Tag Archives: Lightroom

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

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

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.

Stacking: the Overloaded Word That Needs Explanation

Stacking Types Explained

Group into Stack

Let’s start with the easy one: Stacking may mean add to group. In Lightroom and Adobe Bridge you can pick several photos and the options Stacking -> Group into Stack. Or pick several photos and either Photo Merge to HDR or Panorama with the “Create Stack” option checked. In this context, Stacking and Stack just means group. Unfortunately a photo can only appear in one stack, and you cannot stack photos from different folders together.

Why would you want a photo to appear in two (or more) ~~stacks~~ groups? Here is an example where I used a single top shot and created two different panoramas.

Panoramas 1 and 2 were both created using image 3 (608095.NEF) but when panorama 2 was created, image 3 was removed from the stack (group) for 1 and added to the stack (group) with 2. Furthermore, you can see that the panorama and the two photos used to create it were all added into the group (notice the last image says 3 of 3).

Blend Layers using Lighten Mode

Stacking may mean blend photos in lighten or darken blend mode – examples are star trails and timestacks. In this usage, the lightest (or darkest) of all the pixels in each image is selected. This is the kind of stacking that AdvancedStacker Plus does. Below is an example of taking several images that we collected over time with long delays between each exposure causing the “dotted” appearance of the star trail.

Several layers of images taken at intervals all set to blend mode “Lighten”

Align and Blend Stacking

Stacking can ALSO mean ALIGN and blend images with median, mean (aka average) or more sophisticated algorithms. Indeed astroimagers have been doing this style of blending for years using techniques that involve “star registration” (aligning stars with stars) and some pretty fancy stacking algorithms like Alpha-Kappa Median Clipping and Entropy Weighted Average. The key point here is the alignment. Indeed, here at StarCircleAcademy, we’ve explained how you can brighten and reduce noise in your foreground using simple astrophotography processing techniques. See below for how to accomplish Align and Blend Stacking in Photoshop, and plenty of warnings about why this method is very likely to FAIL using Photoshop as the tool.

You may also see references to tracked, stacked images. These are the same as “align and blend” just described, except that to capture the image, the camera is guided by an external device (or by some fancy internal hardware), to allow longer exposures of the stars without getting unintentional trailing (smears) of stars.

The takeaway is that not all stacking is created equal. You need to know the context to understand what is meant by the word: stacking.

Focus Stacking / Auto Blend Layers

In Photoshop there is Edit -> Auto-Blend Layers -> Stack Images this is yet another kind of stacking (focus stacking) and despite the wording is NOT the kind of operation needed to ALIGN and Blend astro images. If you don’t believe us, give it a try and you’ll see it will do very weird things with your layers. Below are the same images as earlier. Note the bizarre masks it created to do the blending.

Edit -> Auto-Blend Layers -> Stack Images makes a mess. We told you so! Click to see a bigger image.

Aligned, Stacked Starry Landscape Images

While it would probably be better to make this a separate article in itself, we found it painful enough that we don’t recommend bothering – and yet we proceed to explain HOW to do it anyway!

If you want the cleanest possible images, you’ll – of course – want to reduce the overall noise and bring out details by using many images instead of one. This approach is not all puppies and kittens. Here are some of the pitfalls:

The direction of sky movement relative to the ground has a significant influence on the quality of the result (as well as the order chosen for alignment). In general, setting constellations are better than rising ones.
Most of the existing tutorials will assume that you have a recent (CC) version of Photoshop with statistics and an an “Auto Align” that properly manages masked regions.
Some of the tutorials we’ve observed are more cumbersome than they need be. There are plenty of hotkeys and mouse shortcuts to make the process go pretty quickly.
More than 10 or so images can become quite demanding on machine resources.
The complexity of your foreground will also affect the outcome. A clean, crisp separation between sky and land is preferable. Trees, poles, wires, and other things that extend through the sky are problematic.
Lens distortion can also adversely affect the outcome.

Aligned Stacking Procedure

Load all the photos as layers in Photoshop.
Heal out airplane and satellite trails from each layer.
Select all the layers and add to a group named “Sky“
Right click the Sky Group and duplicate the whole group as “Foreground”
Select all the layers in Foreground. Use Layer -> Smart Object -> Convert to Smart Object.
Select Layer -> Smart Object -> Stack Mode -> Mean
Duplicate Mean using Ctl-Alt-Shift-E (Command-Option-Shift-E on MAC). Label the newly created layer “Mean” and turn it off.
Select all layers in Sky. Set blend mode to “Lighten” and observe the direction of star movement against the ground.
Be sure the image with stars nearest the ground is at the BOTTOM of the stack. The bottom layer will be your base for alignment. You can drag layers around, or Layer -> Arrange -> Reverse may do the trick.
Create a mask keeping as much of the sky as is easy to do but that DOESN’T include any ground or fixed location objects. IMPORTANT: Be sure the mask doesn’t have holes in it, including at the bottom corners. Click the layer mask, hold down the Alt (Option) key and drag the mask to the next sky layer. Repeat until all sky images are masked with the same mask.
Select the bottom layer and lock it (Layers -> Lock Layers -> check Position -> Ok)
Select all the sky layers.
Chose Edit -> Auto Align Layers -> Auto
When alignment is done, set blend mode for all sky layers to Darken. If stars are disappearing in the result image, that’s bad.
1. If alignment is great everywhere, that is you have plenty of stars, you’re done. But it probably won’t be. So…
2. Duplicate the current layers to a NEW document – call it whatever you want, but perhaps “Left looks good” makes sense.
3. Open the history palette and click just above the “Align Layers” item (to restore to before the alignment was done). Lock the TOP layer (see item 11) and repeat steps 12-14.
4. If a large portion of the image still has streaks in some quadrant, try undoing align, undoing the lock and re-aligning.
5. If you’re still getting a significant amount of streaking you can also try Auto Align -> Reposition rather than auto.
  
  Q: Why do I have disappearing stars?
  A: The reason they are disappearing is because they are not aligned. In Darken mode, the darker sky “wins” out over the several stars. This COULD be a good thing in other situations, but not here!
  
  Q: If I went through the trouble of doing all this alignment, why is it still “off”?
  A: Photoshop isn’t optimized to align stars. Secondly, lens distortion makes a star move non-uniformly across the sensor. And third: stars at different declinations (celestial latitudes) travel at different speeds across the field. To eliminate streaks, the best solution is to track the sky.
Take the aligned sky, delete all the layer masks. With all the aligned sky layers selected, create a smart Object.
Do the same Stack Mode “Mean” trick for the sky smart object that you previously did for the foreground.
The rest is pretty straight forward. Turn the foreground (mean) back on. Use a selection to reveal only the foreground and apply that to the Foreground Group.
Adjust contrast, color balance, vibrance, etc. to your satisfaction.
Save the kit and caboodle.

Does all this seem too complicated? Well, then perhaps you might consider using these tools instead. They do most of the hard work for you and they KNOW the difference between stars and foreground (usually because you help them know).

On a Mac: Starry Landscape Stacker – from the Mac App Store
On a PC: Sequator – do a Google Search to download it.

By the way there are many astro processing tools, like Deep Sky Stacker – but most/all of them expect that your images will have NO foreground or non-moving objects like wires in them.

Lickety Stitcher in Lightroom + Panoramas IN Lightroom

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:

We got a message about “unable to save metadata”
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.
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.

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.

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

Exploring Night Photography Lesson 5: Photo Processing

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:

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.
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.
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.

Homework Assignment

Fire up Photoshop and try to duplicate this image:

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.