrait images. I wish I could set the scale to at least be against ‘longest side’.
