photoken hat geschrieben:
This brings up a point that I've long been curious about: One of the obvious features of Photoshop that is missing in PL is "Image Arithmetic", where images, layers, etc., can be combined in various ways. My questions for the Photoshop users are: Do you use that "Image Arithmetic" function? Would that be a valuable feature for PL to have?
Yes, this is one of two features I sometimes miss in Photoline. That and the "Apply image" command. Mainly because Photoline's channel's panel is so limited, and the channel operations are quite hampered as well.
Which brings us to one of the major features I really miss in Photoline: a more flexible Channels pane. We cannot manipulate channels easily, and it is impossible to create a spot colour, or save a selection as a channel. A tiff with one or more alpha channels may open with the alpha channel(s) forced into the layers.
This also makes it incredibly hard (or rather impossible) to create di- or tri-tones. Anyone wants to do a 6C Hexachrome prep job? Or do a 8c dark/light photo? Or designate a channel for varnish or a metallic coating for print. All impossible in Photoline, unfortunately.
Also very difficult: to create an alpha channel tiff for game work, or 3d work. It is a major caveat in Photoline, and the only reason why I have to start up Photoshop CS6 a couple of times a year, or use other tools.
It is THE ONE area of Photoline's image editing that really is in need of improvement, and also prevents Photoline from being usable in a high end printing workflow.
(To be fair, there are some cool aspects of working with channels in PL, such as being able to draw in one channel only while working in a separate layer - something that is impossible to do in Photoshop. And switching the background layer to another image mode allows us to inspect the channels for each colour space. The cool thing is that when you switch from RGB to CMYK, and then back to RGB, the information is not lost
as long as the layers above it are Lab or RGB!!! Very convenient indeed.! )
You know, I would be happy if the Hubers would only add two new checkboxes in the greyscale layer type properties called "Spot Channel" and "alpha channel", which would then be saved as such in compatible file types and PDFs. I am unsure how helpful that would be with Hexachrome jobs, though, or tri-tones.
I finished my work on this one using the tools available in PL 18.53, so I will wait until PL 19 is released to re-visit this Experiment with the tools in that new version.
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