Photoshop capabilities versus lightmachine and other plugins

[Rilo]

I used Photoshop 7 for a longer time and got quite used to different kinds of photocorrection.
I think photoshop is so powerful to achieve all kinds of corrections and manipulations ever possible with all kinds of different filters and plugins.

Now I saw some of the really astonishing results of Lightmachine, and I wonder how this big amount of contrast gain is possible. If there is really now information in a black foreground church, how could any programm reveal a nearly correctly measured church-front ??

Any photo only has 8 or sometimes 10 or 12 bit per channel of information. If you work in raw-format you can use all of the information to work with in photoshop in 16bit-mode. But you cant gain anything out of a 100% black front building.

Of course, some things work easier, using a good plugin - no doubt. But wiht the actions-pallette in photoshop you can do all kinds of contrast- and lightenhancements using luminance-masks and even blurred and gradient-optimized luminance-masks on photos to achieve the best results.

So I wonder, can plugins like these (and others) really offer additional improvements ???

I think this is a very fundamental question to all kinds of plugins and filters and I am really looking forward to some substancial ansers.

Thanks in advance !

[HaraldHeim]

Hi Rilo,

Whole books could be written on these topics, but I'll try to answer your questions as precise and short as possible.

Photoshop is VERY powerful, but it is a more generalistic tool that is built for all kind of tasks, so performing very specific tasks like shadow removal is quite time-consuming.

LightMachine on the other hand was created for just that task. So it lets you do it more effectively in much less time. If you tried to emulate more or less what LightMachine does in Photoshop alone, you would have a very hard time. I suspect that you would need at least 10 different layers of the same image, a lot of layer masks, selections and several filters. Additionally if you wanted to adjust one parameter, you would often have to undo and redo a lot of steps. That is very time consuming and probably would drive you crazy in the end .

Even using actions to simply the task wouldn't help much, because you would still have to tediously adjust everything manually to achieve the best results. Besides, these layer stacks and masks consume a lot of memory. So with large images Photoshop may become very slow, while LightMachine still runs smoothly.

In LightMachine on the other hand it is needs only one click what needs several clicks in Photoshops. That's because LightMachine was built for very specific tasks.

Even in totally dark image areas there is still a lot of image information. So LightMachine uses this information and lets you enhance it to produce almost perfectly exposed results.We think that LightMachine offers much more sophisticated and flexible tools to extract that information than other available tools.

Please also notice that the images on the LightMachine Examples page were 8bit JPGs and not 12bit RAW files. However, using RAW files doesn't makes much difference with LightMachine. You can achieve similar good results with 8bit JPGs. But I don't want to raise a discussion about JPG vs. RAW here. My opinion is that RAW doesn't make a big difference if you have tools like ColorWasher, FocalBlade and LightMachine to use on JPG files.

Harry

[Rilo]

Hi Harald,

thanks for your quick answer and your hints.
Probably you are right, there's a lot you can do more effeciently if you focus on a specific problem with some photo-tools.
Most of the plugins I found somewhere in the web are somewhat astonishing in the first moment, spending an "Ahhhh / Ohhh"-Effect.
After a while it becomes boring and isnt really an image-improvement in most cases.
Of cause there are some useful plugins and filter (for sharpening, extraction etc.).
But I really wonder how lightmachine can create really better results then possible wiht phtoshop alone, lets say in 3 - 6 minutes.
What I doubt is, that you really need too much masking in PS to do the lights-darkness job.
Remember that the new Version PS-CS gives you especially that tools light-darkness-adjustment which prooves to work very fine if used in special dimensions.
If you do more you get artifarkts and you probably do too in Lightmachine ?
I will try out next time...

Thanks and have a good start in 2005 !

[HaraldHeim]

Most of the plugins I found somewhere in the web are somewhat astonishing in the first moment, spending an "Ahhhh / Ohhh"-Effect. After a while it becomes boring and isnt really an image-improvement in most cases.

I made that experience myself, too, several times. That why we try to create plugins that are so flexible that they work on a lot of different images and not just one type. In fact I think you will need to use our PhotoWiz plugins for a longer time to fully see their usefulness.

But I really wonder how lightmachine can create really better results then possible wiht phtoshop alone, lets say in 3 - 6 minutes.
What I doubt is, that you really need too much masking in PS to do the lights-darkness job.

I could tell you a lot of stuff about what makes LightMachine unique, but please read the product pages yourself. I only want to tell you: See yourself! Take a few difficult images and try to correct them in LightMachine and Photoshop alone.

Remember that the new Version PS-CS gives you especially that tools light-darkness-adjustment which prooves to work very fine if used in special dimensions. If you do more you get artifarkts and you probably do too in Lightmachine ?

If you drive a correction to its extremes you will always get noise and artifacts regardless which tool you use. What matters is that you produce a good correction with as little noise and artifacts as possible.

Please read the LightMachine FAQ and Comparison pages for more information about LightMachine vs. other tools.