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!
Ronny not sure what display you're using but on my image correcting system even with bi linear turned on Photo-PAINT has a sharper image then Photoshop. You are correct it has no effect on output and also correct that Photo-PAINT has nothing to do with this issue unless the person doing the editing injected something into the process. Look at the link I posted, I have two copies of the original TIF set to 24 bit and saved as PNG one from PSP and one from PP. They display identically. The issue being that this way of viewing images leads to many images being sent to print that should not be. This image we looked at without serious noise reduction cannot be used in high end ink jet work, no medium end ink jet work where the image will be printed large, 175, 200 AM line screen and no stochastic print process with any chance of quality. The amount of digital noise makes this image borderline unuseable. This is typical of much of the image work we see today and I believe it's due to the soft display in image editors. Photo-PAINT is currently the only image editing software I know that works for the photographer with a purest attitude.
A rather simple Samsung 23.5 inch monitor at 1.920 x 1.080 is in front of me.Maybe PhotoPaint and Photoshop use different algorithms for on screen interpolation, which explains the small difference you see, David, also after enabling interpolation in PP.Like Bilinear in PhotoPaint and Bicubic in Photoshop, for example.
I'm sure the two applications are using something different in terms of how they program for the display. The bi linear feature in PP seems to be a solution for those who don't have a need for super critical viewing. I keep it turned off as it really makes it easy to detect errors in the file such as digital noise, over sharpening and a few others. As far as my photography goes, I'm a purest, I prefer to utilize the camera and make the best capture I can and use editing as little as possible. I shoot RAW, maybe18 to 20 bracketed captures of the same shot, using different F Stops. I convert in AfterShot Pro eliminating those shots that have issues. The I open the files in Photo-PAINT using that super crisp display and looking for issues. Out of 24 shots I may dump 12 to 18 in AfterShot and then dump 4 to 6 more once viewed in PP. The interesting this is the image we were supplied, look at how PP shows the real image and how a web browser fools you into a false interpretation. If you buy images on the web BEWARE!
One of the interesting things we see in graphics is how many people assume that when they compare Adobe previews or other things like color conversions to Corel and Corel is different than Adobe, they assume Corel is wrong.
In this case Corel Photo-PAINT is correct showing the image is super detail, think of it this way. If you had a microscope do you what one that powerful and clear or one that shows a false image?
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.