John Rostron

DW CS3 will do this. John

What was that “two directions thingy" referred to above? I have tried many web editors, including Pinegrow, and I keep returning to my ancient DW CS3. It does offer upload and download at the click of a button. Is this the “two directions thingy"? It does all I want, inclding support for PHP. John

What you do not say is what you saved it from. Where did the original image come from? PNG andd JPG are raster (bitmap) formats and will have a single layer. PDF and ESP can include 'layers' or objects which migh be equivalent to layers. These might maintain groupable or ungroupable colours. However if the original image you had was a bitmap/pixel/raster image, then it might have been a single layer. In a Photo file, you can have a single layer on which you can have several colours. Or, you could also have (say) three layers, one for the popcorn, one for the circle and the kitchen text and one for the Myra's text. If you export this as jpg or png, then the layers and the colours will be merged. If you export to png, they should be preserved. John

Yes, I probably would as well. I'm nor really into portrait/paunch image processing. One interesting comment I saw in a review is that it is designed to "perpetuate the stereotypes of the 'ideal' western body image". And there was me thinking that this included a (male) paunch. Looking at their example video, I find that I can hardly tell the difference between before and after in the male images. For the females, I mostly prefer the before images. But then, I generally prefer a natural, unimproved look in any human image. John

Does your camera club specify exactly 1400×1050 or as a minimum? Do they also specify 7" by 5"? If it has to be 1400×1050, then you can use Document > Resize to do it, then print specifying 7" by 5". You could try and specify 200ppi, but it is not quite as simple as that. I would ignore tyis and let the printer do the scaling. John

FWIW there is a recently released version of Portrait Pro Body at around £30 or £50 for the Studio version. This claims to fix body shapes as you want. The Studio version works as a PS plugin. Related progams from the same stable work with Affinity. It all depends on if you think it is worth the price. I have not tried it, but it it has been well reviewed. John

The stacking, merging and image re-sizing are no problem in Affinity, but its ability to do the same develop process to a set of raw files is limited. You should be able to create a preset to apply to all of your raw files and then save or export them. However, even the Affinity gurus will often recommend that you use another raw processor (Lightroom, Capture One, On1 Raw) to do this efficiently. You will need to save the images in a format that Affinity understands (.png, jpg high quality or .tif). Having got your developed images, Stacking and merging them is very straightforward in Affinity. Choose File > New HDR Merge and add the 35 images, then process the stack. You are given several options under the final 'Tone Merge' phase, I would suggest using Natural. You can then export/save the image. See the video here. To resize the image, choose Document > Resize Document, then in the size box enter 200%. The other dimension will be automatically adjusted provided you leave the lock icon untouched. You might like to select 'Lanczos 3 Separable' as the Resample algorithm. This is usually recommended for enlarging images. Edit: I just noticed that @firstdefence had replied before I submitted this! John

Same again!

All I can say is that I always develop and save images before loading them into any form of stack. It is more fiddly, but it does the job! John

I find I have to revert to using Corel Draw to do this, and it does the job well. You can get older versions of CD quite cheaply. John

Yes, that is the case, but it applies to the time after the cut-off date. Once you have confirmed, then you should be given an opportunity to re-subscribe or opt out at intervals. John

You could take a series of images with the polarizer rotated through various angles, from the same viewpoint (with a tripod if possible); then load them into a stack. Tweaking the options could give you an optimum solution. I would stsrt with minimum. John

When I have done the procedure as suggested by @toltec, I have found that the blurred background adjacent to the cut-out image is not right. If you have cut out the image, leaving a hole, the blurring incorporates the absent colour, creating a pale area. If you leave the image in place, then you get the blurred mix of the background plus the adjacent subject. What I do is to cut out the subject, then extend the background into the cut-out area (using the clone brush) before blurring. John

It is not all that clear whether you want to Just convert the background page colour to white (leaving the body untouched), or Convert the body shading to white, just leaving the skeleton. For the former, you could start by adjusting the white point in curves or levels. Otherwise, I would use the flood fill (magic wand) with a fairly low tolerance. After each selection, delete what is selected (assuming tha-t it is OK). You would still need to remove the shadows. This kind of greyscale image is often more difficult to clean up than it looks! Finally, add a white background fill below. John

I actually use VueScan for flatbed scanning (and SilverFast for sldes). VueScan is well worth the $40/£28 price. There is also a Pro version which scans slides and does OCR, but the standard version should do what you want. It does not include any bloatware! John

@Youth, you will have to forgive @Alfred and @toltec. They do tend to get carried away. At least toltec did suggest a useable solution. Despite its complex algorithm FFT is fairly straightforward to use and it usually works for me. John

Yes,, I would agree that is a bug. I have never had such problems with my sony .awr files, so it may be specific to certain camera raw files. The bug seems to be that AP ignores any default presets for raw files in anything but the Develop Persona. It ignores them when creating stacks, merges and in batch processing. @andre.lang, @owenr, I would suggest that you report this problem in either the Bug reports or Feature Requests, whatever you deem appropriate. I would also specify the camera models that are giving you problems. John

I don't think this has been suggested yet, but have you tried this: Select a portion of your image (say 300 by 300px), copy it and paste as a new image; Use the inpainting brush to get rid of your blemishes. This will now be working on a much smaller image so won't be scanning for faraway matches; When done, copy and paste back into your main image; Repeat as necessary, using a slight overlap with any previous selections. John

All this informtion is for Macs. Can anyone advise me how to safely disable fonts in windows. I have tried hiding them, but it does not seem to affect loading times. John

Hardly surprising really. The HDR processing will not be aware of the lighting in the other adjacent images and will generate a merge based only on the images provided. You could try adjusting the tone mapping to make the final merge as close as possible to the adjacent images. It is an inherent problem with wide panoramas that the lighting can be inconsistent across many images. John

That makes sense. Opening raw files into the stack operations seems to be a sort of limbo between Develop and Photo personas. AP seems to apply its own development before stacking. I never stack raw files, I develop them first, export and then load them into a stack. John

Have your images got the necessary hard edges as @James Ritson suggested above? Unfortunately Focus Merging does not involve de-ghosting! Could you post your images here for us to see, at least some of them where you have alignment problems. John

Given images taken as you suggest, I would load the images into either a new HDR stack or a new Focus Merge stack. (Unfortunately, you can't do both at once.) Only if this did not work would I move onto what @Dan C suggests. (Actually, I would probably use Photomatix or Helicon Focus.) John

I take a heretical approach to problems like this and eschew the .afphoto files. For your problem I would first develop your five .nef files using exactly the same parameters for each. Export each as a .tiff, .png or even a 100% quality .jpg (I do!). You can then load your five non-raw images into the panorama option. When you have it adjusted to your liking, you can then export it in one of the formats suggested. The disadvantage of not using the.afphoto format is that you lose any saved intermediate processing. The advantage is that you save a lot of space, and loading time. You can still save your panorama as an .afphoto file. You will be given the option to do so when you close it. I usually decline this on the grounds that, if needs be, I can re-create my panorama in a minute or so from scratch. John

I was going to say that your images did not have enough overlap. Usually it should be around 25% and you look as if you have this. However, looking at image 2 and 3, there is very little for the stitching algorithm to latch on to to make a match. Much of it is vegetation. If that is the case the only suggestions I can make are either: Add some images to increase the overlap to 50-60% or more; or: Do it manually. For just four images, this would probably be a straightforward process. Simply stack them as layers and align by hand and then judiciously erase the overlap region with soft brush. John