A Breakpoint widget Workflow Example: RAW to Pre-Print

[den]

As Kiril has suggested, I find that having the capability to adjust a widget in the middle of a workflow process invaluable... ...[because not all images are created equal]... ...for example: basic RAW conversion; RGB color space curve edits; local contrast enhancement and sharpening; chromatic aberration; and final curve and sharpening...

...the Breakpoints allow for customized adjustments preferenced for each image in the Workflow display...

See: http://www.ncplus.net/~birchbay/tutoria ... /index.htm

[MikeG]

Den, Thanks for another highly instructive tutorial. I was impressed by the subtlety of your workflow though, unfortunately, my eyes are no longer sharp enough to fully appreciate the finer nuances of some of the steps. As best as I can tell your workflow worked well on my Panasonic GH2 rw2 files.
The breakpoints are a big step forward over what I have been doing, which is to use 'Selected images' and then have to go through every widget whether it needed adjustment or not.
My current obsession is macro photography of insects and I like to mask them so that I can use the brightness curve, LCE, sharpening and the like to better distinguish them from the background. Thus a workflow that allowed the creation of individual masks (if such a thing is possible) would be a boon.
Given that the DOF in macro photography is shallow and often little but the bug is in focus, a tool that could distinguish between 'in-focus' and 'out-of-focus' would be valuable for mask creation.
Back to the point.
I did try loading 4 RAW images into the workflow (Windows 7 64bit 8GB RAM) with Multitasking enabled and found that 2 images were done in alteratation (perhaps reflecting my dual core processor) without any memory issues.
One puzzle - a dialog box labelled "Workflow Execution Progress" popped up bearing the legend: "Breakpoint ready for processing. Complete present operation and click "Display Breakpoint"." Couldn't see the point of this as completing the present operation was sufficient for the workflow to proceed to the next step.
Mike.

[den]

Den, Thanks for another highly instructive tutorial. I was impressed by the subtlety of your workflow though, unfortunately, my eyes are no longer sharp enough to fully appreciate the finer nuances of some of the steps. As best as I can tell your workflow worked well on my Panasonic GH2 rw2 files.
The breakpoints are a big step forward over what I have been doing, which is to use 'Selected images' and then have to go through every widget whether it needed adjustment or not.
My current obsession is macro photography of insects and I like to mask them so that I can use the brightness curve, LCE, sharpening and the like to better distinguish them from the background. Thus a workflow that allowed the creation of individual masks (if such a thing is possible) would be a boon.
Given that the DOF in macro photography is shallow and often little but the bug is in focus, a tool that could distinguish between 'in-focus' and 'out-of-focus' would be valuable for mask creation.

I believe that if you have a pre-existing mask image open and available in the 'working space', that you could load it into a Breakpoint widget transformation... remembering to change it to another mask image or delete it for the next image in the Workflow queue when the widget next appears. I have not confirmed this to be the case though. Perhaps you could try it and report back?

Back to the point.
I did try loading 4 RAW images into the workflow (Windows 7 64bit 8GB RAM) with Multitasking enabled and found that 2 images were done in alteratation (perhaps reflecting my dual core processor [yes]) without any memory issues.
One puzzle - a dialog box labelled "Workflow Execution Progress" popped up bearing the legend: "Breakpoint ready for processing. Complete present operation and click "Display Breakpoint"." Couldn't see the point of this as completing the present operation was sufficient for the workflow to proceed to the next step.
Mike.

As Kiril explained it to me: ..."As far as the progress bar is concerned, here is the design. There is a a single progress bar which consolidates the progress across all processes. Basically, if you have 10 widgets and 12 images, you have 120 operations to perform. Each time a process performs an operation it advances the progress bar 1/120. It doesn't matter which process does what.

The red is simply an attention device. If a breakpoint occurs while the user has a transformation open I do not open another transformation. (That would be very confusing.) Instead I queue it. The user interface to dequeue it is a button on the progress bar. To attract the user's attention to the fact that something is waiting, I display the progress bar in red -- but the amount of progress shown is the same as if it were in black. Since dequeuing mostly happens automatically, perhaps I should not bother to display the bar in red."...

[MikeG]

Den,
I've started to experiment with an open mask image. Of course I've had to develop the RAW file before I could create the mask so my starting point for the workflow is a TIFF (already straightened and cropped).
In brief, yes, one can use the prepared mask at each break point.
However there are issues which I'll expand on later when time permits.
Mike.

[MikeG]

Had another more orderly trial, but soon got into a mess.
One problem is that widgets shows masks as available in the drop down list even if they are of the wrong size.
Another is if there are two masks available, (maybe it happens with more than two), whichever one is NOT selected is duplicated so that the next widget shows an additional 'identical' mask available.
A complication is that, it appears, the workflow stores any (utilised?) mask so if the workflow is used again these stored masks are opened in the workspace and are available again though they may have no connection with the images to be processed.

Not user friendly as it is - in my hands, anyway.

Mike.

[ksinkel]

While it can be done as MikeG described, I do not recommend using a mask with a breakpointed image if your mask needs to be customized for each image. If you need a custom mask for a particular operation it is far better to use regular PWP transformations which are designed to use the full capabilities of the mask tool. It is fine however to use a standard mask -- one that doesn't change from image to image -- with a breakpointed image.

One way to combine custom masks with the workflow would be to do your mask opeations manually first. The create a workflow for the remaining operations and add the images from the mask step to the workflow. This is made simpler becasue you can now insert images from the PWP workspace into the workflow directly. (To add an image to a workflow, right click on the image and select the Add to Workflow option.)

Kiril