MikeFromMesa

> So I have to wait Or you can use the Adobe raw converter to convert the files to dng for the meantime. APB should process those files without any trouble, and the dng converter is free.

Topaz's new product, Studio, is available as a plugin and does not work with beta 5. PhotoLine calls every single Photoshop compatible plugin that I have tried and they all have run properly, but of course PhotoLine does not have to conform to the App Store restrictions, so their job is much easier.

Affinity Photo deserves a very positive review as it has turned out to be much, much better than I expected when I first started using the Beta. The only negative things I can say about the editor are that it still is unable to properly call Photoshop plugins and there is no way to call an external application. Other than that the editor is simply wonderful and I have had no regrets abandoning Photoshop.

dpReview has reviewed AP and you can find the review here.

Thank you. That would be a big help.

Bill, I shot the images at a reasonably high aperture so it really only took 2 or 3 images to cover the entire range of the flower. APB was successful with those images but lost its way with the entire set. I do not know what algorithm they use for the blending but I assumed it involves sharpness of the contrast (and hence the focus) to determine which parts of the image are OK to use and which are not. I have written enough software to not be too critical of someone's algorithm because it is often the case that the the easiest way to speed and success under one set of circumstances leads to failure in another, and that may well be the case here. Still, I thought it was worth mentioning online so the moderators could report the state to the developers. Mike

I have been testing the functionality on a new Olympus E-M1 Mk II and part of that is the automatic creation of a set of focus merge photos. The camera automatically changes the focus for a series of shots and does not stop until nothing is in focus. This works well, but using the set to create a Focus Merge image in APB gave me this: I added all of the images from the set and clearly that caused this OOF issue with the assembled image. Picking fewer images fixed the issue but why would adding extra images where, presumably, the background items are in focus, cause this problem? What are the guidlines for adding images to a Focus Set? Does APB go astray if some of the images are OOF? Or if some have the main object of the image OOF, even if the background is in focus?

I just took several sequences of focus merge shots and was putting them together in APB when I realized that I had not selected one of the set for the merge. I tried to stop the Focus Merge functionality as it takes a long time to complete and I just wanted to start over again using all of the photos, but could find no way to stop the process once it began. Is there some way to stop a Focus Merge from completing, short of killing the process? If so, what is it? If not, should there not be some way to cancel an operation like that?

Thank you. So I guess I do not have to be as concerned as I have been about the new file system.

And is your copy of AP on the APFS file system?

As I understand it the High Sierra update will give users the option of upgrading their file system to APFS. Given that, I assume AP will not have an issue with the upgrade if users decide to stay with HFS+, so the questions really are, will the next MAS release be ready for APFS or will most users stay with HFS+ for a while? Personally I think I will hold off on upgrading my file system since the change to APFS may have serious effects on some apps and I would like to give Apple enough time to have ironed out any issues as well as the app developers.

I have captured what happens on my system when I try to open multiple files, either directly or through Finder. The dropbox link to the video is here. It is about 2 minutes long (I wanted to wait long enough that people would not suggest I did not wait long enough) and you can see the result of my attempt to close APB at about 1:30 into the video.

Well then, if it is not happening to you with Beta 4 then it must be something on my system. Still, it does not happen with AP itself, only with the beta. I think I am going to make a screen video of this to show the developers what is happening on my system at least. Perhaps that will help. It is very discouraging as it requires that I reboot my system. It does not happen when I open one jpg that way, but it happens every single time I open the same 14 jpgs using Finder or just try to open the same 14 jpgs with the Open command. Perhaps I will also try to open 14 different jpgs and see if the problem repeats itself. Thanks for the post.

I came across this issue today while I was trying to finish doing some photo processing. I had processed a series of files using my workflow tool and had to do some perspective correction using APB. I selected 14 files using Finder and then right-clicked and told my Mac to open them in APB. APB opened, displayed a message saying it was loading 14 files and then just sat there. 20 minutes later it was still telling me it was loading the files, but nothing was actually loading. The Activity Monitor told me the app was getting time, but it was not doing anything visible. I killed the process and tried it with AP and that worked properly and I did the processing I needed in AP. I then rebooted and again tried to load those same files into APB. Again APB opened and said it was loading 14 files. It then loaded 7 of them and the display changed to say it was loading 7 files (presumably the remaining 7), but then it just sat there. I killed the process and tried again, and this time it did not load any files. It told me it was doing so, but nothing happened. This is new since the latest beta as I have done exactly the same sort of thing repeatedly with the previous beta without any issue. Has anyone else seen this problem? Oh, by the way, when you try to close APB while it is "opening" those files you get the following message:

I do not have that camera but I went to dpReview and downloaded one of the raw photos from their gallery for that camera and it processed properly in the Develop Persona. The histogram looked a bit off from the photo, but the editing controls seemed to work properly. I was able to edit in in the Develop Persona and then send it to the Photo Persona where I could continue to edit it. Can you not open the photo with APB? Or is the issue something different?

There was some talk some time ago about being able to change the order of the adjustments under the adjustment tab. I can see with Beta 4 that this has not yet been implemented. Does anyone know if there are any plans to do so? The adjustments are certainly not in the order I would like to use them. Thanks for any help.

Got it. Found it. It works. Thanks.

I do not see a workspace panel on the Mac version.

This is very puzzling to me. I have been using AP/APB since the first Beta was released and I never noticed an Arrange command before. I suppose that I have been using it for so long that I only saw what I knew was there and not what was added later, but it is hard for me to understand how an entire command/pulldown went unnoticed. I wonder when it was added ... Thanks for pointing that out to me.

@Alfred: > No such problem here, Mike. Apologies if I'm asking the obvious, but did you make sure that the original layer was not selected in the Layers panel? Yes. I made sure only one layer was selected. Flipping the selected layer also flips the unselected layer as the entire Document is flipped.

When doing Keystone adjustmenst on one of my photos (in CaptureOne) I found that the result was a great deal of missing information on the bottom left of the photo. Since the photo forefront was largely symmetric it seemed reasonable to assume I could load the photo into AP, duplicate the layer, flip the duplicate layer horizontally and just cut out the missing information on the original layer allowing the flipped underlying layer to supply the missing information. Unfortunately you can not do that in AP because (I assume) the layers are linked, so flipping the duplicate also flips the original. Is there a way to duplicate a layer and flip only the duplicate? This is functionality I have occasionally found to be very helpful. You can not load a second copy of the file because AP will not allow the same file to be loaded twice. Of course I can copy the original, rename it, save it back to the original folder and then load it (which, in fact, is what I ended up doing), or create a new document and copy the original to it, but perhaps there is a way to do what I want without all of the foot shuffling.

Yes, but selecting polygon does not guarantee a straight line when drawing. I tried that and ended up with a curved wiggly line. The Pen Tool does what I need as does using the Shift key.

My mistake. I re-read your instructions and this time, when I did what you wrote, it worked. I am not sure why I misunderstood your post before, but I have it now. Thanks for following up.

This is another piece of functionality that I was not aware of. I really need to clean my glasses and read the help information at the bottom of the screen. However, when I tried this, my experience is that it does not constrain the selection to a straight line but rather adds a straight line to the already-done selection. Thus, given my shaky hand, if I try to select a straight line using the shift key I get a wobbly line (from my inability to keep the cursor moving straight) followed by an enclosing straight line. This can be very helpful, but it is not what I needed for the correction I was working on. However it reminds me how complete AP actually is. I have been using it since the first Beta, but apparently I learned what I needed to do for the stuff I usually do and then stopped trying to learn more. Thus, when I tried to go back and do some really intensive retouching work (removing people, correcting really bad distortion, removing flash reflections, straightening buildings, etc) I ran out of what I already knew. Thanks for the post.

Yes. That is exactly what I wanted to do. I guess I need to sit down and go through the tutorials again because, after all this time using AP, I did not know what the Pen Tool did, or that it was what I needed. Thank you very much for your post. Now I need to go back to some of those earlier photos and redo them.