Hi Community,
I've been using Corel PHOTOPAINT for many, many years (CorelDRAW since 2.x) but have just upgraded from X8 to 2018 a few days ago. I do a great deal of photo editing.
My problem is that PHOTOPAINT 2018 appears to be rendering noise into images opened in that app. So far, it's happening with .jpg, .tif, .png and cr2 raws after import. I'm at a loss to fix it.
My monitors are well and truly calibrated, I have ICC profiles installed, I've set rendering intent to perceptual, but no matter what I do, I can't remove the rendered noise.
Here's two comparisons between PHOTOPAINT 2018 and Photoshop CC 2018 - but it could equally be Lightroom, Win10 Photos, or even Gimp.
If someone could point me to the culprit settings, I'd be hugely grateful!
The bilinear interpolation when zoomed out being checked in my opinion won't help this much if at all. That feature generally softens the image and is most effective a some specific zoom percentages depending on the display and resolution used.
I do quite a bit of architectural image editing and use Photo-PAINT exclusively for final edits due to the crisp nature of the display. What you're seeing is digital noise and if you're seeing it in Photo-PAINT then it really is there. That's what I like about Photo-PAINT, you see it on the display and can check to see if it needs repair or if it's a viable issue before output. Photo-PAINT has the most crisp display of any image editor I've ever used, PaintShop Pro 3 has a slightly better display crispness then Photoshop but not as good as Photo-PAINT, almost all RAW editors have less than acceptable display crispness in my opinion, Light Room, AfterShot Pro and Capture One included.
The change in crispness of display in Photoshop started happening around PS 7 and it got softer and never returned to being crisp. I can only guess but it helped the lower quality screens and digital capture devices of the day look better. Paintshop Pro had an issue with being like PS, too soft but improved in later versions.
The images posted here are screen captures and too low resolution to bother discussing in real detail. The one of the arm is the worst the woman facing to her right has some shake in it but the digital noise you see is, based on what I can see really there. In my opinion depending on the quality of the output device you would not see the digital noise in print. You might notice it in the extreme use of high quality gloss papers on digital devices and then it might show up as micro posterization. An extremely high quality matte paper might show it too but most likely not. This assumes good gray balanced media profile for the device.
I and confident that most raster applications would not have the quality coded into their display to see most of the digital noise in the image of the woman. The only exception might be a 3D raster rendering program.
If you would like you can send me a link to a high resolution image to look at and I'll see what's up if anything. I posted a capture from my Nikon D3400 that exhibits some interesting differences depending on the raster editor it is displayed in.
Hi Ronny & David, thanks for the thoughts. I realise that the images I posted are only screen captures, but the fact is that what you see is what I get. If I save those images out as tif, png, jpg, those noise artefacts are saved into the file and become apparent when viewed in any other viewer. I truly spent about 8 hours yesterday working with images that I'd processed days and weeks previously using X8 and known not to have the noise. I will try a slightly different workflow today (importing RAWs through Photopaint 2018) and check the effects. I'm not holding much hope, but you just never know. From what I can ascertain, it doesn't matter the format - once opened in Photopaint 2018, the noise is added/created. Cheers
I would also like to take a closer look at one of these files (the arm would be great), but I'm pretty sure PhotoPaint doesn't add this kind of noise by itself.The reason for the grainy look in PP is probably the setting I suggested.This being on or off should however not change the file in any way, it is just a display thing.