Presales question: disabling demosaic, sharpening, lens crop-factor detecting precion

[R C-R]

39 minutes ago, Wumpus said:

Fortunately, for an entirely user-group supported product, it appears to have a great community.

By no means are the Affinity products just supported by its user community. The Serif staff & sometimes even the Affinity application developers frequently respond to user questions in these forums, even to the point of suggesting when other competing products would be better for some user's needs.

Good luck getting that kind of 'over & beyond' support from other commercial software makers.

[Wumpus]

Sorry, i may well stand to be corrected. Not trying to troll or pick a fight. I was just speaking from my personal observations. 3 requests, 1 of which has gone for a month (with bumps), seeing no material support (aside from an excellent user community trying to fill in that support gap). Part of the time, the requests came as presales, then converted to post-sales requests. In my posts, I believe I had mentioned contacting other companies, and the great support I received. 

And I may not be an expert in this domain, but in this case, I certainly do happen to have some experience: started out as a tech support rep and worked up to running an entire Fortune 500 contact centre for a few years, for a photographic imaging company, no less.

I would love to be proven wrong. Or maybe hired as a consultant to improve the service.

[R C-R]

17 minutes ago, Wumpus said:

Sorry, i may well stand to be corrected. Not trying to troll or pick a fight. I was just speaking from my personal observations. 3 requests, 1 of which has gone for a month (with bumps), seeing no material support (aside from an excellent user community trying to fill in that support gap).

Using the forum "Find Content" feature, I can find 3 topics you have posted something to. Aside from this topic, in this one, which you started less than a day ago, you seemed to get the answer you were looking for so there was no need for a staff reply. The other one includes 2 comments you made to the Photo Beta on Mac > Pre 1.7 archive sub-forum, which means it does not apply to the current 1.7 beta. Probably not the best place to add a 'bump,' since that topic no longer is relevant to the current beta & few people (staff or other users) will be paying much attention to anything added to it, particularly since you mentioned that it was just the closest topic you have seen to what you were asking about.

In general, it is better to start a new topic for questions like that, posted to the most appropriate product forum. Otherwise, it is likely to get overlooked or ignored.

[Wumpus]

Fair points. I suppose I was getting frustrated after starting a new topic a month ago, and progressively growing desperate (since the help also didn't seem to provide sufficient 'help'), so I began hunting everywhere on the site, trying to find answers. At least that demonstrates that I was making an effort. The only material responses I have ever received have only come from supportive users (such as yourself), that have somehow managed to come across my requests, underlining the importance and quality of the user base here.

A prospective user has only a short window of time to evaluate the product, as does a new customer: in both cases, there's just 14 days to make a decision (trial or return), and so those first 14 days are critical in supplying a positive experience. The marketing is already excellent. I don't have much time (the clock is still counting down): I think I am not a total moron, and am making an honest effort to evaluate buying into this product for the longer term, which to me, also includes its entire ecosystem.

There is some impressive functionality to this application, but the end-user supports, such as documentation and tech support, are still, in my opinion, lacking. I must factor into my decision that in using this product, despite strong protests in the contrary, I have only seen with my own eyes that the only beneficial support has come from its excellent user base. Yes, I will improve where I learn to search and post here, and what nomenclature I should be using, but I am also a net-new user, making a reasonable effort as such. I didn't expect to find a perfect mix from a vendor: that exists solely with the unicorns - the decision about switching my entire workflow from one process one to another is (to me) a big one, and I accepted in advance that there will be positives and negatives to each vendor and product. In this case of this product, it appears that resolving any support issues may take an unknown duration, and depend on the user base. Some companies work that way, others don't, or others charge a fortune for ongoing support: that's part of the balance sheet each product/vendor brings to its markets, and apparently one the management is confortable with (a totally fair business decision). I am still with CorelDraw & Paint since version 2.02, and trueSpace for 11 years (before Microsoft squashed it), Silkypix, not to mention many independent utilities and tablet apps and programs that I haven't had as long (but I'm still counting). I make a careful decision and tend to stay with a product.

I do thank you for your passion and care you've demonstrated for this product: in my opinion, a supportive user base is one of the finest things a product can offer.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Wumpus said:

I suppose I was getting frustrated after starting a new topic a month ago, and progressively growing desperate ...

Do you mean this topic that you started on 15 January? If so, you began to get answers to your several questions almost immediately, including one from @firstdefence that linked to a pair of relevant posts from Affinity staff that I think should have answered some of those questions. The discussion got a bit bogged down on the issue of disabling demosaicing but after that the first reply directly to you from a staff member was on the 18th from @Callum.

I see that Callum never got back to you with his findings about that. I think that was just an oversight, something that happens from time to time but not that frequently, which can be attributed to the large volume of new & continuing topics the staff are trying to keep up with. Inevitably, a few things will fall through the cracks but if you browse through the topics I think you will see that is the exception rather than the rule.

There are a few things you can do to reduce the chances of that happening to you. One is to use the @ form in a reply like I did above; another is to reply directly to a staff member post, quoting what you are still waiting for a reply to. Both generate notifications the staff person will see.

[John Rostron]

12 minutes ago, R C-R said:

One is to use the @ form in a reply

Can I elaborate on this. It took me some time to suss it out. You first check the spelling of the target user's name - very important! Then enter the @ followed by the name. As you type, you will get a list of suggestions. When you see the right one, click on it and it will appear highlighted in your mesage.

John

[Wumpus]

Thank you @John Rostron and @R C-R. Yes, I will use this user-tagging method going forward. Great tip, again from a super supportive user base!

I did get a whole bunch of friendly, speculative responses right off the bat to this topic, but no, none of them were really entirely pertinent, though very welcoming, and so appreciated.

I still don't have authoritative answers about my supported lenses, and I still don't have complete explanations about demosaicing/noise/sharpening. Those were my two topics in this thread. I still don't know about the Clipped Tones functionality/usage (but that was another thread). No constructive or authoritative feedback has been received to date from anyone in support.

@John Rostron fully helped me with my stack layer repositioning question, and I consider that closed, and a great kindness.

With a great deal of effort on my part, I seem to be making progress on denoising and sharpening, to try to avoid creating artefacts, but it's been a month, and I've looked online and through the docs, and it really would have been preferable to be able to spend that time developing photos, and not reverse engineering unexplained functionalities.

I apologize if my frustration is showing. I'm starting to think that I can get some good images from the product, but I need to do some critical comparisons to other development apps/workflows.

I will use these considerate & constructive suggestions for my future topics going forward, and if I sound snarky, please accept my apologies, because the suggestions will definitely be useful.

[R C-R]

19 minutes ago, Wumpus said:

I still don't have authoritative answers about my supported lenses, and I still don't have complete explanations about demosaicing/noise/sharpening.

Lens support depends on support for the specific combination of camera & lens models, & on the develop engine (Mac core or Affinity) being used. There is no definitive answer that applies to them all other than that, & there may be bugs in either engine or in Affinity's ability to read the relevant metadata that the engine uses.

So basically, anything more definitive than that is pretty much going to have to be done on a case by case basis. For that to happen, you need to supply as much info as you can about the exact camera & lens model you are using, the engine you are using, what if anything changes if you switch engines, & anything else that might help clarify what you want to know and/or the source of any issues you might have with that. It also would not hurt to include a few sample RAW files, one for each of the several camera/lens combos you are asking about.

As for demosaicing, as was discussed at some length on the first page of this topic, there does not seem to be any way to develop a RAW file into a usable image without doing that. How that is done in combination with color/luminance noise reduction (if applied) & the various enhancement options that affect clarity/detail refinement/etc., & by which engine (one of which is not under the control of Affinity Photo) is also dependent on the specific camera/lens combination, & on whatever info is in the version of the LensFun database used by Affinity Photo for that combo.

IOW, anything approaching a "complete" explanation of that topic would be what amounts to an enormously long scholarly "white paper" kind of article, far to large for inclusion in a support forum reply, & it still would have gaps because some of that info is proprietary either to Serif or Apple.

[Old Bruce]

I think back to the discussions about film grain whenever I hear 'noise' or 'demosaicing' or 'sharpening'. I also think back to Ansel Adams' comment "The negative is the score, the print is the performance". We listen to your performance so please don't spend too much time reading scores to find the best one to play. In my opinion it is all pretty much subjective nowadays regarding electric cameras and software combinations, the best one is the one you have.

[Callum]

12 hours ago, Wumpus said:

Thank you @John Rostron and @R C-R. Yes, I will use this user-tagging method going forward. Great tip, again from a super supportive user base!

I did get a whole bunch of friendly, speculative responses right off the bat to this topic, but no, none of them were really entirely pertinent, though very welcoming, and so appreciated.

I still don't have authoritative answers about my supported lenses, and I still don't have complete explanations about demosaicing/noise/sharpening. Those were my two topics in this thread. I still don't know about the Clipped Tones functionality/usage (but that was another thread). No constructive or authoritative feedback has been received to date from anyone in support.

@John Rostron fully helped me with my stack layer repositioning question, and I consider that closed, and a great kindness.

With a great deal of effort on my part, I seem to be making progress on denoising and sharpening, to try to avoid creating artefacts, but it's been a month, and I've looked online and through the docs, and it really would have been preferable to be able to spend that time developing photos, and not reverse engineering unexplained functionalities.

I apologize if my frustration is showing. I'm starting to think that I can get some good images from the product, but I need to do some critical comparisons to other development apps/workflows.

I will use these considerate & constructive suggestions for my future topics going forward, and if I sound snarky, please accept my apologies, because the suggestions will definitely be useful.

Hi Wumpus,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. We use the Lens Phun database in the Affinity apps and from a quick look at the list on there website it would seem the lenses aren't supported by them unfortunately.

 

@R C-R Thank you for bringing this thread to my attention sometimes they do slip through the net!

Thanks

Callum

[Wumpus]

@R C-R thanks for your input on the situation - I was just holding out for a definitive answer from the vendor, for as well-intentioned and knowledgeable a user community might be, it still holds no authority: Affinity marketing probaby enjoys saying that they have broad lens support, and wouldn't want to add an asterix saying that it really depends on a case-by-case basis as to whether its supported, or quoting scholarly texts and white papers, so I figured they would give us our definitive answer.

I didnt get my answer, but I did get an answer: it sounds like my lenses are unsupported, and Lensfun, being a 3rd-party,  isn't really supported, so I took my Affinity support question over to them and got a quick answer. Even though the Affinity table provided only matches crop ratios to lenses (and as the user community forum correctly pointed out to me earlier, that's just to keep the table small, and isn't actually representative for what is supported or not) what matters is the exact camera and lens combination, and sometimes set focal distances, for zooms, but the crop actually ratio has nothing to do with whether a given lens is supported or not, even if it makes a 100% match. So the provided table is conveniently compact, but not reliably representative. But enough about that - at least I now know I need to create my own profiles (as stated earlier, I will, per each camera model), and that all my lenses have successfully been profiled onto other bodies, so it's 'doable'. And hopefully, others that might have seen a match of their lens to their crop ratio now know they need to check the Lensfun database on their own website to confirm if their lenses are actually supported with their bodies. So we're making progress! One Original Post question now down!

As far as the weird artefacts I was seeing, which I thought must be some denoising or demosaicing anomaly, now don't appear to be. It seems that Affinity Photo 1.65 is uncontrollably enlarging my images almost 50% upon opening them as RAW images, and the upsampling method is most likely introducing those effects. I haven't been able to stop that happening, and it only seems to happen on my SD1M when I use it at Medium resolution (which uses binning to improve signal:noise and reduce the CoC). The CoC doesn't seem to change in the Focus tab when I change resolutions (maybe it shouldn't?), but the image resolution always auto-scales up to the Full resolution dimensions. It doesn't commensurately up-rez my Full resolution photos, only the Medium resolution photos. I would have thought that might be a bug, but maybe it's intended to be a suggestion to only shoot in Full resolution, because it will reward you with good quality at Full resolution.

In the attached screenshot, the green selection indicates the actual resolution used for the image, while the yellow indicated selection is the resolution that the image gets upsized to. I understand that they don't need to be the same, as there's always some outer control pixels which might or might not be counted, and I think that's great that as many as possible are grabbed. But there shouldn't be (in this case) 47% more pixels in just a single dimension (and a similar increase for the other dimension). So, I think my answer here is "always only shoot at Full resolution". I tried using other RAW processors to compare, and that's when I realized that the Affinity output was also always a lot bigger. So, my second Original Post question is finally resolved too! Hopefully that will save another user a month or so.

Another thing that added to some of the unusual effects was that images shot in the camera's B/W mode (images get brought in where all three colours merged to grey at each photosite, giving creamy smooth shades, or alternately you can take colour images and only take the blue layer, which has the least noise, and then make that B/W, but that second method would be like shooting through a tungsten filter and would accordingly change what is 'light' or 'dark'). With Affinity, it doesn't seem to be able to read from the RAW that a photo was taken in B/W, whereas other RAW developers can (even Irfanview autodetects and opens the RAWs in B/W mode), so you can't take advantage of that B/W mode, and there's also no way to just grab the top layer, even if you try to manually remove RG and CMY, leaving only B, or even allowing G and C (which have some Blue), but then the image becomes abnormally noisy. So there's no way to achieve good B/W, unless it's totally done in PP, and that still gives you the noisiness of each layer, as opposed to the sum total of all layers or the least noisy layer, so it's not really useful. I tried doing some exposure stacking, which is very easy in Affinity Photo, and it certainly improves the noise, but is still not near as good as one single frame from the same set of stacked images taken in pure B/W. Hopefully a version before 2.x will address that, as I've bought the product now.
Thanks!