Digital Light & Color

Picture Window Pro v 7.0.18 is now available. The new release fixes bugs and introduces a number of new features.

New Features:

Eliminating Moving Objects from an Image
A new feature in the Stack Images transformation is designed to process a series of exposures of the same scene to remove moving features and thus reveal the invariant features of the scene. This can be used to 'remove' traffic or pedestrians from scenes of highways and plazas. The transformation has been enhanced by the addition of Median and other blending modes. The maximum number of images has been increased to 16 from ten. A description of the process can be found in the article https://luminous-landscape.com/making-p ... s-go-away/ The article includes downloadable images that can be used to try the transformation.

Plate-making Support
This edition of Picture Window Pro has a number of enhancements designed to support direct-to-plate printmaking process. The direct-to-plate process is a relatively new. It allows you to create gravure plates that can be used in a traditional gravure art press using your inkjet printer. Platemaking involves tailoring the tonality curve to the requirements of the platemaking process and creating a halftone image. This image is then printed and serves to create the plate. A number of enhancements aid in making the tonality adjustments. Since monitors are luminous rather than reflective, making tonality adjustments on a monitor can be misleading when the output is on a reflective medium such a plate or print. Additional features have been added to the Monitor/Printer Curves function to help both in viewing the image while making adjustments and in subsequently printing it. In addition, the Brightness Curve transformation now allows you to store and combine brightness curves. Finally, the Halftone transformation has been enhanced. A short introduction to this process can be found the article http://www.photopolymergravure.com/The_Process.html.

Other Enhancements and bug fixes

• The resize transformation has been enhanced to better support modify image DPI.
• Blink has been extended to cover up to eight images.
• Cases of unnecessary thumbnail refreshes have been eliminated In the thumbnail Browser.
• The Clipboard now supports V5 bitmaps. The image size restriction has been removed.
• Two new transformations, Juxtapose, Swap Red and Blue have been added.
• Bugs discovered since the last release have been fixed. We thank all who have contributed with identifying them.

For a full list of changes, see http://www.dl-c.com/update70.html.

You can download the new release from here: http://www.dl-c.com/site/downloads/pwp-apps.php (The download is free to PWP 7 registered users.)

Note that the software and documentation are in two separate downloads. You should install both.

Kiril

Thanks for this update.
Is there any special reason why the download of the new version has about 78 MB, while the "old" version is only about 47 MB?

Winfried

The new download includes a halftone screen to establish the Halfttone Screen folder. The screen is a large file, so only one file was included with the PWP download. Additional screens are available here: http://www.dl-c.com/site/downloads/pwp-other.php

OK, I understand. This file is about 32 MB. That explains the new size of the download.
Thanks for the explanation.

...
Stack Images -- PWP32 v17.0.18.0 & Vista 32

1) For either 24 or 48-bit color Input images, the Amount Mask only seems to be adjustable when in the Blend Operation mode... ...was this intended?

I would find it useful if Amount could be adjusted for the other Operation modes as well and perhaps limited to specific Input image areas and/or gray tone ranges as has been/is possible in the Blend mode.

2) Are the Brightness and/or Density curve(s) when 'active' for individual Input images to have an affect for other Operations than Blend?

...den...

For operations other than Blend, the Amount control and density masks have no effect. The pre and post curves are still in effect however.

There is one possible improvement that I can think of: when two curves are composited, there are a lot of adjustment points on the resulting curve - likely the result of having to calculate the curve's complex shape. If I don't wan't to adjust them, that's OK, but if I wan't to move the resultant curve a bit, I can't do it because there are too many nodes.

Cheers and thanks for the upgrade!

p.s. I just can't help myself: I've got Fuji X-E2 almost 2 years ago. Some 2 weeks ago Fuji released firmware upgrade that totally changed the usability of the camera, including new AF and many ther functionalities. It's practically a brand new camera. Apart from DL-C, it's very rare...

Unfortunately, the only way I know of to composite two curves accurately that works in all cases is to have 256 control points. Maybe there is a way to selectively remove control points without affecting the accuracy too much.

I was able to find a way to reduce the number of control points significantly by allowing some error in the composite curve. This should find its way as an option into the next release.

Windows Defender, running under Windows 10 and with the latest updates, reports a Trojan (Trojan:Win32/Varpes.L!plock) in the 64-bit setup file for PWP 7.0.18 on one of my computers. Does anyone else see this? I first downloaded and installed the update to PWP a couple of days ago and no problems were reported then but Windows Defender reported the problem today after it updated its definitions to version 1.213.7751.0. I checked the PWP setup file with a couple other tools and they found no problems so I suspect that there is an error in the Defender definitions.