Blatherus

Thanks Andy, I was sure I'd tried that. But maybe I was thinking about live filters. Congrats on the Launch Day success. You guys really deserve it!

Andy - thanks for the reply above - sorry I've been off this forum for a while - would have been good to comment in this thread earlier. Will try the workflow you suggest for modifying masks. I have to say that some manipulations in the layer list are a little unintuitive at this point. But I'm keen to make AP work for me. Thanks so much for getting the channel picker in the blend options dialog. That change has made the AP blend options leapfrog PS significantly. Which I think is the vibe you're going for. One more question - is there a way to apply a filter to a single channel? Unsharp masking in Lab only makes sense on the L channel and a/b sometimes need to be blurred but applying blur to L or sharpening to a/b is usually not good. Even in RGB you may only want to sharpen a particular channel or sharpen them differently. csp - I agree that a lot less needs to be done to get basic correct colour with modern cameras but I would argue that many of the Margulis techniques - especially the Lab ones - can make a good picture better and rescue many bad ones, I think they are well worth having in your tool bag. They are great also for moving away from the art in a controlled way.

I keep loading new betas hoping for some movement on these issues but as time moves on it looks like Photo isn't going to replace PS for me anytime soon. I have mentioned them early on in feature requests and bugs as appropriate. I admit I haven't had time to follow all the progress and I may well have missed something. If so great, please let me know how to do it and I'll be happy. I know Dan Margulis evokes polarized opinions but usually in some fairly restricted domains. There are a ton of useful workflows in Professional Photoshop and Photoshop LAB Color that depend on the channel-specific blend-if sliders in the PS layer options dialog. If you do colour correction using those workflows blend-if can be the difference between spending minutes or hours on a correction. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see these in Photo. The layer blending dialog in Photo is as far as I can tell completely ignorant of colour channels and therefore virtually useless for me. The other thing that prevents me from doing a full correction, not a blocker but such an impediment that it's not worth the effort, is that I can't see how to apply e.g. a curves modification to a mask channel. Again if I just haven't found it, please let me know. I can use adjustments to prepare a mask based on e.g. the CMYK yellow or black. But it's hard to tweak in place. In PS I can apply curves to anything I can see - maybe not as an adjustment layer but I can still do that. I like everything as an adjustment layer but if there's no immediate application of adjustments I need to be able to apply them to any pixel layer - including masks. Photo seems like a great bitmap editor, great for collage work - splicing existing photos etc. But PS is still the only game in town for serious colour correction and unfortunately that's what I need to do. Most of the rest I can already do in Designer. Also I still can't believe that we have a Master curve in Lab mode - and it's the default. That just doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make much sense in CMYK either (because neutrals don't have the same value across all channels) and should be avoided in RGB (because master adjustments can shift colours) but that's another battle. So best wishes for Photo but it's not much use for me right now. Also congrats on the Apple Design Award for Designer! You guys really do deserve it!

I tried to find some other input on this but didn't get anywhere. I was expecting the Blend Ranges box to work somewhat like PS layer Blend if sliders. As it stands after some experimentation with gradient boxes I still don't get the Blend Ranges option at all - what are the axes? Input and Output are what exactly? It may just be that this dialog needs some more labels but it may be that it's not what I'm looking for. In PS, in the Layer Style dialog under Blending Options you have the ability to specify that a layer should be shown based on the colour of either the layer itself or the underlying layer. You can set both of these for each of the colorspace colours and also a composite if appropriate (e.g. not for Lab). Especially important is the ability to option-click on the sliders to separate them into two parts that define the range over which the blend should be smoothed. This way you don't get a hard line when you use the blend if sliders to apply significant changes.