Dodge / burn brushes behavior and defaults

[geni1105]

I am using it to implement Ming Thein's workflow, who often uses selective dodging of highlights / burning shadows to increase local contrast. This works very well in Photoshop CS5: when applying dodge/burn brushes to highlights or shadows, they nearly do not affect midtones - ok.

However in AP, when either highlights or shadows are selected also the midtones are affected heavily. This can only be worked around by reducing brush opacity to 10%, but then the intended effect is mostly gone.

So IMHO a steeper separation between highlights, midtones and shadows would be needed.

 

Secondly, it is annoying that the brushes change to their defaults for every newly opened image.

I am pretty sure most users would prefer to keep the last used settings.

 

Not sure if these are feature requests or bug reports ...

 

Anyway, congratulations to this otherwise great application! 

 

Thanks, Georg 

[Chris_K]

I would have to say this is more a subjective thing and a feature request rather than a bug. Moving this to feature request thread

[geni1105]

I have to bring this up again, because I am not able to reach the dodge / burn results that I want with AP and comparing to PS behaviour.

 

I did a test of dodge and burn brushes on a gradient fill converted to a pixel layer, see attached image.

I used brush size 250 for dodging and burning with the 3 options highlights / midtones / shadows each, all other settings left at their default values.

One horizontal stripe (going back and forth twice, mouse kept clicked) per setting.

 

I might be doing something wrong, but here are my conclusions:

- dodging set to "highlights" reaches far into the midtones, dodging set to "midtones" seems about right, dodging set to "shadows" does not have a significant effect on the shadows

- there is virtually no difference in how dodging affects midtones and shadows, irrespective of the highlights / midtones / shadows setting; if anything, dodging set to "shadows" seems to brighten midtones more than dodging set to "midtones" (!)

 

Similar for burning:

- burning set to "highlights" reaches far into the midtones, burning set to "midtones" has just a weak effect

- burning set to "highlights" darkens midtones slightly more than when set to "midtones" (!)

- burning set to "shadows" even kicks in at a hard threshold, which is high up in the midtones

 

Also, I cannot avoid some posterization on the gradient (even tried 16 Bit RGB and 16 Bit LAB), which is strongly increased by dodging and burning.

 

Finally, there is a significant difference in the strength of dodge/burn effect, whether I am brushing back and forth keeping the mouse clicked, or whether I overlay several separate strokes. Maybe this is intended behaviour, but does not seem logical to me. 

 

This is with AP 1.4, on an iMac Retina running OS X 10.11

 

Thanks, Georg

 

[geni1105]

I'm disappointed that this is considered a feature request rather than a bug report, and that such a basic functionality does not work correctly in AP.

And no reaction from AP staff.

 

I will go back to PS, where dodge/burn works like it should.

[anon1]

Well sort of strange.

Have you tried it again with V1.4.1?

[geni1105]

Unfortunately yes - same behaviour in 1.4.1

[anon1]

Ok, maybe the dev's will find time to look into it.

 

I personally think that it might be good to correct this but on the other hand I think it does not affect real world use too much.

[BJA 42]

As suggested by Mbd, a mere detail in the overall concept of such an advanced Photo software. To consider going back to mummy it is not worth considering, Brian