Garret suggests that I look into DXO Photolab for night sky shots. First, thanks for reading the marmot, Garret. That's also one of life's little rewards these days.

But let me politely say that I appreciate the suggestion, but I probably won't be looking at PhotoLab 7 or any other editor, at least in the near term.

Creative people are passionate about their tools. And that's probably as it should be. If you have a good relationship with a good tool, you feel as though you have a super-power. It allows you to do things you might not have been able to achieve otherwise. At least not with as much ease.

That's kind of how I feel about the E-M1X with the 100-400mm zoom (with the 2x teleconverter) and handheld high res shots. Using it feels like a super-power.

And "gear-heads" in photography, which may or may not include me, often chase cameras or lenses in search of new super-powers. Or to not "miss out" on the super-power experience they read or see others extolling in the forums, or on blogs or YouTube.

Editors, software applications that allow you to manipulate digital images, are not much different in that regard. They all seem to attract their own fans, some of whom feel passionate about them.

Photos is about as pedestrian an editor as you might expect to find. It comes free with every Mac and iOS device! The "extensions" feature kind of changes that equation a bit, but even without it, you can do quite a lot just within Photos, and I'm still learning things about it.

But there have recently been a number of AI or ML (machine learning) innovations in image editing software, that afford remarkable capabilities. Topaz DeNoiseAI was, I think, one of the early ones in this regard. DXO celebrates its DeepPrime XD feature for noise reduction in RAW files. I mostly use DeNoiseAI on jpegs or tiffs. I haven't quite managed to figure out the RAW workflow, though I confess I haven't spent much time looking at it yet. Of noise reduction apps, the DeepPrime people seem to be the most passionate that I've encountered.

Of the dozen or more image editors and utilities I have on my iMac, I use only 4 regularly. Photos, Affinity Photo, RAW Power and Topaz SharpenAI. If I'm successful at learning Affinity Photo 2, I'll likely be using RAW Power less. I should also add that I use OMDS OM Workspace occasionally as well, because it's especially designed for Olympus cameras, and replicates the built-in jpeg engine of the cameras. It's also kind of the clunkiest to work in.

Now, DXO PhotoLab 7 may be a better editor than any of the ones I currently use. I know that there are a lot of people who love it in the DP Review forums. But attention and focus are finite resources, and I'd rather build on what experience I already have in these apps than begin with a new one. Granted, a lot of the concepts are likely similar or identical, it's in the implementation where the advantages lie. But I happen to think that, at least in the near term, I'll be better off trying to increase my understanding of my existing tools.

I still struggle with understanding what a "good" image is. I often worry that my bird shots are over-sharpened. Which suggests to me that perhaps they are. But it also seems to me that they ought to be that sharp. Yes, I know about halos and ringing, and I try to look out for that. And SharpenAI can be prone to artifacts in areas that aren't the subject, so I've been masking more often. But I don't know. It nags at me.

My feeling is that a "photograph" ought to be what the camera puts out. But that's all "just numbers," and computers allow us to manipulate enormous amounts of numbers with very little effort. So most of my photos are little more than slightly modified jpegs. Or, "what the camera put out."

I'm also a sucker for warm, saturated colors, so I'll do some of that in post if I didn't get what I wanted from the camera settings. But I haven't really grokked the idea of these heavily modified photos that add "mood" or "atmosphere." I think I may want to try some of that, but I'm not sure if it's a "photograph" at that point.

I'm also conflicted on the whole idea of "noise." I mean, if nobody ever told me about it, or that it was "bad," I doubt that I'd ever even notice noise in, like, the sky. Now that I know about sky noise, I look for it and then I think I've got to make that go away! And that's what introduces color shifts in DeNoiseAI, and then I can't get the sky right, in terms of that "Olympus blue" I usually enjoy. I play with the saturation and luminance sliders in the cyan channel in Photos and sometimes I can get close; but I'd really rather not do it at all. Sometimes you get a lot of posterization if you do that after noise reduction. But sky noise isn't especially challenging, Affinity Photo could handle that, and I could just mask out everything else. Maybe? Might be different in a sunset with a lot of cloud detail or texture, but then you're not necessarily looking at large swaths of blue either.

All of which is probably why some people like to shoot exclusively in black and white.

Anyway, all of this should probably be filed under TBPO. (The Band Played On. A category of "problems" that are irrelevant in the presently unfolding catastrophe. The great unwinding. De-growth. Collapse.)

But I welcome the distraction.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:05 Tuesday, 23 January 2024