Looking at C1 from a workflow perspective
During the last days I have been trying to get to grips with C1 v7.
After all, it seems time to look for alternatives now that Corel managed to make AfterShot into a complete zombie.
While I like the image quality of v7 (I never was happy with the colors from v6 I must admit), looking at C1 v7 from a workflow perspective leads to piles of frustration.
Here are my impressions after having run a few shoots from ingest to output.
I might have missed some setting so if there is a simple way to achieve what I tried to to please tell me.
Why can't I use the variables that I have for the filename for subdirectories when downloading?
I have my images in a a standardized tree:
/year/month/year-month-day-Shoot/Shoot-year-month-day-seq.ext
C1 forces me to enter the subdirectory explicitly at every ingest and
I have to browse to the monthly directory every time the month changes.
Not really efficient, when all the user would need to enter is the shoot name as everything else can be picked from the image metadata.
And why do I have to endure uppercase file extensions? Just because files come off the memory card with a stone age file system, one does not need to keep that reminder of the IT stone age around.
Why is there no pick/reject marking?
Having to use the color labels or the star rating for this removes useful flexibility.
Why are there different keys for copy/paste of image settings and text fields?
Shouldn't an application be intelligent enough to figure out the use by context?
No hotkey for the clipping warning? Seriously???
And why doesn't the clipping warning tell me which channels are clipped, or at least how many are clipped.
Why are there detachable tools but not detachable tool tabs? The nice dualscreen support via the detail viewer is severely hampered by not being able to have more than one tool tab visible.
The crop tool seems to be designed for masochists.
How to I flip a 3x4 crop to 4x3? Do I really have to predefine that?
And why is there no automated way to fit the crop into the current image? After all, it works for rotated images?
Changes to the crop ratio are only reflected on the preview when I touch the crop rectangle, having to re-target it. leading to yet another unneeded mouse movement to hunt the new rectangle border.
Hmm, I always though AfterShot was slow deleting a bunch of images. But C1 is not really faster, but at least C1 entertains you: you get to see the images vanish one by one...
So how can you integrate C1 with a DAM? Or any other form of file management?
Having the image settings in a subdirectory instead of sidecar files is not very useful.
It breaks all file system operation semantics and makes DAM integration a PITA.
After all, the DAM is supposed to mange the files, not the raw converter.
When I first saw the output recipes I thought they were similar to the batch queues that Bibble and AftetShot have.
But actual usage is quite disappointing.
Output file names that are global instead of recipe specific?
So it is not possible to have two parallel JPG outputs in different sizes where the file name reflects the size or use (I tag my small web/mail files with an additional suffix in the file name).
And there seems to be no simple way to send images to a specific recipe via drag and drop or a hotkey. One has to tag the active recipes in the batch processor.
That is barely better than save as. Ouch.
The slow batch processing is only a minor triviality compared to this...
Speaking of recipes, the file tab seems to be incompletely documented (sub name and vs. sub folder) and conflict with the settings of the output location tool.
My experiments with the regional adjustments show that C1 is not really up do date. A very slow brush. No Bézier or polygon drawing tools (brushes are quite inefficient to mark precise regions compared to Bézier curves. The edge detection algorithm is unfortunately not good enough...)
And why is only a subset of the tools working on regions?
No regional white balance?
No cloning? Do I have to resort to a pixel editor for even basic retouching?
Overall, not very efficient. I guess the history of it being primarily a PhotoShop preprocessor instead of being a complete solution shows.
cheers
afx
After all, it seems time to look for alternatives now that Corel managed to make AfterShot into a complete zombie.
While I like the image quality of v7 (I never was happy with the colors from v6 I must admit), looking at C1 v7 from a workflow perspective leads to piles of frustration.
Here are my impressions after having run a few shoots from ingest to output.
I might have missed some setting so if there is a simple way to achieve what I tried to to please tell me.
Why can't I use the variables that I have for the filename for subdirectories when downloading?
I have my images in a a standardized tree:
/year/month/year-month-day-Shoot/Shoot-year-month-day-seq.ext
C1 forces me to enter the subdirectory explicitly at every ingest and
I have to browse to the monthly directory every time the month changes.
Not really efficient, when all the user would need to enter is the shoot name as everything else can be picked from the image metadata.
And why do I have to endure uppercase file extensions? Just because files come off the memory card with a stone age file system, one does not need to keep that reminder of the IT stone age around.
Why is there no pick/reject marking?
Having to use the color labels or the star rating for this removes useful flexibility.
Why are there different keys for copy/paste of image settings and text fields?
Shouldn't an application be intelligent enough to figure out the use by context?
No hotkey for the clipping warning? Seriously???
And why doesn't the clipping warning tell me which channels are clipped, or at least how many are clipped.
Why are there detachable tools but not detachable tool tabs? The nice dualscreen support via the detail viewer is severely hampered by not being able to have more than one tool tab visible.
The crop tool seems to be designed for masochists.
How to I flip a 3x4 crop to 4x3? Do I really have to predefine that?
And why is there no automated way to fit the crop into the current image? After all, it works for rotated images?
Changes to the crop ratio are only reflected on the preview when I touch the crop rectangle, having to re-target it. leading to yet another unneeded mouse movement to hunt the new rectangle border.
Hmm, I always though AfterShot was slow deleting a bunch of images. But C1 is not really faster, but at least C1 entertains you: you get to see the images vanish one by one...
So how can you integrate C1 with a DAM? Or any other form of file management?
Having the image settings in a subdirectory instead of sidecar files is not very useful.
It breaks all file system operation semantics and makes DAM integration a PITA.
After all, the DAM is supposed to mange the files, not the raw converter.
When I first saw the output recipes I thought they were similar to the batch queues that Bibble and AftetShot have.
But actual usage is quite disappointing.
Output file names that are global instead of recipe specific?
So it is not possible to have two parallel JPG outputs in different sizes where the file name reflects the size or use (I tag my small web/mail files with an additional suffix in the file name).
And there seems to be no simple way to send images to a specific recipe via drag and drop or a hotkey. One has to tag the active recipes in the batch processor.
That is barely better than save as. Ouch.
The slow batch processing is only a minor triviality compared to this...
Speaking of recipes, the file tab seems to be incompletely documented (sub name and vs. sub folder) and conflict with the settings of the output location tool.
My experiments with the regional adjustments show that C1 is not really up do date. A very slow brush. No Bézier or polygon drawing tools (brushes are quite inefficient to mark precise regions compared to Bézier curves. The edge detection algorithm is unfortunately not good enough...)
And why is only a subset of the tools working on regions?
No regional white balance?
No cloning? Do I have to resort to a pixel editor for even basic retouching?
Overall, not very efficient. I guess the history of it being primarily a PhotoShop preprocessor instead of being a complete solution shows.
cheers
afx
0
-
Hello AFX: Nice post, I have seen some of these same issues.
Worst problem I see is the odd behavior of cropping, sometimes you cannot independently adjust both vertical and horizontal crops. It seems to follow some unknown restrictions.
I also noticed that the file structure and folder naming are not good.
P1 software staff might like to check Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom 4 for a few ideas in the next revision.
Kind Regards,
Jon0 -
Is V7 different to V6 for cropping?
The only challenge I find with V6 is that a rotated image (or perhaps a "crop" that is not exactly an easily visible crop for some reason) may appear to be inaccessible for further changes. This nearly always seems to be either, rarely, my system going AWOL for a while for some reason or hat one or more corners of the crop are up against a logical edge of he image and my crop change request would move that corner out of the image. Moving the corner off the edge frees up the effectiveness of selecting sides once more.
Once I had worked that out it seemed like a reasonable way to handle cropping - though different to what I been using previously.
I am fairly sure that there are more ways to work with cropping than I have found but what I have found is enough for me in practice. Grabbing a corner and moving it seems to work well enough - and is, I find, often more effective than working with the separate sides. But then I also anticipate that what works for me may not work for others.
Grant Perkins0 -
Hello SFA: Thanks, one issue can be that the view is slightly zoomed in and the crop edges are not in the zoom area.
Zoom to full image solves that.
But still I see either no response to crop edge changes or it has a mind of its own and will not allow any aspect ratio.
This behavior has persisted throughout the various CO versions.
Enjoy,
Jon0 -
Hello Jon,
I see what you are saying.
I would guess (and it is a guess) that where a corner or an edge are very close the original image "edge" where decisions about how to include/exclude/group pixels are likely to represent some challenges in software engineering decisions, the logic required may be marginal if you try to make the best of what is there.
It might be easier to simply assume that a certain number of pixels (I have no idea what that number might be) should just be ignored. To put it another way that would mean an implied crop (or additional crop) for every image before any editing is performed.
To understand the issues (if not the detail of the technical challenges) would make a fascinating article for a blog post. Or at least I think it would - others may not care one way or another. However the issue of what you "see" when taking scaling into consideration is, to my mind, an important part of understanding what you need to know to get the best out of an editor application with the least effort. Eventually. Once you understand how it works, where the natural compromises have been brought into play and how that affects the way you should approach working with the application.
It's the same for all software (indeed all "systems") whether we recognise it or not.
IMHO.
Grant Perkins0 -
[quote="afx" wrote:
Simple explanation coming up
During the last days I have been trying to get to grips with C1 v7.
After all, it seems time to look for alternatives now that Corel managed to make AfterShot into a complete zombie.
While I like the image quality of v7 (I never was happy with the colors from v6 I must admit), looking at C1 v7 from a workflow perspective leads to piles of frustration.
Here are my impressions after having run a few shoots from ingest to output.
I might have missed some setting so if there is a simple way to achieve what I tried to to please tell me.
[quote="afx" wrote:
I'll create a feature request for that
Why can't I use the variables that I have for the filename for subdirectories when downloading?
I have my images in a a standardized tree:
/year/month/year-month-day-Shoot/Shoot-year-month-day-seq.ext
C1 forces me to enter the subdirectory explicitly at every ingest and
I have to browse to the monthly directory every time the month changes.
Not really efficient, when all the user would need to enter is the shoot name as everything else can be picked from the image metadata.
And why do I have to endure uppercase file extensions? Just because files come off the memory card with a stone age file system, one does not need to keep that reminder of the IT stone age around.
[quote="afx" wrote:
Using the star tags from 1 to 5. In my view it more precise, and offers a more veried way of sorting. Sort the pictures first between 1 and 2 stars at first, then give a 3 star rating, then a 4 and finally a 5. This way you can always go back and quickly find another alternative from your 3 or 4 star ratings, if your customer doesn't like your first picks.
Why is there no pick/reject marking?
Having to use the color labels or the star rating for this removes useful flexibility.
Use color-tags for marking groups of different pictures, customers favorites or what ever suits you. Use the Filter Tool to quickly create filters for that displays your selection combination[quote="afx" wrote:
Why are there different keys for copy/paste of image settings and text fields?
Shouldn't an application be intelligent enough to figure out the use by context?
Imagine you have a text-field selected, and you press ctrl-v. In case Ctrl-V does both image and text adjustments, you don't really know what coming. With separate key-combinations there is no doubt, and you don't have to de-select the text-field.[quote="afx" wrote:
Ctrl-E for hot key warning. You can see the RGB values in the top of the viewer windows, but I agree the channels could be seperated
No hot-key for the clipping warning? Seriously???
And why doesn't the clipping warning tell me which channels are clipped, or at least how many are clipped.
[quote="afx" wrote:
Good idea, I'll create a feature request
Why are there detachable tools but not detachable tool tabs? The nice dualscreen support via the detail viewer is severely hampered by not being able to have more than one tool tab visible.
[quote="afx" wrote:
You just drag it with the mouse, and it will change the crop. No reason to make two different presets
The crop tool seems to be designed for masochists.
How to I flip a 3x4 crop to 4x3? Do I really have to predefine that?
[quote="afx" wrote:
I'm not quite sure what you mean here, can you elaborate?
And why is there no automated way to fit the crop into the current image? After all, it works for rotated images?
Changes to the crop ratio are only reflected on the preview when I touch the crop rectangle, having to re-target it. leading to yet another unneeded mouse movement to hunt the new rectangle border.
[quote="afx" wrote:
This a known bug, and we are working on it
Hmm, I always though AfterShot was slow deleting a bunch of images. But C1 is not really faster, but at least C1 entertains you: you get to see the images vanish one by one...'
[quote="afx" wrote:
You can set full sync in the Preferences, and have XMP files created in the picture directory
So how can you integrate C1 with a DAM? Or any other form of file management?
Having the image settings in a subdirectory instead of sidecar files is not very useful.
It breaks all file system operation semantics and makes DAM integration a PITA.
After all, the DAM is supposed to mange the files, not the raw converter.
[quote="afx" wrote:
You can recipe-specific output names and paths from Process Recipe -> File using the name token "Sub Name"
When I first saw the output recipes I thought they were similar to the batch queues that Bibble and AftetShot have.
But actual usage is quite disappointing.
Output file names that are global instead of recipe specific?
So it is not possible to have two parallel JPG outputs in different sizes where the file name reflects the size or use (I tag my small web/mail files with an additional suffix in the file name).
[quote="afx" wrote:
God idea 😊
And there seems to be no simple way to send images to a specific recipe via drag and drop or a hotkey. One has to tag the active recipes in the batch processor.
That is barely better than save as. Ouch.
The slow batch processing is only a minor triviality compared to this...
[quote="afx" wrote:
more here http://help.phaseone.com/en/CO6/Library ... aming.aspx
Speaking of recipes, the file tab seems to be incompletely documented (sub name and vs. sub folder) and conflict with the settings of the output location tool.
[quote="afx" wrote:
On my computer the brush is very quick. Do you any specific setting?
My experiments with the regional adjustments show that C1 is not really up do date. A very slow brush. No Bézier or polygon drawing tools (brushes are quite inefficient to mark precise regions compared to Bézier curves. The edge detection algorithm is unfortunately not good enough...)
[quote="afx" wrote:
Because resources are limited, and other task are deemed more important (like new camera integration, and so on)
And why is only a subset of the tools working on regions?
No regional white balance?
[quote="afx" wrote:
You have spot and dust removal in the Details tab
No cloning? Do I have to resort to a pixel editor for even basic retouching?
[quote="afx" wrote:
Hopefully this will help yu a bit 😊
Overall, not very efficient. I guess the history of it being primarily a PhotoShop preprocessor instead of being a complete solution shows.
[quote="afx" wrote:
cheers
afx0 -
Thanks Christian for the feedback during the holidays. [quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
Why is there no pick/reject marking?
Using the star tags from 1 to 5. In my view it more precise, and offers a more veried way of sorting. Sort the pictures first between 1 and 2 stars at first, then give a 3 star rating, then a 4 and finally a 5. This way you can always go back and quickly find another alternative from your 3 or 4 star ratings, if your customer doesn't like your first picks.
Having to use the color labels or the star rating for this removes useful flexibility.
Use color-tags for marking groups of different pictures, customers favorites or what ever suits you. Use the Filter Tool to quickly create filters for that displays your selection combination
Looks like I did not explain the problem properly.
Pick/Reject adds another dimension.
Stars are pretty static. Color labels are also relatively static.
Both for the tasks you named.
But what if for a specific group of images I need to pick out some that are not directly modeled by the stars and color tags? And I already need the stars and color tags to stay as they are.
Here an additional temporary label is very useful. Think of them as bookmarks or interim session tags.[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
[quote="afx" wrote:
Why are there different keys for copy/paste of image settings and text fields?
Shouldn't an application be intelligent enough to figure out the use by context?
Imagine you have a text-field selected, and you press ctrl-v. In case Ctrl-V does both image and text adjustments, you don't really know what coming. With separate key-combinations there is no doubt
I know exactly what is coming depending on where my active cursor is. No doubt at all.
After all, if I type the letter "h" in the text field, I expect a letter h to show up, not a cursor toggle to the hand cursor.and you don't have to de-select the text-field.
That advantage is negated quickly by the fact that image settings are copied more often then text settings and need a more complicated key combination.
Been using that scheme for several years now in Bibble and AS. Much more efficient than different keys. And, If you want to accommodate users that feel separate keys better for them, why not make the behavior user customizable?[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
Ctrl-E for hot key warning. You can see the RGB values in the top of the viewer windows, but I agree the channels could be seperated
Been blind. Never found this one ;-(
How about showing it in the tool tip when hovering over the button (would be useful for all tool tips on buttons)?
And a find option in the keyboard preferences 😉 There are so many of them it becomes hard to find what you need.[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
[quote="afx" wrote:
You just drag it with the mouse, and it will change the crop. No reason to make two different presets
How to I flip a 3x4 crop to 4x3? Do I really have to predefine that?
Ahh, it flips. Never noticed that.[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
[quote="afx" wrote:
I'm not quite sure what you mean here, can you elaborate?
And why is there no automated way to fit the crop into the current image? After all, it works for rotated images?
Changes to the crop ratio are only reflected on the preview when I touch the crop rectangle, having to re-target it. leading to yet another unneeded mouse movement to hunt the new rectangle border.
Say I have 2x3 crop active in the image, the crop tool shows 2x3.
When I change the crop tool to 4x3, I see no change in the image. Only when I touch the crop in the image, it flips to 4x3 which is quite confusing.
And if I want to revert an image that had a a crop applied previously to an aspect ratio that fits the original frame I have to drag it there. Did not find a way to make the crop automatically utilize as much of the frame as possible.[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
[quote="afx" wrote:
You can set full sync in the Preferences, and have XMP files created in the picture directory
So how can you integrate C1 with a DAM? Or any other form of file management?
Having the image settings in a subdirectory instead of sidecar files is not very useful.
It breaks all file system operation semantics and makes DAM integration a PITA.
After all, the DAM is supposed to mange the files, not the raw converter.
But that syncs only the metadata.
I was referring to file management via the DAM, where you want to make sure image settings are also moved together with the image file.
What is needed are sidecars like image.type.sidecar in the same directory as the image file to be able to tell the DAM that the .sidecar file is linked with the image and has to be moved or copied together with the image in file operations. That is not only needed for DAMs but any type of sensible file management.
The current setup breaks standard file system expectations.[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
You can recipe-specific output names and paths from Process Recipe -> File using the name token "Sub Name"
That does not seem to work. I get the name specified in the "Output Naming" tool.
Naming tokens are not used here at all.
See also my comment on the missing documentation for the file tab.
The Sub Folder field seems to work as expected (but I would like to see naming tokens in there as well, especially ones that can refer relative path locations).[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
[quote="afx" wrote:
more here http://help.phaseone.com/en/CO6/Library ... aming.aspx
Speaking of recipes, the file tab seems to be incompletely documented (sub name and vs. sub folder) and conflict with the settings of the output location tool.
The tokens listed here do not work in those fields and http://help.phaseone.com/en/CO7/process-recipe does not document the file tab but explicitly refers to the Output tool which is not recipe specific.
Incomplete feature implementation? 😉[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
[quote="afx" wrote:
On my computer the brush is very quick. Do you any specific setting?
A very slow brush. No Bézier or polygon drawing tools (brushes are quite inefficient to mark precise regions compared to Bézier curves. The edge detection algorithm is unfortunately not good enough...)
Quad Phenom. No OpenCL. Machine otherwise basically idle. The brush is so laggy that there is a significant delay between drawing and showing the brush mask.
I found the AfterShot brush a bit slow, but C1 on the same box is significantly slower.[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
[quote="afx" wrote:
Because resources are limited, and other task are deemed more important (like new camera integration, and so on)
And why is only a subset of the tools working on regions?
No regional white balance?
What, no infinite resources?! ;-}[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
[quote="afx" wrote:
You have spot and dust removal in the Details tab
No cloning? Do I have to resort to a pixel editor for even basic retouching?
I must admit I use that more to get lampposts out of peoples heads than for simple dust spots 😉
There is always this trade-off between how easy something is a accomplished vs. the need to do it. If it can be easily done in the raw converter without resorting to a pixel editor, it is much more efficient in terms of time, resources and asset management (I hate intermediate TIFFs).[quote="Christian Gr" wrote:
Hopefully this will help yu a bit 😊
Thanks yes!
have a happy new year
afx0
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