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  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

A change in my workflow

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
For a long time, I have done most of my photo processing and editing with Picture Publisher (since 2001, Version 10). This was a product of Micrografx, of Dallas, Texas (Richardson, actually), since essentially absorbed into Corel.

My most common processing task is what we might consider basic processing, which typically comprises primarily the following (I give some qualifications next to each item).

A. Tonal scale adjustments to compensate for non-optimal exposure. [Needed for most images].

B. Cropping. [Required for perhaps half of the images].

C. Rotation (usually to correct for the camera not being roll-level). [Needed rarely.]

D. Color correction ("white balance" and so forth). [Needed infrequently.]

E. Downsizing. [I do this for images destined for Carla's blog and such, which today is the preponderance of my work.]

I dearly love Picture Publisher 10, but when I reflect on how well it does each of those things, I realize the following (listed by key letter as in the list above).

A. It has no really handy way to do that. I usually have to make several passes around a loop of adjusting brightness (or, perhaps, gamma correction) and contrast.

B. It does this very nicely, with a very nice user interface.

C. It does this nicely. The is a measuring feature that will determine the distance between two points and the azimuth of the line between them. So I can use this to determine how much rotation will be needed bring to horizontal a known horizontal feature in the scene. The, I can ask the program to rotate by an arbitrary angle, and the setting for that will be pre-populated with the result of the measurement.

D. It's not worth a damn at this.

E. I recently realized that its performance at this falls very short of modern accomplishments.

Well, that's two out of five! In addition, it fumbles the Exif metadata of files it handles (probably would have been fixed in 10.1, but it moved on over the northern border before that), so if I want to preserve that I have to use a complex process.

Regarding E, I have of late been doing the downsizing with ImageMagick, driven by the very nice script Bart developed (customized a bit for convenience in my situation). The results there are very much better than those with PP10 (especially with respect to such matters as scene areas with fine patterns, where the PP10 downsizing often gave rise to serious moiré artifacts).

As you have seen from my other recent thread, I have recently become aware of the processing program Silkypix Developer Studio, nominally a raw development program. But essentially all its features (other than raw development itself) are available for work (perhaps with some limitations) on JPEG files (which is how I usually work).

I had earlier concluded that the work of SDS in doing white balance color correction (on JPEG files) seems quite nice, and handy to use.

I recently did some testing on its performance in downsizing, and on my "litmus test" image, its performance is indistinguishable from that of ImageMagick.

The cropping function works in a different way from that in PP10, but is very easy to use.

Regarding rotation, SDS does not have anything comparable to the measuring capability of PP10, but rotation is controlled with a slider, and the onscreen image follows essentially instantaneously. When rotation is underway, a grid is placed on the screen so I can easily tell visually when I have done what is needed.

So I am currently doing the workflow planning to move to the use of SDS to do my "routine" image processing.

In that regard, there is also a nice situation regarding filenames. I give my processed images filenames that comprise the filename by which the file is held in my (camera incoming archives) with a suffix (so they can't be confused with the source file, but the source file can always be identified). SDS will, when told to "save" the processed image as a JPG file, gladly construct a filename consisting of the source filename with any desired prefix or suffix (yes, I know that is not unusual today).

So I think this change will overall be an improvement on many fronts.

I'll keep you up to date as to how it goes.

Best regards,

Doug
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Good luck, Doug!

One brilliant part of Picture Publisher was the ability to work with a small copy of the file and then have all the changes app;died to the entire file afterwards, if I remember correctly. This scheme seems efficient but, programs like Photoshop seem to actually work with the entire file all the time. There was a time when software developers really proved themselves in lean, low overhead approaches.

Asher
 

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
Hi, Asher,

Good luck, Doug!

Thank you.

One brilliant part of Picture Publisher was the ability to work with a small copy of the file and then have all the changes app;died to the entire file afterwards, if I remember correctly.

I think you may be thinking of another program - their names were all so similar.

PP works with the whole file, just like PS.

This scheme seems efficient but, programs like Photoshop seem to actually work with the entire file all the time. There was a time when software developers really proved themselves in lean, low overhead approaches.

Indeed. I fear we are beyond that now!

Best regards,

Doug
 

nicolas claris

OPF Co-founder/Administrator
Hi Doug
I also wish you the best with your new tool.
Changing of sw for PP is always a challenge but in general it surely gives you an extra step forward…
As the question may arise, there are plenty sw for PP, we all prefer the one we use at the moment! But I really think that most of them do quite a decent job and that once one know them in depth one can extract the extra juice of the original files…
Not forgetting that if these sw do help a lot to get that extra juice, the real "thing" comes from the settings you use when you shoot your image…
Next step will be to shoot raw!
 

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
Hi, Nicolas,

Hi Doug
I also wish you the best with your new tool.

Thank you so much.

Changing of sw for PP is always a challenge but in general it surely gives you an extra step forward…
As the question may arise, there are plenty sw for PP, we all prefer the one we use at the moment! But I really think that most of them do quite a decent job and that once one know them in depth one can extract the extra juice of the original files…
Not forgetting that if these sw do help a lot to get that extra juice, the real "thing" comes from the settings you use when you shoot your image…

Indeed. It is important to remember that.

Next step will be to shoot raw!

I keep preparing for that but not never yet really doing it!

Thanks again.

Best regards,

Doug
 
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