"Shadow/Highlights" does not work properly anymore

[Michail]

Unfortunately I have to state that a big deterioration compared to version 1.6 has been taken over into version 1.7.
The filter "Shadow/Highlights" was rewritten in beta and is no longer usable.

I had initiated a thread on this topic in the beta forum (see below), which I now want to continue here.

 

[Steve Beeston]

Agreed. The shadows/highlights live filter is now worthless. Very crude and just compresses the dynamic range at the bottom.

As I recall the filter was recently rewritten for recent versions but that rewrite has now been dumped and the old tool in Develop moved in to Photo. It's just appalling. I'm either going to have to revert to 1.6.5 or go back to Photoshop.  

[Michail]

There's certainly a lot going on at Serif right now. But I would still be happy if a mod could comment on it.
Will the filter stay that way now?

[Steve Beeston]

Credit to someone who posted this elsewhere, but if you open a .affinity file from 1.6 that includes the old shadows/highlight filter, you can copy the layer in to a new document and it works just the way it used to in 1.6. Bonkers!

[Michail]

 

[Michail]

 

[Michail]

Maybe someone can merge the two threads HERE.

[Michail]

@Frozen Death Knight:

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Can you possibly show this with an example?

The filter is mainly used to brighten shadows and darken lights. This is the real challenge in the "Photo Persona".
What do you mean by "real" colors? In such problem areas you can usually no longer speak of colors. For other areas there are better possibilities (e.g. gradation curves). Such image areas do not have to be tormented with this filter.

[Frozen Death Knight]

5 hours ago, Michail said:

@Frozen Death Knight:

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Can you possibly show this with an example?

The filter is mainly used to brighten shadows and darken lights. This is the real challenge in the "Photo Persona".
What do you mean by "real" colors? In such problem areas you can usually no longer speak of colors. For other areas there are better possibilities (e.g. gradation curves). Such image areas do not have to be tormented with this filter. 

Here's a demonstration of what the Shadows/Highlights filter does to colours:

As you can see, the filter increases brightness of the colours up until they max out at their current saturation value, but does not change the saturation to make it more desaturated. Meaning that in those dark areas like in your example photo from your original thread, the dark, saturated shadows will keep their saturation when using the filter. This effect tends to look ugly and unnatural to the human eye, because in real life, natural sunlight washes out colours and desaturate the brighter the light is, going closer and closer to a white/greyish value in the process. That's why I said you should use a desaturation tool like HSL to go around this problem.

[Michail]

3 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

As you can see, the filter increases brightness of the colours up until they max out at their current saturation value, but does not change the saturation to make it more desaturated. Meaning that in those dark areas like in your example photo from your original thread, the dark, saturated shadows will keep their saturation when using the filter. This effect tends to look ugly and unnatural to the humany eye, because in real life, natural sunlight washes out colours and desaturate the brighter the light is, going closer and closer to a white/greyish value in the process. That's why I said you should use a desaturation tool like HSL to go around this problem.

Thank you for your trouble!

1. Obviously such an (automatic) color correction was implemented in the old filter. Photoshop has a correction slider for this. The affinity filter should also have such a balance control.
2. The value ranges of the filter are much too small. The old filter was more effective for more extreme cases (as can be seen in my example). And the Lights slider creates seemingly gray veils.

My workaround until the problem is solved: For the time being, I help myself by using the Live filter in the "Luminance" mix mode. And I increase the filter strength by creating an opacity-controlled duplicate of the filter layer. But I can't imagine that this was Serif's plan.

[Frozen Death Knight]

6 minutes ago, Michail said:

Thank you for your trouble!

1. Obviously such an (automatic) color correction was implemented in the old filter. Photoshop has a correction slider for this. The affinity filter should also have such a balance control.
2. The value ranges of the filter are much too small. The old filter was more effective for more extreme cases (as can be seen in my example). And the Lights slider creates seemingly gray veils.

My workaround until the problem is solved: For the time being, I help myself by using the Live filter in the "Luminance" mix mode. And I increase the filter strength by creating an opacity-controlled duplicate of the filter layer. But I can't imagine that this was Serif's plan.

You're welcome! Yeah, it is a bit odd that the filter regressed in such a way. Maybe the developers were not happy with the old code and rewrote it to solve some underlying issues with it? Hopefully they will be able to restore that old functionality with the new code as its foundation.

[Aammppaa]

Apparently the Affinty team are aware and have fixed the issue in the forthcoming beta are working on a fix...

 

[Michail]

36 minutes ago, Aammppaa said:

Apparently the Affinty team are aware and have fixed the issue in the forthcoming beta are working on a fix...

Thanks for the info!
I only read in the Windows forums. That's why I didn't see this thread.

Unfortunately @Andy Somerfield only talks about the highlights. But the whole filter has to be improved.

[Jowday]

 

[Steve Beeston]

No improvement whatsoever in 1.7.1 either. Very disappointing.

[Justin]

Hi Steve

Can you post some sample images to illustrate the problem, please? If you include the original image I will do some tests.

Thanks

Justin

[Steve Beeston]

Here is an original image

The image below uses the 1.65 Shadows live filter (which has a radius slider, removed at 1.7)

This image below uses the filter at 1.7 - producing a much more washed out image. Note also the filter below (1.7) is set to 100% whereas the filter above (1.65) is only at 30%.

 

The filter with 1.65 was a lot better than the replacement filter at 1.7. This is mentioned by others in this and other recent discussions.

FYI Some editing software packages retain "legacy tools" when updating features and I suggest this might be an idea for those of us that find  that "new and improved" means the opposite :-)

[Steve Beeston]

Here's the original image.

[Justin]

Hi Steve

Thank you for posting your image. I agree you can get a better result on this image using the old filter, which is disappointing. We will reinstate it as an option in 1.7.2.

Cheers

Justin

[Michail]

30 minutes ago, Justin said:

Thank you for posting your image. I agree you can get a better result on this image using the old filter, which is disappointing. We will reinstate it as an option in 1.7.2.

Thank you for the good news!

What exactly do you want to implement as an option?

• The old radius control?
• The old value range of the strength controllers?
• The old compensation of the color shift?
• Or everything together?

[Justin]

There will be an option to use the old filter. I will seek to make improvements to the new filter in the future.

[muelli75]

Please imporove this filter, because its a mainfilter for our layout-business.

We get tons of bad dark photos (from schools and some churches) which we pimp up easily with the equal filter in AdPhSh.
In AdPhSh it takes 1 or 2 seconds to optimize and the quality/result is milestones better than in Affinity Photo 1.6/1.7.

[Scott Williams]

On 6/19/2019 at 12:52 PM, Justin said:

Hi Steve

Thank you for posting your image. I agree you can get a better result on this image using the old filter, which is disappointing. We will reinstate it as an option in 1.7.2.

Cheers

Justin

Great!

[IndigoMoon]

On 6/19/2019 at 3:19 PM, Justin said:

There will be an option to use the old filter. I will seek to make improvements to the new filter in the future.

Thank you, Justin! In the meanwhile we still can achieve the same results using the old fashioned Curves Tool ...

...and would you check the new clarity live filter as well, please. Maybe I'm worng, but it seems the new one is less effective than the older one.