Russell

Bad news; it turns out that the FIlterMeister error above crashes AP if the image is 16-bit.

Thank you! The FilterMeister preview issue seems to have been fixed. An error still pops up when a filter is reopened: Aborting X86_call_fmf1 -- code not valid. But the filter proceeds to work. I understand that it has to do with initializing variables; will have upgrades available soon. —Russell http://www.russellcottrell.com/RCFilters/index.htm

Hello; an observation, when I first installed AP 1.5.0.45, Filtermeister plugins worked but the preview was not color managed, and there were some other small issues with the UI. I updated AP to version 1.5.1.54 and all of a sudden the same plugins I had tried before have grayed-out checkerboard previews, as if transparent. (It happens with the background pixel layer, a duplicated pixel layer, all of them.) The filters work per se, you just can't see what you are doing. I uninstalled AP and reinstalled the old version, but the new problem is still there, images grayed out. Something got worse somehow; was hoping it would get better . . . .

Hello; output levels are needed on the levels dialog. Numbers on the curves dialog would also work. Before printing, the black level needs to be raised above the printer’s total black; a preset value is determined for this based on the printer profile. Thank you, and good work . . . .

This would make a huge difference. RawTherapee uses .dcp profiles as well. X-rite’s ColorChecker software (free download) gives more linear results than Adobe’s .dng profile editor, which tries to “improve” it a little (darker skies etc.)

Bilinear reduction followed by halo-controlled sharpening (you can do it with two unsharp mask layers, or with a plugin) gives better results than bicubic does.

When printing patches for printer profiling, the patches must not be color managed. When Adobe removed the no color management option in CS5, popular demand led them to issue the Adobe Color Printer Utility for this purpose.

Hello, and thank you for Affinity Photo; the world needs more alternatives to you-know-what and Affinity has some great features. Some observations about plugins, some may have been mentioned before. The plugin image preview is not color managed, making it difficult to adjust color. Dropdowns on the plugin UI (with FilterMeister plugins anyway) only show two menu items; the arrow keys must be used to scroll down. I do not see a progress bar after the filter is displayed. And I have had two crashes so far on opening plugins, which previously opened. Here are some plugins to work with at http://www.russellcottrell.com/photo/RCFilters.htm The curves dialog needs to show the input and output values for the selected point. This is especially important for the center point of Lab’s a and b curves. Also, could HSB/HSL mode be added? Congratulations on the HDR merge feature; the .exr output file is the highest quality that I have seen, much better than that of the well-known HDR programs. When merging .tifs (rather that raw files so the camera .dcp profile can be applied first), all other programs that I have tried produce very noisy shadows, often unusable, when opened in applications such as SNS-HDR. (Nothing against your tone-mapping per se but SNS-HDR is the best.) The Affinity .exr’s are high-quality, fully usable. But I have run into a few problems; several of the images I merged had artifacts, little vertical colored lines in the output. And the output files do not look the same when trying to merge them into a panorama with PTGui; the exposure and color balance vary, even with images identically exposed and raw processed (in RawTherapee). I don’t know if this is inevitable or not; I have not had images of this high quality to work with before. Also, could the New HDR Merge dialog save the last used settings (alignment, ghosts, noise reduction, tone map)? Lastly, being able to export files as .psb would be useful. Thank you again . . . . —Russell