Tag Archives: masking

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.

Sneaky Night (and Daylight) Photo Processing Tips

3 Replies

 

Did you attend the Sneaky Night (and Daylight) Photography Processing Tips event held at Adobe in San Jose, California on July 23, 2018? Welcome!

The topics covered include these:

Let’s Start With a Pop Quiz

The Equation…

Or asked another way. Do these look like they might be the makings of an interesting shot?

Three Nuns Thumbnails

The Answer To the Pop Quiz

Combining the images shown in the thumbnails, nets this Interesting star trail.

N-604259-361lstr

“Long Streaks” Star Trail from 112 separate photos

Creating the Star Trail component above is discussed in detail in our NP105: Creating Star Trails & Timestacks Webinar – it’s an interactive 2 hour course with notes, a recording, and practice files. We run that webinar approximately quarterly next event is July 25th. Details  covered include how to set up the shots, configure the camera settings, and combine the images using various tools.

Adding that bright frame with a bit of selection and masking to the star trail image nets this:Reaching for the Sky

And that MUST be interesting because it garnered 80,000 views in just a few days. How do you do this bit of Photoshop Magic? Over the years, we’ve shown quite a few methods for accomplishing this. For example in Foreground – o – Matic we illustrated how to use the quick selection tool. That may work well here because the rock has a nice crisp boundary. Other methods that may work include “thresholding” and Color Range selection.

Thresholding to create a mask:  We’ve described this before. Briefly this is how it works. Select one of the images – one with contrast between the sky and foreground.  Duplicate that image (Ctl/Cmd -> J). Then use Image -> Adjustments -> Thresholds and slide the carat left or right until it has selected what you want (mostly black or white). Paint out the stray areas with either a 100% black or white brush as appropriate.  When done, you have an image you can use as a layer mask. The trick to doing this is to select the black and white image, EDIT an existing layer mask, and paste the black and white image as the layer mask.

 

Photoshop Processing Tips

  • Do work on a calibrated free-standing display in a dim, consistently lit room.
  • Do NOT attempt to process important images on a laptop monitor. You will frustrate the dickens out of yourself trying to get consistent color, brightness, and so forth on a laptop monitor or in an uncontrolled lighting environment. The monitor display angle can cause subtle to dramatic differences in color, saturation, brightness.
  • Do make an action and assign it to a hot-key if you find yourself repeating that operation frequently… E.g. I have an F9 key to apply a contrast enhancement adjustment curve
  • Do name your layers sensibly. You may save yourself a world of hurt.
  • Do NOT crop too early – save this step for last.
  • When combining dark and light subjects (e.g. daylight-like and night) it’s usually best to have very crisp selections – not feathered selections.

Gallery of Photoshop Hot Keys

These hot-keys are described for Windows users. I use these ALL the time. Some have no menu equivalent. You can translate from Windows to Mac as follows:

Ctl -> Command
Alt -> Option
Shift -> Shift

Layer / Layer Mask shortcuts:

  • Duplicate layer dialog allows you to duplicate into another/new document!
  • Ctl-J: Duplicate the current layer
  • Ctl–Alt–Shift-E   Merge visible layers to a new layer as a COPY.
  • Shift–click on layer mask to turn it off or on.
  • Ctl–drag layer mask to move it to another layer.
  • Shift–drag a layer mask to Invert it and move it to another layer
  • Alt–click a layer mask to EDIT it.
  • Alt–drag a layer mask to copy it. Toss in Shift to invert the mask.
  • Shift–click a layer mask to turn it on/off
  • Alt–click quick mask icon to create an inverse layer mask from a selection
  • Do not be afraid to duplicate and adjust a layer for the sole purpose of creating a mask!

Selection shortcuts:

  • Ctl–click on layer mask to create a selection from that layer mask.
  • Ctl–click on a channel e.g. RGB, R, G, or B to make a selection based on brightness.
  • Sometimes Select -> Modify -> Expand or Contract (by 1 pixel) helps to fine-tune a selection. Feathering seldom works well for compositing light and dark images.


Sneaky Tips
Sneaky Tips
Notes from "Sneaky Tips for Processing Day and Night Photography"
Price: $2.00

Darken Mode Stack Tip Using AdvancedStacker PLUS 18

Leave a reply

Published: March 15, 2018

The new Advanced Stacker PLUS 18 is our attempt to make processing simpler. One of the things we find we often do is run multiple stacks (Lighten, Darken, Streaks, etc) to determine which effect(s) work the best. Well, we did something for the first time that worked REALLY well, so we will start by sharing that, even though Advanced Stacker PLUS 18 is not yet ready for publication.

In a nutshell, we created this:

Orion, Falling

From this:

Long Streaks Stack Result – no modifications  f/4, ISO 1600, 15 Seconds. Nikon D600, 24mm x 250

There are several obvious differences between these images.

  1. Because there was strong moonlight (and other light), the sky is over-bright and lacks contrast.
  2. The wind together with surrounding lighting (including flashing red lights from a passing fire truck) caused strange artifacts in the palm trees.
  3. Different colored light sources lit the palm trees differently (notice the really cyan colored palm fronds in the second tree from the left).
  4. There was utility wiring intruding into the image.

The Processing

Stacker 18 allows you to simultaneously stack in multiple modes. For example, to create this effort I used Lighten, Long Streaks, Darkest, and Average modes. I ended up NOT using Lighten or Average modes in this case. Is there extra overhead keeping more stacks? Yes, there is. However we’ve paired down the stacks to as few frames as possible to keep the overall footprint low.

Once the stacking had finished, the result of the Long Streaks was a bit unappetizing due to the red and other artifacts in the trees (see second image). However the Darkest mode stack effectively removes all of the stars – and as it happens, all of the strange highlights in the trees.  First we applied a Curves adjustment layer to the Long Streaks and darkened it.

Blending a Clean Foreground with the Star Trails

Darkest Stack results

The next operation was to find a way to blend the darkest mode stack (right) with the Long Streaks stack while preserving the star trails  and getting the cleaner looking foreground.

 

Duplicate the Darkest mode result (it’s a single layer) on to the Long Streaks stack. Then drag the darkest mode stack to the top layer. Set the new layer blend mode to normal, 100%.

Next we need to mask out the sky of the Darkest stack so that the long streaks will show through. The tool for that is to use Select -> Color Range. Holding down the shift key allows you to click multiple areas of the sky to add to the selection. You can vary the fuzziness of the selection to determine how closely the color has to match the sample. The mask will probably need some manual cleanup afterward, but as you can tell from the selection in the image below, just clicking different areas in the sky produced almost exactly what is desired.

Photoshop Color Range Selection

After pressing OK you get a selection. The next step is Layer -> Create Layer Mask from Selection -> Hide Selection Once you have a mask, you can paint on it to clean up any artifacts. Adjust the opacity of the darkest layer to make it “look right”. In this example, the combined image looked best at about 93% opacity.

Correcting “Off” Colors Due to Light Source Issues

The penultimate step was to create a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer. Lock the adjustment to the Darkest layer (hold the Alt/Option key and click on the boundary between the adjustment and the darkest layer). Then click the “Finger selection”  (just below the word Presets). Now there is an eye-dropper which you use to select the color that needs correction. In this case, clicking the dropper on the cyan colored palm frond is the right move. Adjust the saturation slider way down, lightness down, and fiddle with the hue to make the bizarre color more natural.

Aggressively toning down the cyan colored palm fronds

Removing Wires (and other distractions)

Finally we also used the Spot Healing Brush tool to “heal out” the utility wires. Here is a short-cut for healing out a straight line. Click the beginning of the area with the spot healing brush, then hold shift and click the end of the line. Shift causes the brush to be applied in a straight line between the first and second clicked points. The shift-trick works with almost all brushes. Two other tricks with the spot healing brush tool are to:

  • Start where the surrounding area has a predictable substitution (not a busy area) and work outward from there
  • Use as small a brush as you reasonably can

For example you can adjust the spot healing tool brush size to about double the width of the utility line, then click the healing brush tool where the arrows point below. Next work your way outward toward the tree on one side, then the other.

Summary

Here is a summary of the steps taken – not including the palm frond “naturalization” or spot healing described above.One more trick worth noting… the histogram shown on the Curves adjustment will give you a clue what may need adjustment.

Want to know what we consider the top 5 most used photo editing skills? Read here (and part 2 and part 3).

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