Category Archives: Lightroom

Photoshop Alternatives: On1 RAW 2019 (+Affinity and Gimp)

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Adobe long ago reduced their price for the Photoshop/Lightroom bundle to $10/month but for years now no longer has a way to purchase and outright own Photoshop. The latest version of Photoshop (Photoshop CC, aka Photoshop CC 2019)… it’s a rent-for-life or get-out-of-Dodge model.  The optics of the rental model are anathema for many people.  We at StarCircleAcademy took a look at various alternatives to Photoshop in case you aren’t willing to engage the “rent for life” strategy. However we will also tell you that Photoshop is the 600 pound Gorilla. You really can not argue with its features (bloated as they are) or price ($120/year), or abundance of resources on how to use, abuse, and creatively curse at Photoshop as a tool.

The contenders are: Gimp (free, multi-platform), On1 Perfect Photo Suite (now called RAW 2019), and Affinity.  We will start with On1.

ON1 Photo RAW 2019.2

The pricing as of May, 2019 is $80 for the complete software (discounted from $100 – as is often the case). Upgrade cost is listed as $80. That price brings it under the cost of upgrading to or purchasing Photoshop CS6 (although it’s not clear you can do that anymore), and because On1 is a perpetual license, the three-year cost of ownership is $260 (one purchase, two annual upgrades) versus the best possible three year cost for Adobe Photographers subscription bundle of $360.  And much better than purchasing Photoshop CS6. But there is one wrinkle. How many copies you are allowed to use is a murky area that is not spelled out clearly on their site.  Their site says “When you purchase ON1 Photo RAW 2019.2 you receive a perpetual license“. At times ON1 has allowed 5 seats, the fact that its not spelled out on their site implies the number of seats is subject to change. I am also not clear how they enforce the number of installs allowed. If you have more than one computer or frequently upgrade computers, you may exhaust the number of installs. For the purpose of this discussion, our review was of 2019.1.

On1 is available for windows or Mac operating systems.

Installation

We didn’t get off to a good start. The trial version was a 1GB download.  Installation proceeded slowly, and it required shutdown of Photoshop CC.  Fair enough since On1 includes plugins for various Photoshop components.  For this test we installed on an aging 4 core 8Gb RAM Lenovo laptop machine with Windows 10, 64-bit.  When we started the install, we were warned to close Photoshop.

After dismissing Photoshop it ran a while (3 min 45 seconds) to install. Years ago when we installed an older version (7.5 Perfect Suite) we got a warning about incompatible display cards near the end of the long install, but that was on older hardware. Photoshop never warned us like that.

Usage

We quickly fired up On1, and after dismissing the modal (i.e. in-your-face) getting started box, we “Browsed” to a folder containing our recent work. The folder was previously browsed with Adobe Bridge and loaded VERY fast, the entire directory came up with the images and the ratings that were previously applied. This is MUCH, MUCH faster and more efficient than Lightroom, and even faster than Adobe Bridge (which doesn’t require importing either).

Unfortunately we made the mistake of “enlarging” to full screen and then could NOT find how to make the window smaller again. We tried “Escape”, looking in the various toolbars… No joy. So we killed the program with Alt-F4 and restarted. On1 came up in the same place we had left off, but MAXIMIZED again with no controls to minimize. After hunting in “View -> Maximize” (which made no sense!) we were able to restore the window to add the minimize/maximize window options on the title bar and then drag to downsize the window. Searching in the online help for “undo maximize” or even “maximize” didn’t find anything, by the way.

Our primary display has text size set to 200% so that we can easily capture readable screenshots as well as assuage our tired old eyes. However on our display at some point On1 Tools became garbled.

Next we tried loading a previously created .psd document. This was quite frustrating. The document was created in maximum compatibility mode and has layer groups and layers, but it renders in On1 as a single layer.  What is worse, is that I couldn’t FIND the Layers window. I navigated to Windows -> Layers (Ctl+2) and NOTHING happened. This was frustrating also, but it appears the reason that nothing happened is that the Layers palette is part of the “Develop” panel. If you are looking at e.g. “Lens Correction”, then unfortunately “Layers” is not visible because you have to scroll up. The same problem occurs if you are in the browse setting and click the “Layers” option at the right. The edit comes up, but it doesn’t show the Layers!

To see if we could make On1 show our layers, we thought our normal workflow of using Colorspace: ProPhoto RGB, at 16 bits may explain why the layered photo was coming up as a single layer in On1. We went back into Photoshop CC 2019, removed layer groups (in case that was confusing On1), converted to SRGB profile, 8-bit mode, merged several layers then resaved the document. The saving file almost immediately appeared in the On1 browse menu, but the image shown was flashing between gray dots and an image. It was a big image (800Mb), and it took Photoshop quite a while to write it to our Dropbox drive. Apparently that also confused On1 a bit. And we notice that On1 does have an option to work in 16 bit ProPhoto RGB by default. That’s excellent.

Previously with the On1 Suite 7, we ran into this problem

OnOneUnsupported

Our choices seem pretty limited. Indeed, when clicking OK what we got was a big all-white canvas.

While On1 does provide layering, it doesn’t seem to work with layers in Photoshop psb or psd documents. That is a serious shortcoming if you, like we, have a ton of .psd documents you want to work with.

Usability Quirks

There are quirks with the interface that bother us. For example, the various palettes do not appear to be movable – and that caused our problem finding the layer palette, described earlier. It also appears that On1 spent more effort “mimicking” the Lightroom layouts and contents, but the “Presets” window wastes a lot of space. Presets never struck us as a worthwhile way to improve photos, by the way. Unfortunately the tiny border you need to discover to close Presets (or re-open them) is a bad design choice. We have no clue why they don’t have a “show presets” control (or why you can hide layers).

Some operations are pretty easy to figure out, but it is not at all obvious to us how you mix masking with effects and layers.  On1 has a “Perfect mask” setting that is clever and beats the pants off of anything Photoshop currently offers in ease of use and net result.  When masking near the boundary of sky and tree the perfect mask setting figures out that you want to operate on either the sky or the tree, not both.  And On1 also has a Mask Bug which is an odd looking thing (and very odd name) that is quite functional.  It is a highly adjustable gradient mask with drag controls to control density, directionality, feathering and the area to be adjusted.  What is not immediately obvious, however, is how you can use a bug mask with a separate adjustment – for example to remove the affect of the bug in one area or increase it in another. Ultimately the Perfect Brush is nice, but we do miss the magic wand selection that Photoshop offers.

Layers are also non-intuitive – for example there is a “Local” option after selecting a layer. This appears to mean “operate on the mask”, but the word “Local” doesn’t make sense to us.

Our work often consists of opening multiple documents as layers. What On1 didn’t do is provide a simple interface for this. That is, you CAN use Browse to open documents as layers, but if you’re already in edit mode for a document and try to use the filmstrip mode to Browse for additional layers you don’t have the open/add as layer option. We hoped to be able to select multiple images and then add them as layers to our existing document. Instead, what we have to do is open one document, then use the + to find and open the additional images as layers from the layer palette.  That’s tedious. We also made the mistake of accidentally hitting merge layers (just left of the option for blending control) and watched as On1 merged layers with no confirmation and no undo! Yuck.

Not only does On1 seem to be sluggish loading multiple documents as layers, but you can not change blending options for multiple layers at once. You have to operate on each layer one-at-a-time (select layer, click options, change blend mode). That is tedious.

Another unexpected quirk: we double clicked the .onphoto file that was created by layering two documents. Instead of opening directly into edit mode, it just opened browse mode. And even more curiously, there is no “save as” and no document rename in the edit mode. It looks like On1 also created a .on1 document, but did not register this with windows, so windows didn’t know how to open it. After associating the .on1 file with On1, it STILL wouldn’t open in develop mode. The problem with the lack of rename is that it’s now not possible to use one base document as a foreground with different additional layers. On1 will only save the layers in association with the “base” document (_W9A3041 in the example shown).

Star Trails and Automation

It appears that On1 does not have any kind of automation that would allow easy creation of star trails in the way that the Advanced Stacker Plus can interact with Photoshop. And as we already noted, the Layer manipulations available in On1 require lots of manual intervention just like it used to be in Photoshop (CS5 and earlier). After Photoshop CS6 the interface allowed multiple layer selection and global blending mode changes.

By way of reminder, Advanced Stacker Plus processes incoming documents a layer at a time. This method of processing keeps the memory footprint low and greatly speeds up operation of Photoshop when loading more than 20-30 images as layers.

In Conclusion

We found some things to like about On1 – it’s perpetual license, some good masking tools, but we found it falls short of the editing experience we wish to have and therefore do not recommend it.

In the next articles we will address Affinity Photo (short answer: it seems to be quite powerful), and GIMP.

Lickety Stitcher in Lightroom + Panoramas IN Lightroom

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Published: November 15, 2017

Pointyland Redux

A conventional panorama stitched with Microsoft Image Composite Editor from 3 images.

Maybe we should start by explaining Lickety Split. Lickety Split is US English slang for fast so “Lickety Stitcher” is our contrived slang for a fast image stitcher. Image stitching is what you do to create a large image out of several smaller, overlapping images.

We’ve reported how much we like the FREE Microsoft Image Composite Editor (aka ICE) for stitching images because it is faster and more accurate than Photoshop’s Photomerge or Lightroom’s new, but sometimes anemic Photomerge. Here is a simple “quick panorama” method of creating a panorama from about 3 clicks. How? Configure Lightroom to run ICE as an export step. After creating the export step (described below) you do the following:

  1. Select photos,
  2. right click “Export -> ICE Quick Stitch”
  3. Click through the ICE Menus to Stitch, crop and Save.

Sadly, there is no Image Composite Editor for Mac computers. If someone knows of an equally easy to use, fast version for the Mac, let us know in the comments!

How To Set Up Lickety Stitcher

To use Microsoft ICE (or PT GUI, or other external tool), you create an Export setting for it. Click a photo (any photo), then “Export” and Add new settings as shown below. The only tricky part is finding the program you want Lightroom to run. In Windows it has to be the actual path, not a shortcut.

Microsoft ICE Panoramas from Lightroom

You don’t have to settle for only a “quick stitch” (which is best done with JPGs), you can also export full sized TIFF files and stitch those.  ICE can save documents in Photoshop .psd format and others. And if you have another image stitcher you really like, e.g. PT GUI, you can probably use this same trick to make that software work on demand.

What About Lightroom for Stitching?

We were happy to discover that Lightroom and Photoshop image stitching (panorama) creation has improved quite a lot since our first disasters trying to do vertoramas and panoramas. Indeed, I think we would be happy to use the new tools and skip using ICE in many circumstances. Here is how you use the Panorama creation feature of Lightroom.

First, pick your images. They should overlap by at least 1/3 from frame to frame. And you can pre-process them with noise removal and such. Highly recommend you do at least two things to images before you try to stitch them:

  • Use vignette correction appropriate for your lens.
  • Consider using Distortion correction before creating your panorama – not always necessary.

Then right click and find “Photo Merge -> Panorama”.

Lightroom did a quite respectable job. We were able to to create the image below entirely in Lightroom. We did see some problems, however:

  1. We got a message about “unable to save metadata”
  2. Lightroom insists on creating the image as a .dng file and uses the name of one of the files you picked (we’d like it to be a mash of first-through-last.
  3. Lightroom didn’t seem to be as smart as ICE in how it stitched the images. ICE joined the images without the airplane and satellite trails, or maybe it was just better at blending them out. We had to do that work by hand on the image Lightroom created. It was not difficult, though. It is not the first time we have seen ICE handle an image better than Photoshop PhotoMerge

In ICE we manually  bent the slightly arching shot back into vertical form and did manual cropping. In Lightroom we used the Boundary Warp option at the end to make the images fill the frame nicely. Here is what we got from those 11 images:

10 Image Panorama using Only Lightroom Photomerge

You can compare the above to the same images used via Microsoft ICE and finished in Photoshop.

Overarching Majesty

Stitched in ICE, Finished in Photoshop

Multi-Row Panorama

Here is a more ambitious 22 photo, multi-row panorama stitched with Microsoft ICE. There was a stitching problem due to cloud movement… maybe you’ve spotted it.

Asylum at the Sea

 

Stitching Software Alternatives to Photoshop, Lightroom and ICE

  • Hugin (FREE: mac, PC, Linux). Don’t much like this one even though it is free.
  • PTGUI (mac, PC). A little clunky, but does much more than stitching including HDR and can be automated. This is the one tool you need when you need to convince an image to stitch that just won’t do it. It can’t do miracles, but with work, it can get the job done.
  • Others… that we don’t have familiarity with, though we have heard good things about Kolor Autopano

Back In The Saddle

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Published: October 30, 2017

It is premature to say we are back in the saddle after a long hiatus, but Steven Christenson did recently join forces with his mentor: Harold Davis for another “Dark of the Moon” Shoot in the Eastern Sierras. We have plans in motion to do more workshops like this beginning in 2018 (planning date is early September).

Harold and Steven at Lathe Arch. Photo by Julian Köpke.

As is our custom, we arrive early and re-scout our planned locations during daylight – as well as checking other potential locations. Not every location is suitable for our participants. Some locations are too dangerous, or too difficult to reach due to vehicle clearance or hiking distances or too small to accommodate participants. One pretty place that fails some of those tests is Steven’s favorite spot he calls Pointy Land.

Pointyland Redux

Three shot panorama of “Pointy Land” in Alabama Hills, California

Give Us A Tip, Will You?

On the optional last night we went to a place that while large in area and easily accessible is not able to accommodate many photographers jockeying for the premium views. Such a place is the Lady Boot Arch below.

It seems appropriate to leave you with a processing tip (thanks for asking). The shot below was created from two exposures. The filename we gave it is LaserBoot_C-5550+75.psd The name serves to identity both the photo AND the two images (C-5550 and C-5575) that we used to create it.

Laser Boot

Layers and Adjustments

Here is what the processing looked like from the “Layer Palette” of the image above.

Alignment Headaches

The tricky part in assembling the images was that the ball head had a problem. The head was not stable and it rotated left and right slightly between shots. We had to figure out how to align the images.  Here are some things that DID NOT work:

  • Using Lightroom Photomerge. (“Sorry at least 40% image overlap must be present”)
  • Using Photoshop Merge to HDR Pro. “Composite mode” balked that the photos could not be merged, while the “Automatic mode” produced an image like the one below.
  • Using Photoshop Align Layers – “Not possible”

Photoshop could not figure out how to align the two nearly identical images. The laser and lit foreground confused it.

So how did I get them to align? Selection, slight rotation and “nudging”.  Since there was a lot of green bleed on the laser image (C-5575), I masked off that bleed – look at the layer mask on the bottom image in the “Photoshop Layers” image above.

Merging Images

To make it simple to merge the laser image with the light painted foreground, I:

  1.  Used the “Quick Selection tool” on the sky of the laser image,
  2.  Deleted the sky. Delete? Yeah, just the delete key. That operation makes the selection go bye-bye and become transparent. The same effect can be done using the Eraser tool, but that is just too much work!
    Note: I should have first duplicated the layer in case I needed to do more work on it.
  3. Set the lighted foreground (C-5550) to Lighten mode. Removing a potentially conflicting sky from the image below results in an accurate sky that did not need much cleanup.

We show one of the adjustments (Sky Color Correction). The actual curve(s) to use depend on the sky you start with. A careful observer will notice a lot of Curves Adjustment Layers. Curves can do almost everything all the other adjustments can do (lighten / darken / contrast / white balance and much more) so I recommend learning how to use Curves. Indeed we use curves so much that the Advanced Stacker Plus has a dedicated hot key: F9 to create a custom contrast enhancement adjustment layer.

Once the masking and adjustments were all just as I wanted, the almost last step is to do Ctl-Alt-Shift-E (Cmd+Alt+Shift+E for Mac people). That finger twister is a little noticed but VERY handy shortcut that does the same thing as “Flatten image” – but it does the flatten to a new layer and leaves everything else alone. If for some reason the finger-twister does nothing, be sure to select a visible document layer – not an adjustment layer. After the magic twister sequence, drag the newly created layer to the top.

I name the final layer: combined/heal. On that layer any distractions can be cleaned up using the spot healing brush. In Laser Boot photo there were a few hot pixels and some distracting marks on the rock that needed attention.  If there is some significant noise reduction to do the heal layer can be cloned again and Noise reduction applied.

A Parting Image

We like this image created the second night of the workshop. This is a conventional star trail, but apparently Flickr-ites loved it. It became Steven’s most popular image ever.

Reaching for the Sky

Not surprisingly, the image was created using the same foreground/background blending technique described earlier.  The background was stacked with Advanced Stacker PLUS. But there was not any movement, so it was easy to combine the two shots.  If you’d like to see another gorgeous view of this landscape from a different perspective, check out Harold Davis’ shot: Forgotten Kingdom (and read about it on his blog)

Steven in Galen’s Arch with composite Milky Way background. Foreground by Julian Köpke.

Wait, looks like we have two more images for you. The image above is a complete cheat: a combination of an iPhone daylight shot by Julian Köpke, and one of the pieces of the Milky Way we shot for the image below. We make no guarantee that the sky can be oriented like that in the arch. We included the above shot because it used the same foreground/background blending technique we just discussed – but with a bit more manual mask painting.

The image below is a Milky Way from horizon to horizon. North East is at the top, South West at the bottom.  We included this image here because … we like it.

Overarching Majesty

One of the reasons we like this image is that the Milky Way is natural – not processed to death.  We could have cloned out the camera, but thought it provided a nice context.

Exploring Night Photography Lesson 5: Photo Processing

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Published:  May 4, 2016
Last Update: May 10, 2016

Homework assignment: Star Trails. This was created using StarStax with 150 exposures of ISO 800, f/4, 15 seconds.

Homework assignment: Star Trails. This was created using StarStax with 270 exposures of ISO 800, f/4, 15 seconds. What are those things where the arrows are pointing, and what is the circled constellation?

Last week in lesson 4 the subject was star trails. We continue that theme this week and fill in with some material that you may have learned the hard way.

What settings?

Last week’s assignment was:

  • Weather Permitting, get at least 20 minutes worth of star trails. First determine what the best starting exposure is, then take 20 minutes worth.

I chose to take about 270, 15-second exposures at f/4, ISO 800 for my star trails using an intervalometer trick that I demonstrated in class. That nets over an hours worth of exposures. But how did I come up with those settings?  It was a little bit experience, and a little bit application of the principle taught in the very first homework: namely try and see!  But how did I decide what evening I would try to get star trails?  The weather needed to be right, so the germaine question is:

When will the weather be right for star trails?

Well, we strongly recommend weather.gov. See our article about how to use the information. Indeed, we like it so much, we even created a page with forecasts for places we often find ourselves going.

Weather, check. Settings, check. Now what?

Wait, what about the moon? We need to know when it rises and sets. A full moon washes out a lot of the night sky and makes for unpleasant star trails.  There are many places to determine what the moon situation is like, but I like to use The Photographer’s Ephemeris (either the App, or the online version).

Next we need to review the Stacker’s Checklist both to be sure we have all the gear and that we know what we are doing. Best is to run through it at home. Is it surprising that there are SO MANY steps? Sorry, but they are there to prevent you from making all the mistakes we’ve made.

In class we reviewed our homework (star trails) from the last assignment and discussed hits and misses.  Finally we got to the meat:

Photo Processing

It would be foolish to attempt to describe everything we did in class… especially since we have so many articles here describing how to photo process your shots (and webinars and recordings, too – oh my!)

But we demonstrated three things:

  1. Super simple Panorama creation using “Image Composite Editor” from Microsoft. Yep. You have to have a Windows machine to use it… but it’s free and SUPER simple and more effective than anything we’ve managed to get out of Photoshop or Lightroom.
  2. What Lightroom is good for… cataloging your images. And what it’s NOT good for: complex multi-image editing – for example star trails and image combinations.
  3. The three most powerful and useful elements of Photoshop:
    1.  Layers – This is the real meat of Photoshop together with blend modes which mathematically combine layers.
    2.  Masks – Masks allow you to change the way layers and adjustments get combined by “masking” out some of the changes.
    3.  Adjustments:  Curves – Curves are the best tool to learn since nearly everything you can do with the other tools can be done with curves… and if you get the hang of it, curves are actually easier to understand.

We also demonstrated Adobe Bridge which is a “lighter weight” version of Lightroom – one that doesn’t require any importing. And we spilled the beans that “Adobe Camera Raw” is the guts of Lightroom. And that Lightroom adjustments are really just like what you can do in Photoshop… with some of the magic, and much of the versatility – and also much of the complexity removed.

We also explained why RAW is the way to go, and why RAW is ugly (short reason: the camera does not see the way we do it just records heaps of numbers).

We did not do this in class, but we covered much of the ground:

12 Minute Star Trail using Advanced Stacker PLUS version14D from Steven Christenson on Vimeo.

 

Top Six Questions We Answered About Lightroom

  1.  If I use Lightroom to catalog and organize my images (keywords, etc) am I forever wedded to Lightroom?
    Practically, yes. We used to use Picasa and did our organizing and cataloging there…. unfortunately Picasa was discontinued and Lightroom had no way to import the data. If you stop paying for your Lightroom Cloud edition, you may be stuck as we do not know of a tool that can digest your Lightroom catalog.  SOLUTION: BUY Lightroom, don’t just subscribe. This is not so true about Photoshop, by the way, many tools can import Photoshop files.
  2. Is there anything particularly painful about Lightroom I should beware of?
    Yes. Lots! When your image library gets large, managing images is unwieldy, especially if you want to use multiple computers and multiple storage devices to hold those images.
  3. Is Lightroom good for Night Photography images?  Not particularly. Most of the power of manipulating night images is found in Photoshop (averaging, stacking, compositing). Lightroom can not composite images, for example.
  4. Is Lightroom hard to use? Yes. No. Maybe. We think it is powerful and much easier to use than Photoshop. But there is still lots of learning and ample room to do the wrong thing.
  5. Should I import everything I shoot?
    Yes… and No. The smaller the image library the easier it is to keep organized. Of course if you delete the very images you later want you will have paid a price for your anti-hoarding behavior.  We do believe it is reasonable to throw away .JPGs if you are keeping the RAW files. And those fringe images that you are likely to never use – well you are likely to never need them.
  6. Can I do everything in Photoshop that I can in Lightroom?  Yes, mostly. Photoshop has no image organization tools, but yes, you can make all the adjustments in Photoshop that you can do in Lightroom… only it will be harder to do and may be harder to apply to multiple images at once.

Oh, by the way, the official name of Lightroom is “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom” just to confuse everyone.

What Are the Top 4 Things to Know About Photoshop?

  1.  Photoshop is the lingua franca of photo editors. Nearly every other tool does not come close in the level of acceptance and use. Widespread use does not mean Photoshop is the best tool. Remember how VHS beat Beta? These days video tape is hardly even used! Photoshop has been around a long time and has a LOT of baggage. Photoshop is built to do a lot of things way beyond photo editing (scientific analysis, animation, typography to name a few). Because Photoshop has been around so long, the tooling is unnatural .  We started with Paint Shop Pro and found it much, much less confusing.
  2.  Is there an alternative to Photoshop?
    Yes, there is the free Gimp, and many others. Unfortunately as we have noted above, those tools are not as widely used so getting help with them is harder.
  3.  Do you have any suggestions on what I should learn first?
    Why yes, thanks for asking. We have a series of articles on that:  We call the series “The Most Used Image Editing Techniques” and it comes in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.  The one we used the most is the “Simple Astrophotography” Trick to reduce noise.  We also like this trick to select a foreground (it’s used in the video above) and use it a lot.

Homework Assignment

  •  Fire up Photoshop and try to duplicate this image:
Final image with replaced foreground

Final image with replaced foreground

Super big hint… all the files you need and the process to accomplish the task is described in this article: Foreground-o-Matic.

  • Use the same technique on your own image(s) to pick a more interesting foreground image from a “stack” (sequence) of images.

Feel free to comment below if you know the answers to the questions we asked in the first image above. We will reveal the answers in the next article.