The new Landscape program

[Snapnpiks Profile]

Hi I was checking out the new Lanscape program that was just released, and I saw how you can replace the sky around trees and bridge's in your video tutorials, I was just wondering if its that simple to just move your cursor over the tight small areas in Landscape, how come in SFE when I try to remove background around women's hair its not that simple..I hope you understand what i'm asking, but that would be so awesome if you could incorporate that node into SFE for removing background around flowing women's hair..

[Richard Briggs Profile]

Hi, been looking at Landscape Pro and am a little disappointed as I thought it would be taking the best features of SPE and taking it forward as there seems little development effort going into SPE. SPE is just such a wonderful and unique product but I appreciate the commercial problems in that most of it's unique value (the effects) have been created by the general public.

I see Landscape Pro is completely different and, for me, the only real benefit is the superior sky replacement facility (to SPE). I also echo your thoughts on this.

By the way, did you know in SPE if you hold shift down whilst selecting (a sky area, for example) it does a much better job.

Regards
Richard

[eadams Profile]

Hi, been looking at Landscape Pro and am a little disappointed as I thought it would be taking the best features of SPE and taking it forward as there seems little development effort going into SPE. SPE is just such a wonderful and unique product but I appreciate the commercial problems in that most of it's unique value (the effects) have been created by the general public.

I see Landscape Pro is completely different and, for me, the only real benefit is the superior sky replacement facility (to SPE). I also echo your thoughts on this.

By the way, did you know in SPE if you hold shift down whilst selecting (a sky area, for example) it does a much better job.

Regards
Richard

I didn't know about the tip of holding shift when making selections - I'll have to try it. Thanks!

I own a lot of photo editing software, but I keep coming back to SPE for the sheer power and ease of use. If the rough corners were ironed out, it would have the potential of becoming the greatest piece of image editing software ever created in my opinion

I agree - and it is only an assumption - that the community involvement in creating effects may be a concern preventing the makers from investing too much into it. Topaz Labs has a product that has a similar community concept - "Texture Effects". With this software, however, you can easily import your own self-made collection of texture jpgs, so if you like a community-created effect, you can experiment with replacing the texture in the effect with one of your own from a drop-down list. In SPE editing the effect with the Effect Editor is a bit intimidating for consumers.

The Effect Gallery in SPE is in my opinion better than any other such gallery I have come across. In the Topaz program, the effects are not all bulk-downloaded to the local computer, so it takes forever for the thumbnails to load. And when you select a thumbnail, you don't see the effect previewed at full size. So it you bother to download the selected effect, it might not look as expected at full size. In SPE I have all effects and full-size previews at my fingertips.

Anyway, I wish that Anthropics would direct more attention to SPE. They really have a winner.

I purchased the LandscapePro program but it is still being improved, so I will reserve a final judgement until I think it is in a final form. Of course, it is not as versatile as SPE, so there is no comparing the two.

[Richard Briggs Profile]

I agree 100% with everything said. The only other effects program that has really impressed me (but comparing it with SPE is apples and oranges) is Snapseed which I used on my Android tablet. This is a very neat product owned by Google and I understand they are putting a lot more effort into developing it. Hopefully a Windows version will appear. But, again, it doesn't compare with SPE.

Richard

[admin]

Hi everyone,

It's interesting reading your comments on here especially as I was the main developer on both products. I don't often go into philosophizing and big picture stuff here, but here goes anyway. The two products are, I like to think, the opposite of each other in several ways. In terms of output, SPE ended up very much at the photo art end of the spectrum, while LandscapePro tries to keep things naturalistic (although you can always push it past what's natural). In terms of user interface, SPE puts you in the driving seat in terms of letting you decide what to do next, while LandscapePro is much more like PortraitPro in that it forces you to follow a specific path through the software. SPE has a community build around it (which I love), while LandscapePro doesn't yet (although we may add a forum in the future). Finally, LandscapePro gives you ways to alter everything at once, where as in SPE, going back to edit previous choices takes more of a back seat. So it's not surprising that some SPE enthusiasts strongly prefer it to LP, I don't think they could be more different!

In terms of what LP does that SPE doesn't there are two main things: Firstly is the relighting, which can produce something that can't be done in any other software I've seen, although certainly has cases where it doesn't work. The second is the ability to edit atmosphere and clouds separately in the sky, which can be a lot of fun, and again can't be done easily in other software. It might surprise you to learn than LP has been built on top of the same engine that runs SPE, but with some new nodes added to support these new effects.

I guess the only other thing I'd say is LP is in a much earlier stage compared to SPE, so expect it to change a lot.

Kind regards

Tony

[eadams Profile]

Thank you, Tony, for giving some background information about these programs. One thing that Landscape Pro can do really well is automatically change the atmosphere of the entire image when the sky is replaced. In the "before and after" example below I replaced only the sky with the preset "Clear Red Sunset". The rest of the image matches the color tones of the new sky without my having to do anything. The "Tree and Sky" selection tool does a really good job in defining the edge where trees meet sky. Aside from that, the SPE selection tool is much easier to use.

Before and After 1.jpg (203.57 KiB) Viewed 10044 times