Review of PL 32 in Australia

Here everybody can post his problems with PhotoLine
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greenmorpher
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Beitrag von greenmorpher »

Hi Koyaanis

I made that PDF that size so it would be easy for people to see on screen what was actually happening. In fact, I wasn't aimed at you because you obviously know. Others (including me in respect of adding noise to a limited area rather than an overall slight blur) don't know.

You are right about the limits of the review but quite apart from my "beginner" status with PL32 at the time and the fact that when I suggested doing the review, the editor told me he needed it within two days (which meant I had no time to explore further or inquire, e.g. of this forum, about features), there are areas, like HIS and Lab modes, which I will NEVER know anything about and will never use. I can't mention them because I can't explain them.

Can you explain to me in a couple of good paragraphs what they are about, how you use them and the kinds of differences you can get in them? With HIS, do you mean "Histogram Correction" -- Color Type, Intensity, Saturation (which might be Hue, Intensity, Saturation = HIS)?

As for Canvas, it seems to offer L | a | b editing in that you can look at the histograms and adjust Lightness, a and b separately, just as you can manipulate, e.g. R, G and B separately. But whether it is to the same level as PL32 offers, I have no idea. I've never done and I won't! :twisted:

On the other hand, Canvas offers these mode options for raster images: black and white, grayscale, duotone, indexed, RGB, CMYK, Lab, Multichannel, 8 or 16 bits/channel and Colour Table. I have no idea what indexed, Lab, multichannel and Color Table mean or are used for except that on a few occasions when I have been experimenting with dropping out colours, I get different final effects by introducing these different modes into the process.

Indexed colours allows you to set the exact number of colours you want in the picture, obviously, but beyond that, I have no idea of its use. "Posterize" in Canvas also gives you a chance to select the exact number of colours you want. This is valuable when you are making bizarre colour distortions -- changing the factor by one colour can make a huge difference -- and I think I have mentioned it on this forum and expressed the hope that Gerhard & Martin will leap into action and improve their "Reduce Colors" (which is equivalent to Posterize) offering to match this.

The Raster to Vector is magic although I certainly wouldn't use it for some of the things you suggest. Do I need the put some printg around someone's hat? I'll just draw a vector line around it, put the text on the line, and make the line disappear and render the text to raster. Much faster. Probably the same with the river names. But yes, it is a knockout feature and thanks for pointing to a number of uses I hadn't thought of.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com
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greenmorpher
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Beitrag von greenmorpher »

Incidentally, I forgot to mention -- while PL32 is magic in moving stuff from raster to vector, Canvas has long been magic in being able to do stuff the other way -- it has this thing called "Sprite Effects" which allows you to apply raster filters to vector objects.

It also has some really nice stuff in distortion of raster objects to match vector shapes and stuff. On the other hand, it can't make a cylinder with a raster objects as can PL32! It gets close, but n9o banana.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com