Digital Light & Color

I think I understand why such transformations such as 2/3-Zone are not available as widgets, since they are really only suited to one-by-one image editing; and of course any tool that depends on user input for each individual image (e.g. painting, etc.) can't be automated by definition.

But I don't see why "Advanced Sharpen", for instance, can't be a workflow widget: each of the three panels set fixed parameters for for the transformation. Often groups of pictures taken under the same conditions require the same noise reduction/sharpening treatment, so a workflow solution is actually quite useful and efficient in that case.

Masks could be automated also in respect to masking by brightness curves and other fixed parameters (e.g. masking brighter areas that don't need the "Advanced Sharpen" treatment), although I'm not sure how to represent a masking workflow where one step depends on two input images, one of them derived from the other--probably some kind of directed graph, which would have the advantage of generalizing automatized workflows in PWP. Maybe a project for PWP 7.0!--I'm still on 5.0. (There used to be several visual programming languages that adopted a kind of graph notation for procedural flows, so the idea is not totally crazy.)

Basically, the program design should be: if the processing action has fixed parameters, make it into a workflow widget.

Any comments?

I too have wondered why 'Advanced Sharpen' isn't available as a widget. I don't use workflows for batch processing, but rather to give me the option to re-visit and tweak settings. Sure, I can do (and have done) that by saving the parameters of the various transformations individually along with intermediate TIFFS, so that I can return to them. The workflow is a lot more convenient and uses less disk capacity. If I use Advanced Sharpen then I have to save the parameters separately because it isn't available as a widget. As you remark, if it has fixed parameters then I should have thought it could be incorporated into a widget.

Or am I missing something?

Ian

Creating a widget counterpart to advanced sharpen would be a perfectly logical enhancement.

Kiril

One more voice:

The computations in the sharpen part of Advanced Sharpen are much more accurate than USM and the transformation is ideal for the output sharpening of downsized tiffs to be converted in batch to jpegs for Net use. Output sharpening can be done by the numbers depending only on the size (and output medium if printing) of the final image — masks are not used.

For my purposes, and if more feasible, I would be happy with a Widget for just the sharpen part of Advanced Sharpen omitting noise and speck removal which I don’t use much.

Naturally, I would like it all since I use Advance Sharpen for almost all my sharpening needs, but if a reduced capability makes a Widget feasible in the near term, I would be quite satisfied since a V7 of PWP is probably three years away (based on past release schedules).

Thank you all for responding.

I also use the "Save workflow" feature when saving individual images, it's very convenient.

What about those parts of the Masking process that are controlled by fixed parameters? Never mind making it into widget, since that would imply considerable changes and enhancements to the workflow engine to incorporate masks, but just being able to store Mask parameters would be useful & convenient, e.g. multiple images where a particular set of Mask parameters do the job. A simple reminder to users on saving parameters that not all mask components can be saved, e.g. painting, would be sufficient, I think.

BTW, I notice on the new features list that PWP6 now has a separate "Noise reduction" transformation. Is this based on the AS techniques, or is it something using entirely different image processing? Can any one comment on its relative effectiveness vs. AS for various common types of image noise, viz. color, luminance, etc.

Also in the new features: exactly which IPTC fields can be added and are editable? It would be nice to have IPTC:City IPTC:State IPTC:Country IPTC:Keywords IPTC:ObjectName IPTC:Caption, since all that metadata is indexed by Windows Search (no need for a separate image cataloging application, and apparently for people uploading to Flickr and some other photo-sharing sites, the geographical IPTC terms are extracted & added to the IPTC keywords, the ObjectName becomes the title, and the IPTC Caption becomes the description). And storing metadata as part of the image file is good sense.

It looks like I've hijacked my own thread, I think...

For the IPTC question, please see http://www.dl-c.com/board/viewtopic.php ... 2966#p2966

Kiril