KeithR Offtopic Posts

[KeithR]

Most people here grumble about the silence from Corel and the fact the last update is from April. At the other hand, the last update is only six months ago.

You're missing the point - this treatment by Corel is exactly the same crap we got from Bibble Labs, and that went on for years. The least Corel could do is stop treating its paying customers as an inconvenience simply to be ignored.

Incidentally, I'm trying the ASP beta at the moment, and by the third conversion I see that the Noise Ninja edge artifact bug is still going strong. And by the fifth, yep, pink recovered highlights are still around.

It's pathetic.

[KeithR]

3) plugin availability for PhotoNinja

Jeez, I sincerely hope not, Mike!

It was Bibble's (and subsequently ASP's) use of a plugin model that resulted in the core product being so weak, as users stepped into the breach to provide fixes to functionality shortfalls and inadequacies (fixes that should've been made to the core product by the devs) in the form of user-written plugins - a fact that became patently obvious when the main "improvement" delivered when Bibble 4 was rolled out was improvements to the plugin SDK, which the sacked devs banged on about interminably, while completely ignoring every single one of the bugs in my signature. In their view, easier plugins obviously meant less pressure on them to do their job and actually fix bugs.

Bells and whistles over quality, time after time.

I expect Photo Ninja to be a self-contained application, and any enhancements, bug-fixes or corrections to its functionality to be delivered to its source code by its developers, not plugged in as a "kludge" from a user.

Frankly, the plugin model is a cheat and a scam - it can never be right (outside perhaps, of Open Source) that users - paying customers - should need to be the solution to poor or inadequate coding a la Bibble/ASP.

[KeithR]

My current major AS concern is that performance of the latest beta is considerably slower than the release version, again on my system.

Same here - it's painfully slow.

Forget OpenCL as that seems a complete waste of development time for marginal gain

Just like the Bibble days...

[KeithR]

I guess I think that is a little harsh.

An opinion you're entitled to, Mike - but I sincerely believe it to be exactly the truth of the matter: can you imagine how Godawful Bibble/ASP would be if the core product was exactly "as is" and there were no plugins to make up for its many, many failings?

[KeithR]

ASP is still unmatched in speed, both in editing changes and batch conversion.

Speed is no good to anyone without image quality, where ASP lags drastically behind very other commercial converter and most open source converters too.

As Andy Salay - a one time big fan of Bibble/ASP, now completelly disillusioned with it - says (I've emphasised the section relevant to speed):

Almost no IQ bugs were solved so far. Demosaicing quality is stagnating at best, despite all the competition is running fast. Capture one is miraclous on details level, HR is fantastic, too.

Excellent results are almost instant, just a few sliders away.

How terribly different against all the old Bibble/ASP fiddling with curves, Bez plugin, different denoise, very careful sharpening with more different plugins... And all that deliver just mediocre results on pixel level against latest capture one.

The point being that program speed is utterly worthless if it takes so long to get to a point where you're - just about - happy (in the loosest sense of the word) to convert the file that the speed "advantage" is entirely wiped out: and when the results don't warrant the effort anyway, you eventually just stop using the software.

Oh, and for the record, on my machine ASP is significantly slower to convert Canon 7D files to 16 bit tiff, than Lightroom 4, Capture One, DxO Optics or Photo Ninja...

[KeithR]

They have concentrated on OpenCL support which is a who cares item except for game boys. It adds little/nothing to the product functionality but has required the plugin developers to rewrite the plugins for it to work with the newer versions of ASP.

Just like the sacked Bibble/ASP devs obsessed over dicking around with the plugin SDK while completely ignoring bugs and IQ.