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!
http://www.graphictechnology.com/noise/
I posted two copies of your image one from PP and one from PSP, files have been unedited except for size and to 24 bit RGB for the PNG format.
Down load the lnked file it contains a zip file that has a CDR and PDF file created from the CDR file. The file has several studies, I zoomed to 25% in PSP and to 25% in PP with bi linear turned off and PP was much more capable of showing the digital noise in the image. In PP at 25% I turned on bi linear (I then zoomed out and then back in to 25% to reset the display) the display in PP was much more like your capture in PS and mine in PSP. With that said PP was still a bit sharpen and better at seeing the digital noise.
Understand this the display does not change how this image will output, on a quality output device this image will output much more like the display in Photo-PAINT with bi linear turned off then how it displays in Photoshop or PaintShop Pro.
Also there has been no change in the Photo-PAINT display since X5 except to make bi linear selectable by the user as an application level control. So your old images have always been displaying like this.
Hi David (and Ronny),thanks again, both of you, for your thoughts and ideas.
To be honest though, the issue has not been resolved for me.
I can assure both of you that my 'old' images have NOT "always been displaying like this". The post processing work I do for clients is/was delivered in TIFF (and also JPG) and I can guarantee that had they been displaying like this, clients would have been screaming at me - and understandably so.
However, to be sure, I asked a cross section of them to revisit my TIFF work just in case. Some sent back 'old' TIFFs (X8 and PP 2017) for me to see for myself. Evidently the issue only exists on my machine/my installation - and then, only in PP 2018.
After changing my pipeline to use the PP-18 RAW import utility, the noise does NOT exist in PP-18. If I revert back to the old pipeline and use Lightroom to open the RAW, then export to TIFF or JPG, the noise mysteriously appears - BUT ONLY when opened in PP-18. If I view that same TIFF in any other application, it +/- equals the Lightroom level of noise.
The pipeline change is a work-around, but only for RAW's. As I mentioned earlier, I have 1000's of TIFFs created using the old pipeline that now - in PP-18 ONLY - exhibit ridiculous levels of digital noise, rendering them completely unusable.
I've got a ticket raised with Corel Tech Support: I'll post any useful info back to this thread.