Photo Develop Persona - Vectorscope

[Ferdinand13]

Having the Scope/Vectorscope in Affinity Photo's Develop Persona is a really powerful tool and something that even Photoshop's Camera RAW dialog doesn't have as of yet. However in it's current implementation the Vectorscope is a bit useless.

First of all, the main use of the Vectorscope in my view is to ensure your skintones are correct, making use of the "I" line at around 11 o'clock. In order to do this, you currently have to crop your image to a suitable area of your subject's skin, make the changes to your WB and Tint settings to have the colour align better to the "I" line, then reset the crop back to where it was before.

This process is a bit too convoluted. Instead, it would be great, if the user could marquee select an area of the image which would then be isolated in the Vectorscope. Making changes, one would then be able to see the Vectorscope update (still in isolation mode), before clicking out of the isolation mode once the changes have been made.

Another possible way to achieve this would be to be able to link the image zoom to the Vectorscope, so it would sample only the area of the image that's currently visible. This way one could zoom all the way to a suitable area of skin and make changes accordingly.

Furthermore - as a takeaway from DaVinci Resolve - it would be a great addition, to have a "circle" appear on the Vectorscope that corresponds with the area of colour that's under the cursor. This way, once again, the user would be able to quickly identify where the colours "live" and if skintones are in the right ballpark.

Lastly, if it would be able for the cursor to not just sample a 1x1 pixel area but larger pixel areas that could be user defined, this would also help a lot, as often with the Vectorscope the user is after sampling an averaged area of pixels rather than individual ones.

 

P.S.: Is there a reason why the Vectorscope is only available inside the Develop Persona? It'd be incredibly useful for the standard "Photo" persona as well.

 

[carl123]

2 hours ago, Ferdinand13 said:

P.S.: Is there a reason why the Vectorscope is only available inside the Develop Persona? It'd be incredibly useful for the standard "Photo" persona as well.

It is available in the Photo persona

[fde101]

Yes, in the Scope panel which is hidden by default.

That said, I have two major issues with the Scope panel which make it next to useless for most real-world applications:

• You can only see one scope at a time.  For example, I can't have both the RGB Parade and the Vectorscope (the most powerful combination of the available scopes) visible at once.  The only pseudo-scope you can have on with one of the others is the relatively worthless Histogram which is in a panel of its own and visible by default in the Photo persona.
• It can't be resized.  You can make the panel wider, but the actual scope within the panel has a fixed size and simply centers itself.  You can't make it taller so you are stuck with one tiny scope at a time.  Compare to Resolve where I might show a two-up or four-up view of scopes and move them to a separate monitor which is only showing scopes so that I can actually see the details.  The scopes in Photo are too small to tap their full potential.

The fact that they show the histogram by default and not the far more useful scopes is kind of sad, but that at least can be worked around.  Being limited to one scope at a time is inconvenient.  Not being able to resize the scopes is crippling.

[Ferdinand13]

6 hours ago, carl123 said:

It is available in the Photo persona

Oh great, I didn’t know that. Couldn’t find it in the list of panels, but based on the comment below, I should be looking for the “Scopes” panel. 

[Ferdinand13]

5 hours ago, fde101 said:

Yes, in the Scope panel which is hidden by default.

That said, I have two major issues with the Scope panel which make it next to useless for most real-world applications:

• You can only see one scope at a time.  For example, I can't have both the RGB Parade and the Vectorscope (the most powerful combination of the available scopes) visible at once.  The only pseudo-scope you can have on with one of the others is the relatively worthless Histogram which is in a panel of its own and visible by default in the Photo persona.
• It can't be resized.  You can make the panel wider, but the actual scope within the panel has a fixed size and simply centers itself.  You can't make it taller so you are stuck with one tiny scope at a time.  Compare to Resolve where I might show a two-up or four-up view of scopes and move them to a separate monitor which is only showing scopes so that I can actually see the details.  The scopes in Photo are too small to tap their full potential.

The fact that they show the histogram by default and not the far more useful scopes is kind of sad, but that at least can be worked around.  Being limited to one scope at a time is inconvenient.  Not being able to resize the scopes is crippling.

Thanks for the hint and I 100% agree with your comments. The whole “Scopes” panel will need a lot more love to become actually useful. Having said that, the Adobe crowd have been asking for a Vectorscope for years and still didn’t get one. So Affinity Photo is already a step ahead. Fingers crossed their devs listen to this.