Bookmark This Page

Beta Page Last Updated: 28 Nov 2011. See the Change Log for details.

New Features in PWP 6.0

64 bit support:

64 bits provides a much larger address space and thus allows processing very large images. With 64 bits, the theoretical maximum memory increases from 2 gigabytes to 2 gigabytes squared or 4 x 10¹⁸ bytes, a truly astounding amount for current technology. To support older 32 bit machines, a 32 bit version is also available.

Workflow Improvements

New drag and drop editing: Drag and drop editing introduces new convenience and speed in dealing with the large numbers of images. It works like this. Open and edit an image of a given series as you normally would. Then select other images from the same series in the browser. Drag and drop them on the image you have just edited. The same workflow is applied to the new images, eliminating the tedium of performing the same steps over and over again. This feature requires no pre-planning and does not require explicitly creating and saving workflows, so it can be used as soon as you realize that you have additional images which require the same treatment as one you have just finished. The workflow is processed in the background, leaving PWP available for other work.

Breakpoints: You can now pause a workflow at a selected widget and set its parameters manually. For example suppose you want to customize the cropping of each image in a workflow. You can do so by setting a breakpoint at the crop widget. As you execute the workflow all the other operations would be performed automatically as usual. However each time the workflow encountered the crop widget it would display the image in the workflow window and pause, allowing you to change the crop settings in the crop transformation. After making the settings, you click OK in the transformation. The workflow then continues executing automatically until it reaches another breakpoint or completes. Breakpoints can be set at most widgets. Exceptions are the Raw widget and the output widgets.

Adding open images to a workflow: You can now add an open image to a workflow. This allows you to edit an image and then add to a workflow for additional standardized operations. For instance you may want to use a workflow to add borders, a copyright notice or watermark to your images after you edit them. The new Add To Workflow function can be found in the image window's right-click menu.

Save As Widget: There is now a new option for saving images. You can use the Save As widget instead of the conventional Windows Save dialog. The Save As widget lets you specify the save path and file name as a macro that can be relative to the current location of the image. This makes saving quicker and lets you etablish conventions on where you save images. Importantly, it also adds the Save As widget to the image's workflow. Then if you use the workflow later to process other images, saving is defined as well.

New wfl file structure: The wfl file structure has been entirely rewritten. Masks and other images stored in the wfl files are now compressed. The file structure is more flexible and robust which will allow us to add workflow features more easily in the future. For backward compatibility, PWP 6.0 reads 5.0 and earlier wfl files.

Save File Widget: All jpeg and tiff options are now settable.

Copy/Move Widget: Performance is improved,so copying files from a camera card is much faster. The widget now has a Skip on duplicate name option, so if a card is read a second time, images previously transferred are ignored.

Video images can now be transferred: In addition to image files, Copy/Move widget now also transfers .mov, .avi, .mts and .mp4 video files. This allows you to transfer the entire camera card. The video files are displayed in the browser as icons. Double clicking on them launches the media player (or other viewer) and runs the video.

Raw Improvements

Better Color and Tonality: Several improvements have been made for better, purer color rendition and better control of shadow and highlight areas. These include control over gamma curve shape, addition of preserve options for saturation, color probe size settings and modifications to the shadow and highlight slider algorithms.

Faster more responsive raw dialog The raw dialog is now faster. If an new edit is made before processing of a previous edit is complete, the previous processing is immediately cancelled, making the dialog much more responsive to quick changes.

Jpeg Extraction: High-quality jpegs can now be extracted from raw files allowing quick previewing the image.

Raw Settings Improvements Defaults for additional parameters can now be set, including sharpening and saturation resulting in a better initial image in the raw dialog.

New and Enhanced Transformations

Noise Reduction: A new noise reduction transformation has been added. The transformation is not only effective in making noise less obvious but can also be used for other smoothing tasks, such as the smoothing of skin tones in portrait photography or reducing the effect of grain in images scanned from film.

Button: This transformation builds button graphics that can be used for web sites or other purposes. The transformation gives extensive control over color, surface properties like shadows, highlights and reflectivity, and degrees of apparent convexness.

Calendar: The Calendar transformation has several new features. Holidays and Sundays (or any other days of the week) can now be displayed in a contrasting color. Holidays are editable, so you can easily add family birthdays and other events. The last days of the previous month and first days of the following month can also be included.

Album

Text: Album now supports text for captions and titles. Captions can be anchored to any edge of an image and stay in the same relative position as the image is moved on the page.

Image Save: Album can now save images automatically when you save the album. You have a choice of copying all imaes to a new folder, so all images are together, or saving the image in place.

Comments

Geotagging Support: Latitude and longitude captured by GPS enabled cameras is now displayed in properties. You can also open a mapping site such as Google Maps, with coordinates preloaded, directly from the properties dialog.

IPTC keywords and location fields: Editing of IPTC keyword and location fields is now supported.

Access to comments: Comments are now more easily accessed. They are available from the browser, the image window and the raw dialog.

Browser, Play Image

Larger thumbs Thumbnails are now larger. They are stored in compressed form in a new-format browseinfo file.

Browser folder name field The field has been enlarged to the full width of the browse window and is now clickable, so you can navigate to any root folder by clicking on the pathname.

Higher performance play image display. Performance has been improved, particularly for raw files. The play display for raw uses the embedded jpg and no longer opens the raw file itself. The play image now uses a separate window so that it may be run full-screen.

Delete browseinfo file. A new function has been added to the folder right-click menu. It deletes the browse info file. Deleting the file forces browse to regenerate all the thumbnails in a folder the next time the folder is opened in the browser.

Other Changes

Monitor curves renamed The monitor curves function has been renamed Printer Curves to better represent its function.

Photo CD support has been dropped from the 64 bit version of PWP because the required Kodak dll is not available in a 64 bit version. Photo CD continues to be supported by the 32 bit version.

Light-falloff Transformation: Camera and lens data is now displayed in the transformation. This data can be used to identify the best pre-stored setting file to load.

Menu Changes: In the File menu, creation of a new image, album, and workflow are all grouped under the New command. In the Transformation menu, sharpen, blur, and noise reduction are grouped under a common heading. Both changes were made to streamline the menus.

Magnified Previews Previews for the Sharpen, Blur, Noise Reduction, and Chromatic Aberration transformations now display images magnified at 1:1, to make it easier to see how the structure of the image is affected. You can center the preview display on any point of the image by clicking on that point in the main image window.

Auxilliary file location Auxilliary files which used to be stored in the main Picture Window folder are now saved in you App folder under Digital Light & Color\Picture Window. This allows the executable folder to remain write protected in normal use, improving security. (Note that the application folder may be hidden. You must set Folder Options in Windows Explorer to display display hidden folders and files to view or edit these files.)

Picture Window Pro 6.0 Software Downloads

This is the beta version of Picture Window Pro 6.0. You can leave your current version of Picture Window installed and return to it if you encounter any problems. If you have a problem installing or running the program, please send e-mail to beta@dl-c.com and describe the problem in as much concrete detail as possible.

IMPORTANT: The names of the instalation file folders have changed from the previous release. For this reason, we recommend that you first uninstall your current version (using the Control Panel/Programs/Programs and Featues function) before installing the new version.

64 bit version

PWP60-64.zip (28 Nov 2011)

32 bit version

PWP60-32.zip (28 Nov 2011)

Beta Documentation

The beta documentation consists of this page and the included Help. A new version of the Picture Window Manual has not yet been released.

Posting Comments:

A special PWP 6 Beta forum has been established on our message board. Please use this for any comments or bug reports. Before posting a bug report, please search the forum to make sure the bug has not already been reported. You can also send e-mail on beta issues or suggestions to beta@dl-c.com

Change Log

PWP 6.0.7 (28 Nov 2011)

Changes in this release:

• Workflow multi-tasking is now restored, for signficantly faster workflow execution on multi-core systems. A new preference setting allows the user to set the maximum number of concurrent background tasks that will be run during workflow execution. The setting is under the Workflow File button.
• Memory usage while running workflows with breakpoints has been reduced considerably. Memory usage no longer goes up with each image, allowing processing any number of images. Use of masks during breakpoint operation has also been improved.
• A number of rare problems in displaying thumbnails in the workflow window have been corrected.
• Cancellation of workflows is now more responsive. An option to abort the current transformation in workflow has been added, so the workflow window may be closed (and a PWP session terminated) even if a transformation is open.
• A custom installation path may now be set in the installer.

PWP 6.0.6 (29 Oct 2011)

Changes in this release:

This release updates the raw converter and improves robustness and cleans up a number of bugs that have been reported over the last several weeks. Thanks to all the testers for reporting them. The fixes include:

• Calendar background color problem.
• Extract JPG from Raw in the browser now applies to all selected images.
• Problems with Color Curve transformation initialization and loading of mask image.
• Problems in executing workflow when the Save File widget was the only widget in the workflow.
• Errors in saving jpg images in the workflow.
• Problems in setting a breakpoint at the Warp widget.
• Problems in adding multiple periods in the Text transformation.
• Problems in running workflows which contained breakpoints from the browser or history.

Workflow multitasking is turned off in this release, pending further understanding of several reports of background process crashes related to this feature.

PWP 6.0.5 (05 Oct 2011)

Changes in this release:

This release improves robustness and cleans up a number of bugs that have been reported over the last two weeks. Thanks to all the testers for reporting them. The fixes include:

• A freeze-up upon launching the workflow window reported by one user.
• Problems with opening raw files in workflow design mode.
• The crop widget not resetting correctly between landscape and portrait images.
• Small patches of black background behind toolbars in the main toolbar and the browser toolbar.

PWP 6.0.4 (21 Sept 2011)

Changes in this release:

• Workflows now execute substantially faster on multi-core machines -- nearly twice as fast on two-core machines and four times as fast on four-core machines. An option for forcing single threaded operation is available It is useful for wokflows which must be executed in sequence. The option is set from the workflow's File menu.
• The play window now is independent of the main Picture Window window and can be maximized to full screen. A number of play window bugs have also been fixed.
• A bug in saving comment edits when an image is saved has been fixed.
• A bug in the breakpoint feature which caused coments not to be copied to the output image has been fixed.
• Thumbnails in the workflow window are now automatically sorted whenever nw images are added to the window.

PWP 6.0.3 (07 Aug 2011)

Changes in this release:

• You can now add one or more breakpoints to the workflow. The breakpoint pauses the workflow at a specified widget and allows you to manually customize its parameters for each particular image.
• The raw converter has been upgraded to support recently introduced digital cameras.
• A button for the Composite transformation is now available in the Window/Configure Toolbars function.
• Open images can now be added to workflows directly. The function is in the image window right-click menu.
• Delete browseinfo file function has been added to the folder right-click menu in the browser. Deleting the file forces browse to regenerate all the thumbnails in a folder the next time the folder is opened.
• The preview window for the Chromatic Aberration transformation is now displayed magnified to 1:1 to make adjustment easier.
• A problem with displaying thumbnails of 48 bit images has been fixed.
• A bug in locating auxilliary files in the slide show function has been fixed.

PWP 6.0.2 (1 Jun 2011)

Changes in this release:

• Updates the raw converter to support recently introduced cameras.
• Holiday definitions used by the Calendar transformation for Austria, Germany and Romania are now available. Thanks to Dieter Mayr for preparing them.
• Problems with play window play and pause buttons have been corrected.
• Problems with text block positioning in Album have been corrected.
• Problems with drop shadow in the Text widget have been corrected.
• Problems with mask loading in the Color Curves widget have been corrected.

Known issues in this release:

• The 64 bit version of PWP does not support scanning at this time due to a problem with 64 bit Twain. Scanning is supported normally by the 32 bit version. As a work around, please use the 32 bit version or the scanner's direct interface for scanning until the problem is corrected.

PWP 6.0.1 (25 Apr 2011)

Original release.