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Hello guys,

 

Thanks for developing this nice application.

 

I have some issues merging stacked images from "new stack" option. I try merge 20  images and it doesn't start doing anything even after 15 minutes, but the RAM usage is over 30 GB, all JPGs only. Force quitting program from task manager is the only way to solve it. The stacking in any of the menu options takes too long in stable or BETA, almost 5 minute just for a simple stack process.

I also have issues with Panorama and HDR stacking like in previous stable edition. Aligning HDR brackets will sometime lock to skies and move the landscape, you know how that story ends. The HDR noise reduction removes important details and replace them with big artifacts or just massive blotches of black/nothing.

The "tonemapping" function - or your RAW converter - have a long way to go. I get the cringe every time I need to go in there, and the results I get can easily get better surpassed by cellphone apps. It feels like I'm pushing a JPG every time I'm in that converter and not a RAW file, the details instantly clip to black using "black point" setting, but you did some magic with the latest "highlight" and "shadow" slider, it feels better. Worst part is the crazy lagg I get from pushing any of the sliders, mouse and system freeze for seconds before slider jumps to "next" spot, even freeze my Spotify playing. This is a 12 core Threadripper 4 GHz with 32 GB RAM, 1080 Ti and NVMe SSDs, so it should be able to handle a basic RAW converter, I got CaptureOne Pro v11 and no problem there with a lot more tools and stuff.

I don't find any way to tune the Panorama merge function like in PtGui, I wish it had more options like that program. I don't know if it is possible to tweek the perspective after the merge, but there should be more features while having the image as layers, thats when you got the most power to fix things.

There is one function I miss from PS CC and I hope you can add similar function, because this is invaluable when using a Wacom tablet like I do. Just FYI, I replace mouse buttons on my pen, so this works great for me:
In brush tool (PS CC), hold (Left Alt), Hold (Right mouse click), move mouse up and down to change size of any brush tool. Move mouse side to side to change the hardness.


Don't take the critic too hard, I know you're not Adobe and I probably won't get any of the things I'm asking for, but I hope you guys spend more time on the features above. The stacking features and RAW converter/tonemapping should really be top priority for you to fix. I just left Adobe but I feel forced to go buy PtGui because this stacking you got going on never works for me.
 

 

Best regards
Aleksander

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37 minutes ago, atefoto said:

There is one function I miss from PS CC and I hope you can add similar function, because this is invaluable when using a Wacom tablet like I do. Just FYI, I replace mouse buttons on my pen, so this works great for me:
In brush tool (PS CC), hold (Left Alt), Hold (Right mouse click), move mouse up and down to change size of any brush tool. Move mouse side to side to change the hardness.

I agree with you here, working with tablet this missing brush workflow should be added.

Cheers,
Juan

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Yeah, when using PS CC I used ALT+Right mouse click on my Wacom's thumb button, so I could easily change the hardness and size of the brush. It is very useful when working with dodge and burn on portraits and such - even in general use.

I know I can bind brush size to my Wacom buttons, because I do this now in Affinity, but it is not as fluid and intuitive as using the PS CC method.

20 minutes ago, jc4d said:

I agree with you here, working with tablet this missing brush workflow should be added.

Cheers,
Juan

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Hey atefoto,

Thank you for your feedback. Positive and negative feedback is always welcome.

I have come across a few reports of high-end PC's struggling with the most simple tasks. I'm not entirely sure what the cause of this is. Perhaps it gets reported by users with high-end PC's because they're expecting blistering performance, and quite rightly so.

My sliders aren't lagging in 1.7 as this was reported in 1.6 but I thought had been fixed. 

We have sped up the raw engine so your images should open much quicker but the develop time has slightly increased as we're doing some extra work behind the scenes. Tone Mapping can also be slow to open. I've seen users report upwards of 2-3 minutes but this can be affected by the type and size of the image you're working on... 

I have mapped a right-click to my Wacom pen to allow me to change brush width/hardness when I hold it along with the Alt key on my keyboard—you should be able to do this too.

I'll pass your feedback on and update you with any info I get.

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10 hours ago, Chris B said:

Hey atefoto,

Thank you for your feedback. Positive and negative feedback is always welcome.

I have come across a few reports of high-end PC's struggling with the most simple tasks. I'm not entirely sure what the cause of this is. Perhaps it gets reported by users with high-end PC's because they're expecting blistering performance, and quite rightly so.

My sliders aren't lagging in 1.7 as this was reported in 1.6 but I thought had been fixed. 

We have sped up the raw engine so your images should open much quicker but the develop time has slightly increased as we're doing some extra work behind the scenes. Tone Mapping can also be slow to open. I've seen users report upwards of 2-3 minutes but this can be affected by the type and size of the image you're working on... 

I have mapped a right-click to my Wacom pen to allow me to change brush width/hardness when I hold it along with the Alt key on my keyboard—you should be able to do this too.

I'll pass your feedback on and update you with any info I get.

You're welcome.

Well, issue is that I can try to move one slider just a bit, and suddenly whole PC freeze without any reason. I have no problems in similar programs, and I had Photoshop some weeks ago, no problem there either. CaptureOne is a very intensive application, even there I have no problem. I'll try to make a video tomorrow if I have time.

The freeze I notice is not the kind of "its only a bit slow", but it is actually bogging down the PC completely.. It even interfere with playing a song on Spotify, and thats by just dragging the whitebalance on one regular 24 Megapixel RAW file.

I'm only stacking two 24 megapixel RAWs, and that takes a lot of time - sometimes. Tonemapping them is even worse than regular RAW, but that is kind of expected since RAW editor also laggs on one RAW file.

I'll try to do this next time I'm in Affinity, thank you.

Just check in on the thread tomorrow, I'll try to get that video going to show you my problem.

Aleksander

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I do panos, stacking and ungrouping for subsequent manual blending, focus stacking of more than some 200 images but have not come across such a difficult situation as reported in above threads. I use hugin also for panos,it's good but found AP doing a better and faster job though hugin has more options and alignment related features being specifically for panos work. Editing features are minimal in hugin. Ishall try to do some trials to simulate reported issues and report if problems are noted. 

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6 hours ago, atefoto said:

I'll try to make a video tomorrow if I have time.

That would be great—thank you. Could you also upload a couple example images to our private Dropbox so I can check the performance on my lower spec PC?

@unni - The issues above described seem to happen on some high-end machines but I'm not sure what exactly causes it.

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I tried the following steps:

1. Images 1 and 2 - top portion of scene low and mid exposure.
2. Images 3 and 4 - bottom portion of scene, low and mid exposure, 30% overlap with images 1 and 2.
3. Open as stack 1&2, align perspective only, ungroup stack and store in tif format as individual images.
4. Do the same 3rd step with images 3 and 4.
5. Now make pano using image 1 and 3 to get a low exposure image and save as A in tif.
6. Make pano using image 2 and 4 to get mid exposure image and save as B in tif.
7. Open image A and B as a stack, align using option scale,rotate,translate, then ungroup.
8. On checking the alignment by turning one layer ON and OFF at 600X or so does not show any misalignment.

This shows that it is possible to make a final pano out of different sets of exposure bracketed images. If the images are shot with
nodal correction brackets/tripod, step 7 may require only perspective option in the stack alignment.

Below is a final image exposure blended manually using luminosity masks, intermediate LAB mode usage, USM, clarity .
One mid and one high exposure was used as input and aligned as stack, ungrouped, saved as two tif images, then opened
the tif images as layers. Regular processing done on layers after this stage.(There is no pano step in the below image).
Image taken with D7000, handheld, 70mm , f7.1, 1/2500, iso 320, Nikon 70-300 VRii lens.

@Chris B  : My system is a normal core I3-4150 CPU, 3.5GHz, 16GB ram, 64bit Win 7, Gigabyte motherboard, home assembled.

rock series 3 2048.jpg

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15 hours ago, Chris B said:

That would be great—thank you. Could you also upload a couple example images to our private Dropbox so I can check the performance on my lower spec PC?

@unni - The issues above described seem to happen on some high-end machines but I'm not sure what exactly causes it.

Impossible, the interface and PC hang so much that even SnagIt, ShadowPlay and other recording applications stop working and give error message.

I have to give another try tomorrow, maybe trying to record with my cellphone or so..

I notice CPU usage is always less than 20% total GPU is always less than 5% when stacking. Doesn't Affinity take advantage of multicore or GPU power when stacking? Disk read/write speed is low as-well, and RAM usage was only 4 of 32 GB.

The wacom shortcut works, but I do believe it is ALT+LeftMB+RightMB to enable size and hardness changes :) Anyway, that was very helpful.

I'll also upload the files to a cloud when I'm retrying this again.



Aleksander

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16 hours ago, Chris B said:

That would be great—thank you. Could you also upload a couple example images to our private Dropbox so I can check the performance on my lower spec PC?

@unni - The issues above described seem to happen on some high-end machines but I'm not sure what exactly causes it.

Until video is ready, here is a couple of sets for stacking which I'm not too afaid to share. :P JottaCloud
https://www.jottacloud.com/s/151edd6a29a269d44699eeb494ca1872525

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I downloaded the jpegs, made 3 sets of 5 images. Each set was put through HDR. This gave 3 images
as output. The 3 HDR output images was treated in panorama mode to get the single final image.
No other editing was done except slight exposure correction by curves at the right top quadrant area for clouds.

The HDR processed within 3 minutes (per set of 5 jpegs).

The second image is a quick hand manual exposure blending of just two images.

HDR 3 sets - then pan.jpg

manual quick blend-2 images.jpg

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Thanks for the sample files. I've spent a good amount of time running some tests and this is what I came up with:

  1. New Stack with 2 images - 47 seconds
  2. New Stack with 9 images - 03:55
  3. 3. New Stack with 17 images -  07:45

So pretty much 40-47 seconds per image

  1. New Panorama with 2 images - 51 seconds / Rendering took 43 seconds
  2. New Panorama with 9 images - 05:02 / Rendering took 47 seconds
  3.  New Panorama with 17 images - Inconclusive. My entire PC after 30 minutes was unresponsive and I had to do a hard reboot. 

Tone Mapping Persona with these images always took over a minute but as I work with the software daily, this behaviour is what I would describe as typical but that does not mean I don't think it couldn't be improved. 

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On 11/30/2018 at 3:01 PM, glootech said:

I can confirm that sometimes when using sliders the whole UI becomes unresponsive (to the point that standard window decorations start to show). It usually happens not long after launch and gets better over time.

Yeah, thats the problem. It can last for 5 seconds every time, and it happends a couple times pr image.

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On 12/1/2018 at 4:53 AM, unni said:

I downloaded the jpegs, made 3 sets of 5 images. Each set was put through HDR. This gave 3 images
as output. The 3 HDR output images was treated in panorama mode to get the single final image.
No other editing was done except slight exposure correction by curves at the right top quadrant area for clouds.

The HDR processed within 3 minutes (per set of 5 jpegs).

The second image is a quick hand manual exposure blending of just two images.

HDR 3 sets - then pan.jpg

manual quick blend-2 images.jpg

Fantastic results man, I'll be happy to see a screencast while you do this :)

Anyway, it might be down to what you're used to, or I in other words. I've been using (and still using) CaptureOne V12 Pro (since V6), and I find the lack of the RAW converter or "tone mapper" to be a challenge for me. I might have to sit down some days and just force me throug it, but I hope thats now how the developers want us to adapt to it (?).

Regarding the alignment, the images is always misalinged on my side despite I check "align images". Did you have to do something special to get them aligned?  I always get the rear hilltop top to be "ghostlike", double hilltops where one is semi-transparent.

Regarding the time, I saw GamersNexus yesterday state that some graphics applications like GHz rather than more cores - like the Adobe apps. I got AMD with multiple cores, 12 actually, could that be the reason? Mine is running 3.9 GHz.  I know Intel ones run above 4 GHz easily.

Video is not coming today, it's been over my head with work. Portraits for christmas cards, family shoots etc. I'm not complaining, but I don't have the time today to record my problem. In 20 minutes a new client arrives, then rest of the day off with GF :)

I hope you can put aside some time to make a short video of the stacking above, I would appreciate a lot :)

Best regards,

Aleksander

 

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On 12/3/2018 at 11:21 AM, Chris B said:

Thanks for the sample files. I've spent a good amount of time running some tests and this is what I came up with:

  1. New Stack with 2 images - 47 seconds
  2. New Stack with 9 images - 03:55
  3. 3. New Stack with 17 images -  07:45

So pretty much 40-47 seconds per image

  1. New Panorama with 2 images - 51 seconds / Rendering took 43 seconds
  2. New Panorama with 9 images - 05:02 / Rendering took 47 seconds
  3.  New Panorama with 17 images - Inconclusive. My entire PC after 30 minutes was unresponsive and I had to do a hard reboot. 

Tone Mapping Persona with these images always took over a minute but as I work with the software daily, this behaviour is what I would describe as typical but that does not mean I don't think it couldn't be improved. 

Thanks for your data, I'll set aside 1 hour on Friday to make same measurements - as long as no clients "need" more images.

 

Best regards,

Aleksander

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On 12/5/2018 at 12:57 AM, atefoto said:

Fantastic results man, I'll be happy to see a screencast while you do this :)

I hope you can put aside some time to make a short video of the stacking above, I would appreciate a lot
 

@atefoto Hello Aleksander,

I have not used screen capture programs. So I am giving the process in steps.

Sequence of processing:

1. Discarded two images which did not belong to the exposure bracket sequence.
2. Renamed the images as 1a to 1e, 2a to 2e, 3a to 3e. These are three sets of exposure bracketed images.
3. Each set seems to be taken with a large overlap of about 70%. Overlap of about 30% is sufficient.
4. Launch AP.
5. File>HDR Merge>Add> and select images 1a to 1e. Tick options Auto align, NR, Tone map. In the pop box, select perspective.
6. Save output as HDR1.
7. Repeat 5 above for the remaining two sets.
8. Now you have three images - HDR1, HDR2, HDR3.
9. File>New Panorama>Add. Now select the three images of 8 above.
10.Create the final panorama.

I am not sure whether AP or photoshop can handle exposure bracketed panoramas or HDR. It will get confused and align the wrong images.
This is the reason for the issues you noted.
It is best to process each exposure bracket set separately and then make the panorama from the output of each set.

Hope this helps !

Unni

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Did you have to do something special to get them aligned? 

No, nothing special done. all default settings. For serious panoramas, it is better to have a nodally corrected setup.

 

 

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