09 Jun 2019

After a Rough Start, On1 PhotoRaw 2019 Recovers

On1 PhotoRaw is another application that's attempting to take advantage of Adobe's decision to eliminate perpetual licensing for its photographic products. The 2018 version was promising, but a 2019 update had serious performance problems. Now the 2019.5 update has resolved most of the issues.

Some users are still complaining about slow performance, but most have reported significant improvements with the recently released half-year update. In the initial 2019 release, for example, opening an image to edit mode from the browser could take nearly a minute. Now that operation is nearly instantaneous.

On1 is positioning PhotoRaw 2019.5 as "a game changer" that is an alternative to Lightroom "with powerful Photoshop features."

Most photo editing and management applications have lens correction options. Some apply the corrections automatically and others require the user to apply the correction manually. Lens corrections are intended to correct known problems with specific lenses and virtually all lenses have known problems. Prime lenses (those with a single focal length) have fewer problems and zoom lenses have more.

On1 says that PhotoRaw applies these corrections automatically and in some cases it does. When I use a Canon camera, the EXIF data recorded with the image is sufficient for PhotoRaw to identify the lens and apply any needed corrections. However, with a Sony RX100 PhotoRaw recognizes only the Camera make but reports no match for the lens.

Ironically, the application knows about the camera's built-in lens and will apply appropriate lens corrections when the user selects the lens from a drop-down list in the Lens Correction section. The RX100 lens exhibits a serious vignetting issue, but only when the lens is at its widest aperture, which is 9mm, or approximately the equivalent on a 35mm camera of 24mm.

Having applied the lens correction to one image, I'm supposed to be able to synchronize the setting across multiple images. This may work on a Mac (I haven't tested there), but I couldn't make it work on a Windows machine.

On1 claims that the update is "up to 50x faster than the previous version", but that claim is both misleading and specious. The claim is correct for one extremely specific action and the company would have been wise not to make such an outlandish claim. PhotoRaw 2019.5 is, in my testing, clearly faster for many operations, but the user who expects something like a 50x improvement across the board will be mightily disappointed.

I should also point out that one action cannot be 50 times faster than another operation. It can take 1/50th the amount of time, but "times faster" is, at best, an oxymoron.

Mac users who have MacOS 10.11 have reported that the new version will install but crashes on open because it requires MacOS 10.12 or later. PhotoRaw 2019.5 is a 64-bit application on both Windows and MacOS. Mac users will need at least MacOS 12. The Windows version runs under Windows 7, 8, or 10, but On1 recommends Windows 10. Although the application will run on systems with only 4GB of RAM, at least 16GB is recommended.

The application stores its catalog on the C drive for Windows in C:\Users\{UserName}\AppData\Roaming\ON1\ON1 Photo RAW 2019\ExploreService\ and on the primary drive for MacOS users in ~/Library/Application Support/ON1/ON1 Photo RAW 2019/ExploreService/. It's unclear whether the catalog can be relocated.

Sometimes all of the edit options in the right-side panel disappear and closing the application displays a crash message. Restarting the application restores the controls.

Now that I have the complaints out of the way, let's see what this application can do and why you might want to take a look at it.

There's a new edit history that allows the user to roll back changes. Edit and browse windows can now be opened on separate screens, which is a plus for those who have more than a single screen. A new keyword system that allows nesting keywords inside keywords to make finding and organizing images better.

So despite my grumbling, this is a worthwhile application, but not yet a replacement for photographic professionals who use the various Adobe applications. The application is one of several that began developing standalone versions with the objective of siphoning off some Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop users who don't like Adobe's software rental plan, but PhotoRaw can still be installed as a plug-in for Adobe's applications.

On1 PhotoRaw includes many controls that will be familiar to Adobe Lightroom Classic users, but some work differently. One example is the Dehaze tool in Lightroom, which is the Haze tool in PhotoRaw. Moving the slider to the right in Lightroom cuts haze and sharpens the image. Moving the slider to the right in PhotoRaw 2019.5 increases haze and makes the image less sharp. There's nothing wrong with either approach, but the difference is something that users will need to deal with.

Four primary options are available in Edit mode: Develop, Effects, Portrait, and Local.

• Develop is the part of the application that looks most like Lightroom. It's here that users control exposure, contrast, color balance, tint, saturation, and vibrance. There's an option to reduce vibrance on skin for more natural flesh tones and a "purity" adjustment with sliders for highlights and shadows acts primarily as a way to reduce saturation selectively in the lightest and darkest areas. Sharpening and noise reduction are also in this section, as is the lens correction setting with options to manually adjust distortion, color fringing, and vignetting. Transform controls allow the user to fix keystoning and other problems.
• The Effects tab is where filters are stored for various photographic looks such as antique images, black and white, cross process and bleach bypass, film grain, HDR, lens blur and flare, and more.
• The Portrait section attempts to locate faces in the image and works best when the person is looking directly at the camera, less well when the subject is in partial or full profile. Settings in this section make it possible to reduce blemishes, whiten eyes and teeth, and improve details in the subject's eyes.
• The Local tab includes many of the same exposure, color balance and saturation controls found in the Develop tab, but allows the modifications to be brushed on to specific parts of the image or to apply the change selectively to highlights, midtones, or shadows; flesh colors, vivid colors, or neutral colors; or one of several specific colors.

Changes made to images are non-destructive, so PhotoRaw uses sidecar files that are stored in the same directory with the images and have an ON1 extension. A single sidecar file contains the information about all changes made to an image.

 Performance enhancements put PhotoRaw back in the running

The first iteration of PhotoRaw 2019 was so sluggish that even long-time users of the application were threatening to abandon the application. Although the 2019.5 version has fixed many of the performance issues, some operations are still slow when compared to other applications in what's becoming a crowded field. As a plug-in for Lightroom and Photoshop, On1 always had some worthwhile looks and these continue to be worthwhile whether PhotoRaw is used in standalone mode or as a plug-in. The company allows users to install the application on up to 5 computers, MacOS or Windows.
Additional details are available on the On1 website.

Short Circuits

It's Not Just Elections the Russians are Messing With

Fifth Generation (5G) is the cellular service that will fulfill promises we've been hearing about for years, but if you watch RT America, you might be worried because the Russian television service in the United States does more than just spread political divisiveness.

First, a bit of background: RT America is the Russian government's cable television channel in the United States. The Russian president is an old KGB operative and he has not forgotten the lessons learned during his days with the Комите́т Госуда́рственной Безопа́сности (КГБ) -- the Committee for State Security. The KGB worked with TASS (Телеграфное агентство Советского Союза) -- the Telephone Agency of the Soviet Union (the official Soviet news agency) to spread disinformation and they were skilled at doing just that.

Very little has changed. The Russian strong man (president in name only) wants to strengthen Russia and that means weakening the United States. One technique involves using phony Facebook and Twitter accounts to spread divisiveness and to reduce our confidence in the electoral system, but lately RT America has been warning viewers of what it calls a dangerous "experiment on humanity."

The dangerous experiment? Installation of 5G cellular technology throughout the United States. You may have seen the new towers in your area. They're considerably smaller than typical cell towers and they are spaced closer together. An internet search reveals sites that post alarming information and tell people how to oppose the development of 5G technology.

RT America has run eight programs so far on the "dangers" of 5G technology and yet in Russia Vladimir Putin is all in favor of going full speed ahead to develop the technology. Why?

As I said at the outset, 5G will deliver on the promises we've been hearing for years. The nation that excels with 5G will have significant advantages over those who lag behind. The United States already has slower overall internet service than what much of the rest of the world has and pays more for it. Falling behind on 5G will only compound that. Oh, and China is also positioning itself to be a major player in the 5G market.

If Russia can convince US citizens to oppose the technology, it gives the Russians a chance to move ahead. Already I have seen concerns expressed by neighbors who fear the new system. The problem is that much of the "scientific evidence" is far from being either "scientific" or "evidence".

For example, you may hear that 5G radio waves (in the 30GHz part of the spectrum) are dangerous to humans and to the environment. In fact, a high-power concentrated 30GHz beam can cause damage. The radio waves used by 5G cellular communications are low power and diffuse.

You may also hear that studies show current wireless technologies cause cancer. In fact, there are no such studies. There are more mobile phones in use than the populations of every nation on Earth. Cell phones started being used widely in 1985 — 34 years ago — and yet there has been no relationship established to any increase in brain cancer.

"Follow the money" is almost invariably a good maxim for dealing with questionable information and scaremongering in general. Why does RT America spend so much time trying to frighten Americans about the "dangers" of 5G when the person who is ultimately in charge of RT America wants to push 5G technology forward at home? I'll leave the answer for you to ponder.

Wi-Fi Signals Also Won't Harm You

The upcoming 5G technology is just the latest to attract scaremongers. Much of the scaremongering depends on the incorrect use of specific scientific terms such as "radiation".

Scary, right? Radiation is a bad thing to have around the house. But what about your radiator? There's radiation from a radiator, whether it's in your car or in your house. What's being radiated is heat. If you listen to radio or watch television, you're using radio frequency (RF) radiation. You're actually surrounded by RF wherever you are, except maybe in the United States National Radio Quiet Zone in parts of Virginia and West Virginia. If you want to know more about why there's a quiet zone and what the Greenbank Observatory observes, there's a Wikipedia article with an explanation.

So you're surrounded by this scary "radiation". But opponents of Wi-Fi use the term that brings to mind Chernobyl or Three Mile Island or X-Rays. RF signals are "radiation" — energy moving through space — but not dangerous radiation. RF signals non-ionizing radiation that does not damage cells and tissues.

Your local AM, FM, and TV stations radiate energy through space. So does a flashlight, for that matter. RF from Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or cellular communications are tested, and have been from the beginning, to determine that the amount of power used is well below any demonstrably hazardous exposure level. That's an important consideration, too. The RF from a radio station's transmitter won't harm you, either, but if you touch the antenna while the station is on the air, the results will not be go your liking.

In a society where people who oppose vaccinations that protect against dangerous diseases, it's not surprising that people who claim that Wi-Fi signals are responsible for creating "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" have at least a small number of misled followers. A recent article by Kenneth R. Foster, professor emeritus of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, takes an in-depth look at the claims and debunks them.

If you'd like to read the full article, it's on the Education Next website.

Handling High Dynamic Range Images

Your smart phone's camera probably has a high dynamic range setting. You'll see an option labeled "HDR" and the results will be very good. If you have a camera that captures raw images, and even a lot of point-and-shoot cameras can do that these days, you'll get even better results if you combine multiple raw images to create a high-dynamic range photograph.

In bright sunlight our eyes can see detail in both the brightest areas that we're looking at and the deepest shadows. To be entirely truthful, our eyes can't really do that, but they fool us into thinking that they can. We focus only on a small bit of what we see and our eyes adjust quickly. Glance at a bright sunlit area and you'll see details. Shift your view to a shadowed area and you'll see details. Cameras, whether film or digital, don't work that way and that's where high dynamic range processing helps.

On Memorial Day, I had escaped the heat outside and was sitting in my younger daughter's living room. The view out the front windows was a perfect HDR situation. I could see the trees and the house across the street. I could see the backpack on a chair under the lamp. I could see detail on the table and the floor. But I knew that the camera I was carrying could not reproduce this detail.

The camera is a Sony RX100 version 6 point-and-shoot camera. It can capture raw images and it has an option to capture multiple images that can be used to create a single HDR image. I took three images at normal, -3, and +3 exposures.

• The "normal" exposure (top left) is what the camera created as the best possible compromise between the brightest and the darkest areas of the image. There is no detail in either the highlights (outside the window) or the shadows (in the corner).
• The "highlights" exposure (top right) correctly exposes the exterior but eliminates even more shadow detail. Even so, the sky has no details and this is a situation where 5 images instead of 3 images would have been better.
• The "shadows" exposure (bottom left) brings out details in the shadowed area, but loses details in the highlights in the room and outside.

If I had to pick one of these images, I would use the lower left exposure because it retains detail inside the house, but an HDR image that combines all three of the images (lower right) retains adequate detail in the highlights, the shadows, and the mid-tones. The three images were all taken without use of a tripod, but I did use the camera's built-in ability to capture multiple images in a single operation and Adobe Lightroom Classic's ability to align and combine multiple images into a single HDR image.

Some cameras can take multiple exposures at different exposure settings. This makes the process much easier because holding the camera still for three or five nearly instantaneous exposures is easy. If you need to change the exposures manually for each of the images, stitching them together will be much more difficult for the application. Nearly all photo processing applications for professionals and advanced amateurs include HDR processing, either as part of the primary application or as an add-on.

Although your smart phone can create a good HDR image, the better solution will always be to use a digital camera's raw mode to create at least three exposures that can be combined to create the final HDR image.