New to SPE, Not New to Photo Editing. Questions (Long).

[cooltouch Profile]

I saw an ad at sonyalpharumors.com for SPE last night and followed it over to your website, and decided to d/l your demo. From the start, I realized that SPE is very different from anything I've ever used before and I immediately began to see the possibilities as I browsed through all the various editing jobs that were shown. First thing I did was load in an image of mine that has some issues to see how the program would respond. Well, it responded alright -- with 277 pages of suggested edits. And I spotted a few immediately that had some strong possibilities. But any of you who are old hands at photo editing will understand this -- so I chose an edit that caught my eye and took a more critical look at it. Then decided maybe a touch more of saturation here, a bit less contrast there, perhaps a bit more sharpening overall, etc., etc. And that's when things started to get . . . well, frustrating, really.

I'm used to starting out with a raw, unprocessed image and making various adjustments to it, finally arriving at an image that I'm satisfied with. Each image is different, but I've learned that, for those that require some adjustment, often there is a definite order that I have to follow with these adjustments for the image to come out the way I expect. Many images will have specific areas that need attention and these areas will vary from image to image. So anyway, it is trying to emulate these processes when opening a new image in SPE that the frustration begins. Look, I appreciate being able to pick from 277 pages of edits that have been applied to my image, but you know, all of these edits -- or at least some of them -- were done by folks who started at the beginning, without editing the work of others. That's where I want to start.

But I can't start with a single image on the screen if I want to start with certain commands. Take "Sharpen" for example. In order for me to find that command anywhere I have to load the Effects Gallery, which means my image disappears, replaced with the first of 277 pages of edit examples. At first I can't load Sharpen at all, then I realize I have to grab the left side of the image's frame and move it to the right so I can see the right end of the list of commands there (this is one of a growing list of examples of the interface I don't care for -- I have to do that every time, when it should remember the first time I did it. In fact, I shouldn't have to do it at all if you want to get specific about it.) Okay, so I'm looking at a page of a dozen iterations of my image, all of which are sharpening examples. And as I'm browsing through the examples, I note that some have more control sliders than others. So of course, I'm wondering where the people that did these edits found all the control sliders, since when I click on "Tools" as I'm looking at my basic image alone, the "Sharpen" command is not one of the ones shown. Is this something missing from the trial version?

For me, the process of editing a file is rather frustrating. I have a fairly fast machine -- a 2.8 GHz 64-bit processor running 8 gigs of ram, yet doing things like moving the merge sliders around with a 10 megapixel .tif file results in frequent crashes. Just now, I managed to crash the program by moving one of the merge sliders to a low value and then back up to a high value with this same 10 megapixel .tif file. The editing routine I crashed was "Denoise and sharpen detail" by tom. And it isn't a "not responding" situation that Win7 often can extricate itself from. This is the fatal sort with the "Photo Editor has stopped working" popup. I have been able to do this now four or five times in rapid succession with a few different editing routines -- so I can't just go and blame "Denoise and sharpen detail" by tom. Setting this aside for a moment, I'm also wondering why certain commands don't seem to make any difference, or at least work the way I expect. Calling up the noise command, I noted that the previous routine I'd used had a chrominance slider, so I decided to go with it again. Then I loaded up a file -- another 10 megapixel .tif file -- that has a fair amount of color noise in it. It is frustrating because as I move the sliders around I have to wait for the image to redraw and I have to wait as it decides to slip into (Not Responding) mode, and then as I attempt to adjust another slider I get the "SPE has stopped working" popup. Quite frustrating, people. How do you manage to get any work done? I boot the program again and load up the same file and the same editing routine. I zoom in on the same area that has quite a bit of chrominance noise. (BTW, in other image editing software I use, I can zoom in and out using the scroll wheel -- with SPE, I have to go up to the Pan/Zoom control and put up with its balkiness and hesitation as I try to zoom in on the area I want. What takes a fraction of a second in one of these other programs can take a minute or more in SPE. Why is this?) This time I start with the top most "Merge" slider and move it back and forth to see if it makes any difference. None that I can tell. Then I try the next one. At last, I can see some difference. I slowly move the slider leftward, seeing it remove some colored splotchiness and then -- the fatal popup again. WTF. I tried three more times to see if I could get rid of the chrominance splotches, but finally gave up. SPE would not let me get that second slider below 0.013 without crashing. Even leaving it at 0.015 and moving the bottom Merge slider to the left, I got it to crash again when I had the merge slider at about 0.40. But worst of all, the color noise was still very obvious.

I note that the trial copy of SPE states that "Save" and other features are omitted. Is access to a more full suite of controls one of the things that is omitted from the Trial version?

I was able to crash SPE with both v1.18 that I first d/l'd and with v1.19 that I d/l'd today.

Is it possible to have more than one image file open at the same time? And I don't mean two versions of the same file. Two different files.

How about image resize -- say I want to reduce the image from its native file size to one that is more suited for viewing on the Web?

What about a "free rotate" command? Say I have an image with a horizon that is canted at about a 4 degree angle. With a free rotate command I can fix this. Is this possible with SPE? I haven't found anything like that yet.

I'm confused about .png images. In one spot I noticed that the program stated that it supported .jpg, .tif, and raw files only, and in another spot I saw where .png files were being discussed.

How about having a viewable image gallery, such that if I have a directory that contains just files, I can view this entire directory's contents? Then I can select which files I want to edit visually. With SPE, I can call up the directory as part of the "file open" command, but this isn't as convenient. I dunno -- I suppose it's all the way you look at it.

I suspect that I'm expecting SPE to do things that it isn't designed to do. But I'm also trying to figure out how to get it to do things that I know it can do, but that so far I can't figure out. The included Help routine hasn't been completely helpful in that regard. I'll wager that I'll be able to find the answers here at the forums though. Despite the problems I've run into -- which would have been sufficient for me to delete the software from my hard drive if it had been anything else -- I see enough interesting possibilities with SPE that I intend to spend some more time with it, and because it is so favorably priced, I will most likely go ahead and buy a copy. The way I see myself using it most often is as a final polish to be put on some of my files. However, some of the special effects routines as shown in the tutorials are valuable enough by themselves to keep this software around.

[admin]

Hi Michael,

A few points that you might find useful:

The trial version doesn't have all the functionality in it, so if you see things mentioned on this forum that you can't find that might be it.

Regarding adjusting your picture: The effects gallery is there as a creative, 'let's see what I can do' environment and certainly isn't useful when you know what you want. Some of the effects (particularly the ones by Tom that do denoising) are very processor intensive.

For whole image adjustments there is the Image Treatment tool, and for area based adjustments there's the Area Treatment tool (which has sharpening and clarity both on sliders).

Free rotating is available through the crop tool and there's the straighten tool if you just want to fix a wonky horizon.

If you want to save out a version at a different size, that option appears when you save a picture.

Jpg/Tiff/Png and Raw images should be supported throughout the software. If you spot any point where they aren't let me know! There was a bug where one of the file dialogs defaulted to only showing raw files, but you could change the filter in the usual way.

SPE isn't currently designed for multiple files nor is it an image browser.

Re: crashing: we always want to hear about crashes so we can fix them. Could you open a support ticket here so we can try and reproduce the crash?

Hope that all helps and let me know if there's anything I've missed.

Tony