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!
Hi David,
located here are two files - a crop of the Hi-Res TIF plus a comparison of what I see between PhotoPaint-2018 and Photoshop-CC-2018: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PKs4jAQdzMrojauN8
For clarity, the RAW (CR2) image was first opened in Lightroom (no edits) then saved out as a full res TIF, then max res jpg. Viewing those files in PhotoPaint-2018 adds the noise you see above and in the links.
As indicated earlier, today I tried 'reversing' my pipeline: I used the native PhotoPaint-2018 CR2 import utility (no tweaking) then saved the image out as both TIF and JPG. In this case, the noise is non-existent and a comparison between PhotoPaint-2018 and Photoshop-CC-2018 shows virtually identical results (shown in same link above) So, that's a win, I guess.
However, it would seem that almost all the older files I have checked that had a Lightroom > TIF/JPG > PhotoPaintX8 pipeline show similar levels of noise - but only when opened in PhotoPaint-2018. For me, that is a *significant* issue. Noise that was not evident in X8 is now overwhelming in v2018 - and what's more, it's retained when saving out of v2018 into any format.
I'm no expert, but it seems that PhotoPaint-2018 is not reading/rendering stuff that has been 'touched' by Adobe stuff the way it used to be. I'm at a loss, but if I can't find a work-around (for the 1000's of images created in X8), sadly, I'll need to move away from PhotoPaint.
Hope you or someone can assist.
Thanks Ronny, Bi-linear Interpolation made zero difference in this instance.
Thanks for the files I unfortunately I have to get to work and cannot finish my work on this until later but I did not want you to think I'm ignoring the issue. This is a significantly noisy image, actually a good example of what I see allot today.
My preliminary tests show exactly what I expected I tested in PaintShop Pro 2019 and Photo-PAINT 2018. At 25% and 200% zoom, at 25% PSP has a smoother appearance, at 200% both applications show significant digital noise.
I saved the original image and renamed from both application and the display of the resulting newly saved file had no change this is as expected with the TIF file format.
More to come later today gotta go work for a living.
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.
Had a look at the file with the arm and made a comparison between PhotoPaint 2018 and Photoshop CS5, and the result confirms what I said in previous post; the difference between them are solely because PP doesn't use bilinear interpolation when zoomed out by default. After changing this setting, they are equally smooth in both apps.Regarding destroyed file after saving from PhotoPaint I'd say that as long as you save in a non-destructible format, like TIFF for example, and do not resample in any way, there should be no difference whatsoever after saving.If you change the size or save as JPG for example (lossy compression), there will always be a change, and most likely not for the better.Exactly what has happened in your case is hard to say, but it appears that somewhere in the chain RAW > Lightroom > TIFF/JPG (no-no!) > PhotoPaint, something has gone wrong, but I'm pretty sure it is not caused by PhotoPaint by itself.