jimh12345

I'm just getting into 'raw' processing with AP, thinking I might wean myself off of Capture One entirely in the future. Things are working, although the workflow with the Develop persona is a little strange when I attempt to go back and forth. But it now takes me about 20 seconds to open a project file (during that time I see a highly pixelated image and can't do anything with it). My raw file is linked, not embedded. Is there anything I could do to speed this up?

The workarounds posted here are very clever. But my problem is memory - not the computer's, but mine. Although I've used AP extensively on photos I'm not doing it often enough - even if I got the 8-step process outlined here to work, I'd never remember it next time. I need a more direct, discoverable solution; and I'm sure we'll get one eventually.

Well that's true, although I know of no channel for doing so that isn't basically a waste of time. Let me turn this around and say that Microsoft does, sometimes, pay attention to feedback from companies like Serif, via their "developer support" group. My fear though is that if Microsoft finds out that ransomware protection conflicts with their new 'strategic direction' for installations, they'll just remove the ransomware protection from a future release.

I'm not posting in an attempt to increase the pressure here - I'm a former developer and I know these things take as long as they take. I just want to add to the "use case" justifications for a standard installer. I'd been using Windows' built-in ransomware protection. In case you don't know about this, I'd say it's actually pretty good. But it wants to know the paths to, and names of, the executables that you've authorized to touch your files in protected folders. The "app" installation completely messed this up, in a couple of ways. I disabled the ransomware protection, but I really want to turn it back on, so I want the .MSI installer. I've read about photographers getting hit by ransomware and you really do not want to go there.

Once you use the "built-in" mask by painting on it, you can't stop seeing it as a thumbnail attached to the Layer. It's just a little distracting.

When you explicitly create a mask layer, it's like any other layer, you can delete it. But when you create a mask just by painting black and white on an adjustment layer, you get a "mask" that isn't a "mask layer" and there's apparently no way to get rid of it.

Ok, so this is just a bug - the right-click menu is missing "Group" in this case. Thanks guys. I used Layer/New Group, and dragged the adjustments into the new group. That worked. But now I have several adjustments with redundant masks, and there does not seem to be a way to delete those adjustment masks - I guess I have to explicitly paint them all white.... 😞

I was searching for the way to get rid of a mask on an adjustment and found this thread. Apparently there is no way - other than painting it all white?

I'm confused on a basic point. I want a set of Adjustments to share a mask, so they all affect the same part of the image. I create a couple of Adjustment layers and a Mask layer, select them all, right-click, and... there's no option to Group them. Surely there has to be a way to have some Adjustments share a mask. But it seems the Group option is only there if I select a Pixel layer.

I'm using the Selection Brush Tool to cut out objects with complex borders. With a little practice, it works well. I've been trying to help it along by putting a background of a contrasting color behind the object when I photograph it - for example, if the object is mostly blue, I'll put some orange paper behind it. This doesn't hurt, but I'm not sure it really helps either. Is the Selection Brush tool sensitive to a color boundary or is it just looking for edges in the luminance?

Thanks Walt! That's exactly what I need. And no doubt that status bar contains other gems at times. I'll start noticing it.

If I understand right, you can't create a new keyboard shortcut, just remap the existing ones to different keys. Is that right? Here's what I want to do: I'm using the Selection Brush Tool to outline some complex objects (with jagged edges) and cut them out from the background. As I work my way around the object, I have to flip back and forth between Add and Subtract to correct errors. Rather than mousing up to the tool bar and back to the image each time, creating keyboard shortcuts for Add and Subtract would be great. But I don't think there's a way to do that...

Having worked in software development, I know the complexities of the "feature list" and the release cycle. I'm in AP for the long haul. So I'll just say that yes, being able to see the mask is a bedrock feature that I miss every time I use AP.

Well obviously some things would be problematic. For example, use the clone tool to clean up dust spots in a sky, then goe back to Develop and tweak things just a little - and those spots could show up pretty bad. Need to avoid those scenarios With some readjustment in my thinking, this could turn out to be a good way to work, at least for many images. The key would be to do as little with the raw image as is necessary. The question I have is - when I hit "Develop" and switch to "Photo", how much dynamic range am I really losing? Maybe it's essentially none - until I export a JPG of course.

But wouldn't the cloned pixels reside the new layer, not the 'base" layer generated by Develop? If so they're not affected by future edits of the raw image .

Well... when I first saw "non-destructive raw editing" I got a little too excited: I thought Serif had developed the Holy Grail of photo editing, the one app to rule them all. Now I see that this is an incremental improvement that might be useful, if I work in a certain order, and stay aware of what operations aren't undoable (i.e. are still pixel-based). It comes down to things like the clone brush, as it always has. That's where you cross the Great Divide in photo editing applications. Capture One has a clone brush that's nondestructive - totally parametric - but it doesn't work very well, and that's probably why.

But how is that really any different from what we had before? In my case, if I want to change the Raw again, I go back to Capture One, edit differently, export, and import to AP as a new base layer. Same thing here, just a lash-up within a single application.

[Sigh.] For a while there, I thought we really had something. 😞

Ok, stop the music. I guess I misunderstood this whole "non-destructive" thing. If you Develop the raw file, then go to Photo and do anything that modifies pixels - like cloning - you're immediately working with a pixel layer, and further edits to the raw file won't affect that layer. Is that basically it?

Are you possibly running V1 and not V2? Here's how it should look:

Hmmm.... haven't used a "clipping path". I'll file this solution for now, but it might turn out to be the one, thanks...

I need to fade the edges of a photo, to transparency. I've seen how to do one edge with a gradient mask, but for all four edges, that's cumbersome. And I'll definitely have to adjust it later, so any method that uses static, rasterized masks is out. Is there some easy-to-use filter or effect that does this?

That's the best policy. Just don't crop in "Develop" until this is fixed.

Here's what really scares me about this: sooner or later, my hard drive or PC fails, and I have to rebuild my system. That might be a year from now and I won't remember any of this hoo-ha about how V2 installs as a app - so I'll have to figure it out all over again. What a PITA.

So cropping in Develop is destructive and undoable? That's a big "ouch". Thanks for the heads up.