Digital Light & Color

It's taking longer than I expected to produce a reasonably solid beta version for testing. The most serious remaining issues are mostly related to masks, the interaction of gray and color profiles (gray profiles are new with PWP 8), and a new retouching tool (the Edit tool) that I am also planning.

When I get masks working reliably, I plan to release a version for testing and feedback, probably minus the Edit tool which will come along later, followed by performance improvements and smoothing the rough edges of the user interface.

In the meantime, I am uploading a first cut version of the PWP 8 help file which describes all the new features. You should be able to download a copy at http://www.dl-c.com/PWP8/Picture%20Window%20Pro.chm - sorry for the size (235MB), but that has to do with all the high resolution screen shots - hopefully I can make the final version smaller. It will download to your Downloads folder -- apparently double-clicking the help file does not open it properly -- you have to right click on the chm file and select Open With... and then select Microsoft HTML Help Executable as the application to open the file.

Thanks for your patience.

A user emailed me the following tip for opening the help file:

Anyways after following your instructions online I was able to save the file and when I ran it, it opened the application but everything was blank. So I had to right click on the file properties and in the pop up box had to check the unlock square and that made it work.

I had forgotten the help authoring system I am using can generate PDF as well as HTML Help files. Consequently, I have created a PDF version (unfortunately even larger than the other one) which you can download at:

http://www.dl-c.com/PWP8/Picture%20Window%20Pro.pdf

I don't recommend trying to print this file as the fonts came out larger than I would have wanted and it would waste a lot of paper.

Thank you for sharing the document and the update on the new version's progress. I'm looking forward to a few new transformations and controls to play with, and very glad to see the overall design is an evolution of the older (current) versions, so my learning curve shouldn't be too steep...

Just wondering if you have considered a "view image full-screen" option, possibly on a second monitor?

The new "Separate Tool" mask selection looks very interesting, as is the "Scratch Removal Tool" and "Test Patterns". Can't wait to try them out!

There is almost a full screen mode already if you use the main tool bar to hide the image browser. This leaves just the current image filling most of the screen with just some tool bars and the menu bar at the top.

Jonathan - thanks for all your work on this. As a PWP user from back in the shareware days...I'm really looking forward to V8.

I noticed that the File menu Commands, as listed in the Help file, don't include "File / Save As Widget". I use it all the time because it always puts the file I'm saving in its original directory. Is this command going to be in the final product? Or is it just omitted from the Help file?

PWP 8 does not have widgets so there is no Save As Widget command. I plan to add automation features in a later version. The File Save As command will, by default, try to save the file in the same folder as the original, with a version number tacked on the end of the filename.

Because of the way the image tree saves everything you did to an image so it can be repeated or modified later, editing is non-destructive and you cannot save the file with the name name as the original. If you were using Lightroom or some other raw converter, this would be similar to saving a modified raw file over the original version and thus corrupting your digital negative.

Instead PWP 8 gives you three options for resolving pathname conflicts when you save a file:

1) Save with a version number added to the end of the filename (or some other name)
2) Rename the original and save with the original name (or some other name)
3) Start over selecting where to save the file

Just a question that needs some clarification for me:
I read the part about "Image Info".
I miss some support of xmp Metadata. To my understanding xmp formated Metadata are the current standard for metadata.
see: http://www.photometadata.org or http://www.metadataworkinggroup.org/
The current IPTC-standard is a xmp-standard.

Of course I don't expect that PWP 8 becomes a xmp-editor. But I would like to see, that existing xmp-data of a file are copied from the inputfile to the output file. Since PWP doesn't handle RAW-data, I am not talking about external xmp side-car-files, but about internal metadata of *.jpg or *.tif files using the xmp concept.

I still have a number of issues to clean up with file handling. I will take note of your request -- I believe implementing a pass-through of specific metadata should be relatively simple. Currently there is no IPTC support at all although I was planning to add it back in at some point.

Jonathan,

Thank you for sharing the documents, they really make appetite to lay hands on the new version.
When browsing through the document I noticed that you seem to have dropped the calendar transformation?
Should be no big deal to keep an older version on the computer as it is used once a year usually, but I just wondered why it was dropped.