Additions?

[Robert Schleif]

1. I would find it useful if there were a tool "Notes" in which I could write notes and information to myself on the use of PWP to do something nonobvious.
2. Scattered through the help information and tutorials is information on various ways of increasing local contrast. I would find it useful if most of this information and any more that is known were collected together somewhere. A tutorial, or possibly this could go into a transformation called local contrast from which one could invoke any of the several transformations that can be used in increasing local contrast?

[tomczak]

This doesn't really address your suggestions, but maybe could be of some help:

1) it is possible to insert one or more Text transformations in the processing stream, write whatever notes you wish, and then click on their Bypass button to turn them off. You can rename them to signify that these are notes and should be kept turned off, not something you want to insert into the image. Setting Background Transparency to 0% helps as it will only show the text and it will be easy to detect if you accidentally leave it on after reading.

You can save the whole thing as a Workspace Script, and when you load it again the Text transformation(s) will be still there and still turned off. If you need to be reminded what you wrote, turn them on momentarily, read the note and then turn off again. That may not be exactly what you wanted, but it's workable...

2) also probably not what you ask for or perhaps nothing new, but maybe of help: there is a white paper that Jonathan penned a few years ago on LCE using Bilateral Sharpen for PWP 7, which is still applicable.

https://www.dl-c.com/Temp/downloads/Whi ... cement.pdf

LCE is such a broad term and there are so many ways to do that (the oldest one I know is Unsharp Mask with really large radius - but that creates large halos, unlike the Bilateral Sharpen that can be adjusted to avoid it), that I'm not entirely sure if that would be practical to put all of them in one place... At the very least it is bound to create a lot of disagreements as to what's useful and what's not... ;-)

There is another technique that does something similar and I started liking it lately - I kind of knew about, but never cared much for it: Brightness Curve in Advanced Mode, which is also based on Bilateral Sharpen, but in an interesting fashion - you can change (or not change) the global contrast while preserving (or amplifying or even decreasing) the local one.

[jsachs]

I wrote a program several years ago that I use to do something similar, namely to keep track of settings and procedures for all my cameras, serial number for all my lenses, and other miscellaneous sets of tips and fragments of useful information. I also wrote a compatible Android version so I could carry it in the field. It could just as easily be used to store editable tips and tricks for using PWP. I could probably post an installer for it if you are interested.

There are more extensive products like Evernote, Notion, OneNote and Google Keep which do something similar but are probably overkill for this, as well as some open source products like Joplin.

[Robert Schleif]

Thank you for the offer of an installer.
Currently I keep the information in question in a text file that I open with the Windows Notepad program. It would streamline and expand my use of this crib file if I could access it directly in PWP.
Tomczak's method is clever, but it would be even more convenient if I could access my notes in the same way I access transformations.

With respect to LCE. Without having made a careful examination, it seems to me that the several different methods for LCE give slightly different results, and I haven't settled on one to use in all situations. Typically I use unsharp mask sharpening to to get a quick idea of what LCE can do for my image, and then I mess around with refinements like bilateral sharpening, filtering an image with itself, or blending a high pass version with itself with the soft light option and the use of masks to prevent halos at critical boundaries.

[jsachs]

There are several reasons I suggest keeping the notes in a separate program:

1) Having the notes is a separate window you can open or close from the task bar makes it easy to refer to your notes while PWP is in the middle of some process.

2) I assume you use other programs and may have notes for them, so a single solution that works across all your applications would make more sense than a special purpose solution.

3) Note taking programs such as the ones I mentioned earlier are far more sophisticated than Notepad and can organize notes into categories as well as augment them with rich text formatting, images and tables. They can also share them across computers and smartphones via the cloud.

With regard to LCE, the only method I really recommend is using Bilateral Sharpen with a largish radius. Filtering an image with itself just applies a quadratic curve to each of the RGB channels and does not increase local contrast. I have heard of but not really used the blending high pass with soft light, but have no idea how the math behind this works -- it does not appear to have any halo reduction ability which is really the biggest problem with LCE. You can also get some LCE from 2-zone and 3-zone adjustment, but this only works well if the histogram breaks naturally into sections, and it still can have halo problems.

[Robert Schleif]

Good points.

[tomczak]

Just personal advice when choosing a note-taking programme: once you choose one you probably need to stick to it for at least a while... I tried a few from what Jonathan mentioned, there is also a semi-decent one called Nimbus Notes (which I think offers some encryption as well, if security is an issue).

I finally settled on OneNote, which is free, isn't that horrible once you get to know it, offers little security, but had one advantage at the time: it could be used off-line both on PC and MSPhone and then Android (i.e. your notes physically sit on your computer or phone, if you want them to and get synchronized with your OneDrive for the Browser access).

Which means you can get to them and make them regardless of connection. It made a difference several times. I'm sure some others can do it too now, but make sure they do as to me that was important. Another useful function is clipping off the web browser - you basically save the page or a part of it (or a link) to a website article you're reading to your notes with a simple click.

Once you choose one though and start organizing your notes, it's not that easy to switch to something else - takes quite a bit of work...

[Charles2]

Jonathan recommends DxO PhotoLab for your raw developer program. That led me to play with it, and it is indeed impressive for my cameras. It has a Micro Contrast control, which looks like a local contrast enhancer. I haven't pushed it to see when halos appear. Just for my taste, it needs to be used at smaller values than the program defaults to. Subjectively, not timed, I find DxO PL does a Micro Contrast change faster on my computer than PWP Bilateral Sharpen with large radius.

[tomczak]

As to notes: a wild suggestion. There is a Bypass Transformation, useful in some situations as Jonathan explains in Help, but it doesn't have any settings or dialog box - it's just a placeholder whose input=output. What if it had a Notes field as a dialog box that would be saved with it?

[tomczak]

That's a fairly old thread, but I was just designing a workflow and wanted to save some notes with it for future reference and it reminded me about this discussion. I made those notes elsewhere (in OneNote), but then chances are that I will not remember that I made those notes when I dust off this workflow. So, following my own advice, I added a Text transformation and turned the bypass off - kind of works, but, again, chances are that I will turn it on unwittingly later because I wouldn't remember what it was for.

I think that maybe it is too much to ask to make a special 'notes' transformation. That the PWP doesn't really allow to edit EXIF is probably an advantage and the reasons have been discussed before. But, I still think that maybe there is a place for leaving some unobtrusive notes with the workflows - I suggested Bypass Transformation as it is benign, yet still very useful, and simply transfers input to output, but maybe there is some other way, if at all.