Tag Archives: layering

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

5 Replies

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.

Adding Special Touches to Your Astro Landscape

5 Replies

Published: November 6, 2107

1000 ISO, f/2, 3 minute exposure with some augmented stars

Because stars are pinpoints of light, the camera does not capture them as our eyes see them. To our eyes, brighter stars stand out more noticeably than dimmer ones. At a workshop in Alabama Hills, one of the participants, Julian Köpke, was using a diffusion filter so the stars captured would look more like you see with the naked eye. Sometimes nature provides its own diffusion filter in the form of high, thin cirrus clouds as shown below. The large bright orb is the star Sirius in the constellation Canus Major (Big Dog). The orange star near the top of the frame is Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. One nice thing about the blur that the clouds added is the star color is more noticeable. But the diffusion here is not uniform because the belt stars (Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka) and “corner” stars (Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph) in Orion are all noticeably brighter than the surrounding stars while in this photo only Betelgeuse and Rigel stand out.

Dog Star [C_065586]

You can create a make-shift diffusion filter by shooting through a nylon stocking – or buy a diffusion filter. The disadvantages of using a filter are that everything is blurred – including the foreground and you reduce the amount of light collected. Most night sky photographers try to avoid clouds and you will get an image like this:

The moon and Teapot Asterism in Sagittarius – over Lone Pine Peak – as shot.

When what you had in mind is something like this:

Same Photo as above, but with the Teapot Asterism in Sagittarius enhanced.

How to Bring Out Star Color And Enhance The Apparent Star Size

Our Advanced Stacker Plus has two built-in ways to increase star brightness. We call those Bump Up and Pump Up the stars. Bump Up creates a small blur by literally duplicating the shot , nudging the duplicate(s) and recombining .  Pump Up is more sophisticated and tries to find the stars so it can then apply enhancements to just the stars. But there is a new tool in the arsenal that I have begun using: Star Spikes Pro from ProDigital Software.  Version 4 is the latest as of this writing.

NOTE: Star Spikes Pro and HLVG described later are currently only available on Windows machines.

You can use the Star Spikes Pro plugin to add diffraction spikes and diffusion. The most common diffraction spikes you see with stars are due to obstructions in the telescope used to photograph them and many people come to think of the spikes as evidence of astrophotography.  You can create diffraction spikes easily on your own.- just stop down your aperture;  however stopping down to make stars create those spikes will not work well.

The first time I tried to use Star Spikes Pro it did not quite work as I expected.

Look hard. Star Spikes Pro decided the moon was a huge star outclassing all others.

Indeed it took me a bit to realize what was going on. The good news is it was easy to work around. The huge moon looks like a huge star to Star Spikes Pro – and that makes perfect sense since the plugin is usually used with Astrophotography that does not involve landscapes.

Here is how I made it work as I wanted and limited the effect to just the desired stars.

Layer Palette and Steps to Enhance The Teapot Asterism

Above left is the layer palette. Look carefully and you may spot the fix. After loading the image (1) I first duplicated the original and called the new layer Heal (2). I then did minor contrast adjustments, used the healing brush to remove hot pixels and other offenses (short satellite trail). Next I duplicated the Heal to another layer (3) and fed it into Hasta La Vista Green – a free plugin written by Rogelio Bernal Andreo of DeepSkyColors. HLVG removes green which is an unnatural sky color usually caused by RGB artifacts. HLVG operates on the entire layer and does not know the difference between land and sky. To leave the natural green in my landscape I used the quick selection tool, dragged it across the sky followed by Select -> Modify -> Expand 4 pixels. Then I created a Layer Mask using “Reveal Selection” (4). That made the foreground come back to its normal state. If you look carefully you will notice I also used a white brush to add some of that green removal back onto the mountain by painting on the HLVG layer mask (4).

The next operation was a finger twisting sequence that has no menu equivalent: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E (on Mac that’s Command-Option-Shift-E). What that sequence does is “flatten” all the visible layers and create a NEW layer in the process (5). That layer I called Input to SSP.  Since I had discovered that Star Spikes Pro was confused by the moon (and could be confused by the foreground), I used the quick selection tool again and brushed it across the foreground. By default using the quick select tool again ADDs to the current selection so I brushed it around inside the moon and its halo. At this point I did not need to create another layer (Ctrl-J/Command-J or Duplicate Layer) but I did so that it was easy to see what happens next. After creating the new layer I selected it and used the delete key. Delete removes the selection making it transparent – that is the foreground and moon were now gone (6).

Next up: let Star Spikes Pro loose on the image. First deselect (Ctrl-D / Command-D) or Select -> Deselect), and feed the sky layer to Star Spikes Pro via Filter -> ProDigital Software -> Star Spikes Pro.  The defaults for SSP produced the image below (I’ve zoomed in on the teapot asterism)

I felt the color was a bit too strong, and I did not want the diffraction spikes. The next step was to select “Advanced” – just below Settings, set the Primary quantity to zero. Next was the Secondary tab where I reduced the quantity to 44, the intensity I bumped up to 23. Soft flare I set quantity to 12, bumped up the intensity, dialed down the size a little and dialed down the Hue to -21. These adjustments were all based on eyeballing the image and were made for aesthetic appeal.  After all the adjustments looked about right, I saved the settings as a new adjustment I called “DiffusionOnly”. Finally I clicked OK and my layer was all nicely done by the SSP filter.

The filter processed a few more stars than I intended to augment. The simple solution was to create a “Reveal All Layer Mask”, select a brush, the color black and paint out all the effects I did not want on the layer mask (7).

The final operation was to use an Adjustment Layer (8) to increase the contrast and restrict that adjustment to the sky (where you see white) and tone the adjustment down a little with a low-flow back brush on one area that looked a little too dark.

The topmost layer in the layer palette is my watermark.

There Is An Easier Way!

With some experimentation, and some coaching from the plugin author I discovered that Star Spikes Pro has several features that make the process easier than I imagined. Instead of creating the transparency (deleting the moon and landscape) I only needed to select the area I wanted Star Spikes Pro to operate on.

Also, instead of masking off the stars I did not want affected after the fact, Star Spikes Pro has two tools to greatly simplify things the: “Hide” tool to turn off any effect that I did not want, and the “Show” tool to turn the effect on.

 

Star Spikes Pro limited to specific section of the sky via a selection and using the Hide tool to turn off an effect.

 

The net is that you can get that nice diffusion effect for your stars without having to compromise by shooting through a diffusion filter. However if you DO want to try a diffusion filter, I recommend you take two shots quickly. One with the filter off, one with the filter on. You can then place the diffused shot over the normal shot. Set the diffused shot to Lighten and mask in (or out) the areas where you want the diffusion to show through.

If you’re wondering whether there is a way to get the diffusion effect on a Mac or without purchasing Star Spikes Pro, there is, but it requires a lot of Photoshop twiddling and it is not anywhere near as pleasant as using ProDigital Software’s Star Spikes Pro.

Disclaimer and Book

I am not affiliated with ProDigital Sofware. I am a happy customer of Star Spikes Pro (and another product called Astronomy Tools). I was not paid, or encouraged to write about the product. I chose to because it is that good. Rogelio Bernal Andreo  author of Hasta La Vista Green and purveyor of DeepSkyColors is a friend and a multi-multi award-winning astrophotographer. He has a Kickstarter Project that I recommend you look into called Notes From the Stars

Notes from The Stars: 10 Award Winning Authors

Blobulous Revisited – Part 1

Leave a reply

It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with just a little bit of effort.  Below you’ll see a star trail formed using the Blobulous technique that I described in an earlier column on Advanced Star Trail Tricks.  There are many ways to achieve this effect. The method I described in the prior article – adding the last frame using Screen or Add blending – works especially well if the skies are dark. But here, I used high ISO shots about an hour before moonrise. Because of the high ISO exposures with a soon to rise moon the sky was blue not completely dark.  Adding the last frame to the stack as described earlier will work but it makes the Milky Way blow out and the sky overbright. I wanted the Milky Way to remain noticeable.

C_072887-935+934_AFTER

Selecting Images to Work With

There are few important things to note here. The radio telescope tracks the sky and slews from location to location causing blur. Each 20 second exposure was shot at ISO 3200, f/2.8 using a 15mm fish-eye lens on a Canon 5D Mark II. I carefully picked a range of images where the start of the sequence through to the end of the sequence included only images where the dish did not move “too far”. The next four frames show how dramatically the dish moved in subsequent shots. Had I included them it would have made quite a mess.

JPG

The dish moves far in 80 seconds…

To say it clearly: looking at the individual frames is what allowed me to zero in on the specific images I planned to stack. After selecting the range of images (C_072887 to C_072935),  I stacked them using good ‘ol brightness mode stacking. You can stack using a ton of methods but our favorite, of course, is to use the Advanced Stacker+ from StarCircleAcademy.com though the free TEST Stacker can do the job, as can a variety of free tools that we describe in this article and in our Star Trails Webinar.

To create the shot below on the RIGHT you’ll need Photoshop or some equally featured program that allows layering and masking like GIMP. Even the lowly, stunted Photoshop Elements will do the trick. After doing a normal brighten mode stack, the output looks like what you see on the left.  After some image manipulation magic, we achieve the result on the right.

Before_After

Before (left) and After (right)

From BEFORE to AFTER

It would be tedious to show step by step what I did, so I will start with a “one shot” view. You’ll notice there are 9 layers that contribute to the final image.  The top – SLC-SCA – is obvious, it’s my watermark.

Results with all layers shown.

Results with all layers shown.

However you can also see the brighten mode stack (at the bottom), and a copy of that same stack with a layer mask.  If you look carefully it’s pretty obvious that the black on the mask corresponds to the upper part of the moving dish.  Sharp eyes will notice two additional blacked out parts corresponding to the other radio dishes.  Notice that above the stacked layer is a single frame: C_072934 – the next to last image from the set used in the stack. All the layers above the single frame are adjustments to correct color, white balance, hot pixels (the Heal layer), and to do some sharpening.

BlendModeLighten

The single frame (934) is blended in Lighten mode with the stack. The stack is at 36% opacity.

The essential bit of magic here is that the Brighten layer is only used at 36% opacity. 36% was chosen by eye. I slowly reduced the opacity until the Milky Way became noticeable rather than a blur and yet the star trails remained noticeable.

The image was nearly complete by painting out (excluding) the blurred stack areas using a black brush at 100% opacity with a small amount of feathering – i.e. a brush that was not 100% hard.  It’s easy to paint on the mask and watch how the blurry dish from the stack is replaced by the non-blurry single image from C_072934.  If you’re wondering why I didn’t use the final image, C_072935, it’s because it was a tiny bit blurrier than the preceding image.

The rest of the adjustments are straight forward – they were all meant to fix contrast, darken the overbright areas and then correct for the color saturation increase that occurs when you darken an area with color.

We cover complete details in the PhotoManipulation webinar series.

Here is the image obtained from the next set of exposures after the dramatic dish move. This image used the “Streaks” stacking method available in the Advanced Stacker, but is otherwise identical in creation.

C_072941-67

For yet one more take – using yet another Advanced Stacker Mode (long streaks), there is this.

Long Streak Runnin'

In the next column I’ll show all the steps I took to produce the first image on this page.

 

Bump up Those Stars

17 Replies

After publishing the article on the 600 Rule (and why it’s a lousy rule), I was heavily prodded by a reader who insisted that a 4, 5 or six pixel star streak is not noticeable and not to worry. My counter argument is: “it all depends!”  A larger print (greater magnification) will reveal the streak.  But that got me to thinking – and dangerous things happen when I start thinking.

How Do I Boost the Visibility of My Stars?

The obvious answer is to bump up the brightness and the contrast – but that creates other problems – including magnifying the noise. But there is a simple way to boost those stars – at a relatively low image quality cost.  And this method may very well remove some of the dash like appearance of a star in a longish exposure.

Are you ready? In Photoshop duplicate the layer. Select the duplicate layer. Activate the Move tool. Hold down the control (windows) or option (Mac) key and click the up (or down) arrow key exactly once. Photoshop calls this maneuver a “nudge”  Now change the blend mode to Lighten, 100%.

What do you get? Here is the original.

 

Original

Now watch as we perform the “bump” (cursor over the image to see what was bumped)

[acx_slideshow name=”BumpUp”]

Why Does this Trick Work?

Actually, your first question might be: why doesn’t my image get blurrier? The answer is that it does but you probably won’t notice even if you print the image LARGE. You can counteract blurry by masking off everything that is not sky in the nudged layer.  The reason that the stars seem to be brighter is that you’ve added more bright pixels in nearly the same location. The eye sees more light where every star is. If you look closely you may also notice that some other features get brighter too – the snag (dead tree) at the far right and the waterfall. To see the change in foreground details compare the Original with the Up One images.  Then compare the Up One with the Down One. In the Down One image I masked off any area that is not in the sky and as a result the tree and waterfall brightness do not change.

Perhaps you’re asking a different question like:

PS My thanks to Tiberiu Tesileanu whose questions and comments lead me to experiment with the “bump” strategy.