I must admit this topic has been very enlightening. When I started this topic, I could not see any reason why the advanced history should be lost on program close down and I still do not believe it should be lost.
One thing I learnt in photography over the many years I have been doing it (1953) is to reproduce what I see in the mines eye, in the viewfinder of the camera and get the exposure right. Using either spot metering or reading off the back my hand with a light metre in the same lighting conditions. For me, this meant minimal darkroom work. Nowadays, minimal development work in whichever development programme I am using.
If I step back in the history. Anything above where I stepped back to is wrong. Thatās why I stepped back in the first place, so I am not worried if I lose the problem updates. To me. DxO should be listening to their customers and try to give them what they require. If these requirements are in the preferences then those that do not want them can turn them off, and vice versa. Sorry to keep on the same rant.
This is the problem with the difference between parametric software like PhotoLab or LR and ābitmapā software like Photoshop.
Going back to a history in a PL session makes sense (and we did without it for a long time). I hardly see the point of finding the history on a later session. For example, classic case: I modify any setting such as the exposure. then I make other adjustments, in particular rather complicated local adjustments, then other adjustments afterwards. A few days later, I come back to my photo and realize that I have overcorrected the exposure. If I go back to the history, I then find in the history the change of exposure, I click on this setting and I modify it in the palette. By doing this I simply erased all the work I had been able to do since that point, especially the local adjustments that I had worked on a lot, and completely forgot about 3 or 4 days later!
Without history, I see that I have overcorrected the exposure and I will directly correct it in the palette ā¦ and I have not lost any of my work!
Iām sorry but I personally cannot accept your arguments. If I step back in history. Anything above where I step back to is incorrect. It could be anything from 1 to many operations. I personally do not worry about losing those operations. I have found it is much quicker for me to step back in the history, rather than go through the right-hand panel looking for any possible operation that I did and hoping I found the correct one. Then adjusting it, adding to the history and finding out it was the wrong one.
Does anyone use the switch above all the palettes to show only those adjustments that have actually been made?
For me, this is history because adjustments can be made in any order (with a very few exceptions). You can actually see what has been changed and quickly make adjustments without losing any other adjustment!
Do be careful if you turn off an adjustment because it will disappear off this palette and if you want it back again you will have to go to itās home palette to turn it back on again.
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Photo-DKO
(Dirk Offringa, Windows 10, RX570, PL6E-VP3-FP6, Fujifilm shooter)
46
Hi, any seasoned Lightroom user is aware of this. I go back in history, often years after the last edit, to see what stages I went through. I just KNOW that if I move a slider when somewhere in the history, I will ditch everything that came later. If I donāt want that, I make a vitual copy and work on that one. If I ditch a part of the history by accident, CTRL-Z is my friend.
Iām a new PL5 user, I didnāt know history wasnāt saved. Thatās a bummer indeed. Like some said earlier, itās part of my workflow, I use it extensively. Thanks for pointing this out, I thought I could rely on itā¦
Your definition of history seems to be quite different from mine. What you are referring to is the current state resulting from various events that occurred over time in the past. The current state of things is not a history.
in general, a history is about the details of how the current state developed and the order in which the events leading to the current state . occurred. With respect, you can call the active corrections anything you like, but referring to it as a history is inaccurate.
Further I use that tool all the time so I know at a quick glance what features are set. But, it serves a completely different purpose than the advanced history.
I suspect that a lot of people who donāt use the advanced history also donāt make many dozens or even hundreds of edits on their images. Just using control lines, control points, snd negative control lines and negative control points to modify various parts of my images might tequire 50 to 100 edits or more. And that is not even considering global edits. If I only made 15 or 20 edits I wouldnāt need the advanced history list either. The beauty of PhotoLab is I can make all those edits in a fraction of the time it would take me on some other raw editors.
A parametric editor like PL is also a bitmap editor. The difference is how they save the result: a parametric saves it as a list of functions with their parameters, a bitmap editor as an image. To save as an image in a parametric editor one has to export it.
Only a few functions in a raw converter are based on the raw data.
In general any edit is based on what one sees. Therefore changing an old edit is deleting the later edits: the basis on which they where done are gone.
In general I donāt use the history list but I wouldnāt like to miss it: you never know. Making several vc assumes one knows on the forehand the place to go back.
Hi Mark, donāt get me wrong, I understand what history is and why and how other people use it. All I was trying to do is point out that PL edits are not linear and are only applied to your image when you export. The order that these edits are applied are defined by DxO. The list of edits made shows you what the current state is as an accumulation of all your previous steps.
I guess the way I work is to keep my edits as simple as possible because my goal is simple too - to portray what I saw when I took the photo. I donāt particularly like black and white and I only very occasionally do something artistic.
I want to portray what I saw as well. In my experience it takes a lot more than a few simple edits. Few cameras have the dynamic range needed to approach reality but the tools in PhotoLab, allow me to get closer. More than 50 percent of my edits, on a regular basis, are local adjustments used to raise shadow detail, darken skies, modify colors, add luminance, sharpen specific object, bring out cloud details, modify the texture of items locally, and dozens of other things. I might have as many as 5 to 10 different LA masks.with a a half dozen or more edits for each mask. I also use the repair/clone toll quite often to remove small distracting objects. If donāt like the direction of the most current edits the history file lets me step back to any earlier point, It is really very simple.
DXO claimed this feature would be implemented for Windows in a Photolab 4 update, but that never came to pass. So far theyāve been silent on it appearing in PL5 and it would appear to be low on list of priorities.
Itās hard to argue thatās better to want something and not have it than to have it and not need itā¦