AfterShot Pro 2.0 Beta Update

[brucet]

Thanks Rick for the update.

I also must voice my opinion on the 'need for speed'.
I hope Corel isn't being sucked in by the 'speed nerds' at the expense of common sense features for us 'common' users.

The advance in speed will only be of benefit to the small minority who have the hardware to take advantage of it. I've been a part of organizations that stumbled because a small minority influenced development so much that the silent majority drifted away due to the neglect of the basic/core reasons they were there in the first place.

Regards
Bruce

[algreen345]

Some developers add features interesting to themselves. Good developers add features interesting to their customers.

[jknights]

IMHO most important should be
Camera support and Image quality.

There's no use for all the speed gains if your camera isn't supported, or the results are plain ugly. (Noise, pink highlights, ...)
competitive IQ and cam support, but SPEED, now that would be something

+1
I agree.
I dont want to be forced to buy a £$€500 card to put in my computer to keep up with the software having OpenCL (gaming support ) but I do want the fixing of bugs in the SDK and the AfterShot Pro software (e.g. the horrible red line rendered in D600 images - see forum) plus new camera RAW support and some additional new features and enhancements.

In addition I would like the forum to be used as a method of reporting bugs even a sub-forum called Bug Reporting to make it easier for all. The current SurveyMonkey mechanism is clunky, decrepit and unhelpful which leads to people not reporting bugs.

[brucet]

I think in hindsight we are all being a bit hard on Corel. We complained for months about no action. Then Rick makes a post and we all throw our collective hands in the air. We're a hard lot to please.

Question to Rick/Corel. - Why is the Toyota Camry one of the best selling cars in the world? It's not a huge horse powered beast. It's not even pretty. Doesn't appear in many sports events. Very bland in fact. Maybe, just maybe, Toyota has appealed to all the 'average Joes' out there. Maybe Corel could look at the reliability of the Camry and learn something! Just maybe most of us are driving Camry type computers.

regards

[algreen345]

We aren't being hard on Corel. Months ago they asked us for requirements for the 2.0 beta and we loyally responded with hudreds of suggestions, which they ignored and instead now tell us they are working on performance upgrades for an AMD CPU/GPU chipset that isn't shipping until late 2014.

This company only communicates after customers complain, and when they do communicate they tell us they don't listen to our needs.

[bananahead]

We aren't being hard on Corel. Months ago they asked us for requirements for the 2.0 beta and we loyally responded with hudreds of suggestions, which they ignored and instead now tell us they are working on performance upgrades for an AMD CPU/GPU chipset that isn't shipping until late 2014.

This company only communicates after customers complain, and when they do communicate they tell us they don't listen to our needs.

I think that you need to calm down and go and read Rick's post again. Slowly, so that you get the finer points.

He doesn't say that the only thing they have been working on is performance upgrades for AMD. He simply says that it is one of the things.

He doesn't say that it is shipping late 2014.

You have no way of knowing what is in the beta until either it is released or they publish a feature list. And even then you have no way of knowing if any missing but requested enhancements have been ignored or held until a later release.

Personally, I am happy that there is communication and that there will be a new release.

[df]

IMHO most important should be
Camera support and Image quality.

There's no use for all the speed gains if your camera isn't supported, or the results are plain ugly. (Noise, pink highlights, ...)
competitive IQ and cam support, but SPEED, now that would be something

+1

While all of the cameras I currently own are fully supported by ASP you'll never be thought of as a real competitor to Adobe if you don't stay up with current cameras with the latest version of your program.

[MarcvH]

Bibble used to be real fast with updates on new cameras. Even though I didn´t upgrade for the last 4 years, I now switched to an EM-1 and needed a raw converter that would support it. Since I dislike the kind of software Lightroom (eventhough there are some features in it I´d like to see in ASP as well) represents, I looked elsewhere and found Iridient Developer (working on a Mac). It is a very good programm that I came to like quite fast.
It handles the EM-1 files quite well and give almost the same core functionality as ASP.
So I paid the small fee that they ask for and am now happy as before with ASP. The few things that are missing I can do with JPGs in ASP if I wish....

So sorry Corel, if you dont come up with a rather intruiging update soon which supports newer cameras as well, I guess I will have adopted to a new shiny programm.

I asked Rick if I could partake in the Betaprogramm already 2 months ago, but haven´t heard back from him since. So if feedback seems unwelcomed, communication rather slow and only when pressed to do, the user satisfaction drops quite clearly. Sorry to say this as a user since 2006....

[ferdinand-paris]

I think that you need to calm down and go and read Rick's post again. Slowly, so that you get the finer points.

He doesn't say that the only thing they have been working on is performance upgrades for AMD. He simply says that it is one of the things.

He doesn't say that it is shipping late 2014.

You have no way of knowing what is in the beta until either it is released or they publish a feature list. And even then you have no way of knowing if any missing but requested enhancements have been ignored or held until a later release.

Personally, I am happy that there is communication and that there will be a new release.

All these points are true. But algreen's basic point still holds - there's little basis for optimism in Rick's post. I.e., no hard evidence of progress on the things that matter and no indication of an imminent release.

[algreen345]

I think that you need to calm down and go and read Rick's post again. Slowly, so that you get the finer points.

He doesn't say that the only thing they have been working on is performance upgrades for AMD. He simply says that it is one of the things.

He doesn't say that it is shipping late 2014.

You have no way of knowing what is in the beta until either it is released or they publish a feature list. And even then you have no way of knowing if any missing but requested enhancements have been ignored or held until a later release.

Personally, I am happy that there is communication and that there will be a new release.

All these points are true. But algreen's basic point still holds - there's little basis for optimism in Rick's post. I.e., no hard evidence of progress on the things that matter and no indication of an imminent release.

There are 98 posts on the thread AfterShot Pro 2.0 Research. It would have been appropriate for Rick to summarize the improvements we customers requested and at least provided some feedback on which items were within scope for the 2.0 Release, which items were going to be worked on later, and maybe which items are only possible with the HSA stuff for computation reasons. But to send the first communication in months and then to tell us their primary interest is in HSA compatibility because the former head of Bibble is now working for AMD (and maybe AMD is paying Corel for this support) is quite insensitive to our needs. And then they tell us that the rest of the features being worked on are confidential.

Do we have to teach these guys to communicate and manage customer expectations too?

[afx]

But to send the first communication in months and then to tell us their primary interest is in HSA compatibility because the former head of Bibble is now working for AMD (and maybe AMD is paying Corel for this support) is quite insensitive to our needs.

Michael is not the former head, just one of the developers who probably went to AMD because he knew about OpenCL because of the work he did in AS.

Do we have to teach these guys to communicate and manage customer expectations too?

I fear so...

cheers
afx

[algreen345]

And while One or two Coreldevelopers decided to work on wwhat they like, an entire community of developers added new features to the second major point release of darktable this year. I have played with this new version and it has capabilities that blow ASP away. I am gone from ASP.

From the Darktable announcement.

as announced before, we just packaged 1.4rc1 for more testing before releasing 1.4 proper in a few weeks.

we've got tarballs:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darkta ... z/download

macintosh dmg:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/darkta ... g/download

and pascal's ppa has been updated, too.

preliminary release notes are (also see RELEASE_NOTES in git/tarball):


- darktable now integrates a lua engine that allows writing scripts to make it easier to use with other image processing software. These scripts can be run when a particular event takes place (for example when a new image is imported) or when a particular keyboard shortcut is used. There are very few scripts available at this point but we expect the community to provide some more during the next release cycle.
- darktable now include several kinds of drawn masks: brush, circle, ellipse, path and gradients
- exporting in WebP format
- serious speed enhancements of lighttable when using large colections
- focus detection on lighttable
- local cached copies of images for offline files
- a few new blend mode like "HSV lightness", "HSV color", "Lab lightness" and "Lab color"
- new modules "contrast brightness saturation", "color balance" and "color mapping" which replaces the now deprecated "color transfer" module
- new histogram mode "waveform"
- added a setting to automatically collapse modules to only have a single one expanded
- better user experience for bauhaus sliders: the popup now has a blinking cursor to make possible text entry more discoverable
- the text entry for bauhaus sliders and vimkeys' ":set" command can now evaluate mathematical expressions
- many bug fixes and small improvements

- a tool for measuring basecurves from a sample image

- updated usermanual

- darktable now requires Gtk+ in version >= 2.24, Glib in version >= 2.30



thanks to everybody helping out! please double check your credits in the about dialog and the AUTHORS file and give us a shout if you're missing.

this is the pre-release announcement for the dev list, we'll do a proper announcement on the website in a couple of days to give you guys a head start for packaging.

hope you enjoy the release!.

[EOS]

And while One or two Coreldevelopers decided to work on wwhat they like, an entire community of developers added new features to the second major point release of darktable this year. I have played with this new version and it has capabilities that blow ASP away. I am gone from ASP.

me also, my switch to Darktable will be with year change.
i'm now i a state in Darktable that i can make all changes of different photo's
sometimes better that i maked in aftershot

the great thing about darktable for me is:
if you have a "this camera + this lens + this iso + ....." ---> do this preset.


just look @ the colors!
Aftershot's
http://users.telenet.be/photo-memories/ ... ershot.jpg

Darktable
http://users.telenet.be/photo-memories/ ... ktable.jpg

[algreen345]

Shadow and highlight recovery is so good in darktable and so poor in ASP. This alone was a reason to try darktable. But now with all the improvements and the open source community working on bug fixes and innovations all the time in an open way, I won't stick with ASP at all. They have lost me.

[t3mujin]

For me the main issue of Darktable is the lack of support for Fuji X-Trans, and it's not even on their roadmap... If I have to move to different software I prefer to have all my cameras supported.