[Kiwizinho]

Trying to get my head around this - it has nothing to do with the history list - ie if you go back to an earlier point in the history you delete all that comes after it. But if say your first step was say colour temp - then you did a heap of other things - then went back to readjust colour temp it would reset the earlier attempt rather than add to it. And so for each tweak of the tone curve you may do it will boil down to one maneuver . This is distinct from Gimp or PS where as each attempt would be additive. Have I got it?

I don't use Darktable, but if it's non-destructive I guess it works in a similar way to Lightroom.
The way I understand it, the software stores a list of parameters for all the adjustments you have made to an image, and each time you load up the image and make further adjustments it applies the full list of adjustments to the original image, which remains unchanged.
For performance reasons, I think most software stores a cached copy of the modified image often at lower resolution, but the pixels of the original are never altered.
It's a bit like the difference between a vector graphic (eg a font) that describes HOW to draw an image, and a bitmap image such as a photo that describes the individual pixels. This is somewhere in between, it records a set of operations to be applied to a bitmap image.

The other side of this is if you want a permanent record of your edit that can be recognised outside of the software you used to do the edit, you need to export the image to produce a copy that has all your edits baked in to the pixels.
Even Lightroom and Photoshop, which are pretty tightly integrated do this; if you choose to edit a Lightroom image in Photoshop, from Lightroom, it will create a TIFF file, as Lightroom recognises that Photoshop can modify the pixels, so won't send the original image to Photoshop.
I'd imagine Darktable and Gimp probably work together in a similar way.

It's actually why I started to get excited about DxO. I use Nik effects, and I can use them directly from Lightroom, but because Lightroom doesn't recognise Nik edits, it creates a TIFF file any time I send an image to Nik, and all the individual list of adjustments are lost, they're just baked into the pixels in the TIFF, and when the image comes back from Nik, the same applies.
With DxO, it looks like it's possible to do both Lightroom type adjustments and Nik type adjustments and have all the edit parameters retained, so if I change my mind on anything, I can go back and tweak it without having to redo a whole major edit, and without having to end up with a massive TIFF file.

---------- Post added 10-30-19 at 09:54 AM ----------

As you can see, unless I need a specific effect or technique, pretty much all my workflow exists in Bridge/ACR/Photoshop.

Hope this has helped a little.

In my camera club, quite a few people use Lightroom, but one person refuses and swears by Bridge/ACR, but in the end Lightroom or Bridge/ACR actually produce the same edits. Lightroom is essentially a management tool with ACR baked in, so all the raw adjustments available are exactly the same as what is available int ACR.
Bridge and Lightroom each have their pros and cons depending on how you want to work with images. Bridge doesn't require you to import images, but then it also doesn't allow you to search for offline images, and I think Lightroom's batch processing of raw edits is better, however the way I've seen a lot of people try to use Lightroom, honestly Bridge/ACR would be a better choice.
Basically if you don't want to use Lightroom's image management features, and want to do raw adjustments to individual images Bridge is quicker, as it just browses folders, and provides many, though not all of Lightroom's features.
I do use the full image management features of Lightroom so find it useful.

[microlight]

Completely agree. I’ve had a folder structure for digital photos since the early 2000s (my first digital cam of any description was a small flat Fuji with one and a half whole megapixels!), and don’t want to re-catalogue it all, so using Bridge to work with existing folders and then opening the photos in ACR works fine for me. I don’t typically shoot hundreds of photos at a time (my K-3II is three years old and has less than 10,000 clicks, and a thousand or so of those in NZ last year) so the Bridge route is easy.

[richandfleur]

When I open a RAW with photoshop, up comes the import window with a whole bunch of sliders like lightroom.
When I've adjusted as I want, this launches Photoshop but as a fixed developed file. To the best of my knowledge (very limited around this aspect of photoshop) I can't then go back and adjust any of those initial settings?

[Class A]

It's actually why I started to get excited about DxO.

I agree with all of your post but wonder about this comment.

What is special about the Nik controls that make their integration exciting?
From what I've seen from the video that zkarj posted the Nik controls points are like radial gradients without the flexibility of radial gradients in Capture One. Also in the example used, it seemed much easier to hand-brush the mask instead of combining five or so control points with some of them negating the effects of others.

[Class A]

To the best of my knowledge (very limited around this aspect of photoshop) I can't then go back and adjust any of those initial settings?

Normally you cannot (and the ACR controls you are seeing are equivalent to those available in LR).

However, if you open/use the raw file as a smart object, you'll be able to revisit your ACR adjustment choices.

The "Open Image" button in the ACR dialog will change to "Open Object" when you press the Shift key.
This will allow you to open the raw file as a smart object.

If you always want to open raw files that way, check whether your version of PS has a "Open in Photoshop as Smart Objects" option in the "Workflow Options".

[microlight]

Rich, what you’re seeing is the Adobe Camera Raw interface; ACR is essentially Lightroom’s ‘engine’ which is why the controls look very similar. When you’ve finished with the sliders etc and open the image in Photoshop, you get the image at its final stage in the current edit. The settings are saved in a sidecar file. Then in Photoshop, you can non-destructively edit further using smart objects or adjustment layers.

You can indeed change the edit parameters of the image that you previously opened in ACR. If you go in through Bridge and navigate to the folder with your pre-edited image in it, right-click the image and click ‘open in Camera Raw’, and up pops your image with its previous settings, which you can now change.

[richandfleur]

Thanks all, nice to learn about those options.

My current workflow is entirely in Lightroom for what I refer to as image development. Sits nicely as the old dark room film development equivalent. That's where I take my diginal negatives and output an image.

I only involve Photoshop (or HDR software) when I undertake what I refer to as image manipulation, meaning composites etc and agressive cloning/masking/reconstruction beyond what I can do as spot removal etc in Lightroom.

Everyone is different, but that's how my 'workflow' goes.

[Kiwizinho]

I agree with all of your post but wonder about this comment.

What is special about the Nik controls that make their integration exciting?
From what I've seen from the video that zkarj posted the Nik controls points are like radial gradients without the flexibility of radial gradients in Capture One. Also in the example used, it seemed much easier to hand-brush the mask instead of combining five or so control points with some of them negating the effects of others.

I haven't experimented with Capture One, so I'm not sure what that's like to use. I have used Nik Effects, and found I could often get better results than Lightroom alone, albeit with large TIFF files, and without the ability to go back and fine tune. If DxO can avoid the big TIFF files, and provide the ability to do subsequent adjustments, that's a step forward.

If Capture One can do even better, I'd certainly consider it, but I want the library management features of Lightroom as well, which seems to be its strength.

---------- Post added 10-30-19 at 03:51 PM ----------

When I open a RAW with photoshop, up comes the import window with a whole bunch of sliders like lightroom.
When I've adjusted as I want, this launches Photoshop but as a fixed developed file. To the best of my knowledge (very limited around this aspect of photoshop) I can't then go back and adjust any of those initial settings?

It's a while since I've done it, so maybe don't quote me, but I think I remember from my Photoshop Elements days, (which used a cut down version of ACR), if you opened a RAW file, made adjustments, then went on and let the image open in PS Elements, even if I didn't save, the RAW adjustments got saved to the DNG file, but of course because it didn't alter the actual RAW data, I could always open it again, and it would show the adjustment sliders exactly where I left them, so I could go on and tweak them further.
I think it might have been possible to do the same with jpg files using the RAW filter, as JPG files like DNGs allow saving additional metadata, so if you only used a non-destructive filter like ACR it could save all the adjustment parameters to the file, while leaving the image data untouched.
Like I say, don't quote me, but I think this is what I discovered, and I certainly found it quite handy.

[zkarj]

Non-destructive editing in principle just means that you can revisit any of your decisions at any point in time. There is never a committal, say to a certain noise reduction level, that will irrevocably destroy some information in the image.

In my view, "non-destructive" means just that — it does not destroy any information. Where I think the nuance is, is between a simple "undo" function (keeping a buffer, possibly limited in size, of prior versions) and a true parametric approach which layers up every effect each time it renders the image and thus allows any of those effects to be altered at any time — which is how DxO works. And Lightroom, and Aperture, and Luminar, and Photoshop if you know what to do.

What is special about the Nik controls that make their integration exciting?
From what I've seen from the video that zkarj posted the Nik controls points are like radial gradients without the flexibility of radial gradients in Capture One. Also in the example used, it seemed much easier to hand-brush the mask instead of combining five or so control points with some of them negating the effects of others.

The control points are content-aware. See this example I was playing with. The full-colour image shows how I placed the two control points (each with an effective radius), and the monochrome one is with "show masks" turned on.

[Kiwizinho]

Thanks all, nice to learn about those options.

My current workflow is entirely in Lightroom for what I refer to as image development. Sits nicely as the old dark room film development equivalent. That's where I take my diginal negatives and output an image.

I only involve Photoshop (or HDR software) when I undertake what I refer to as image manipulation, meaning composites etc and agressive cloning/masking/reconstruction beyond what I can do as spot removal etc in Lightroom.

Everyone is different, but that's how my 'workflow' goes.

Bridge and Lightroom can essentially do the same things but in different ways. Bridge suits people who don't want to import images and maintain a catalogue, as it just reads and writes metadata from files themselves (or sidecar files), and it's really fast for browsing, but you can't browse offline files, and also to make adjustments it pops up ACR in a separate window instead of just going to the Develop tab in Lightroom.
Personally, I prefer the layout of the editing controls in LR to ACR, but the functionality is the same.
Bridge has an advantage if you have a networked environment with more than one PC where files don't necessarily have exactly the same path on each one, or if you have multiple users needing to access files in the same folder simultaneously.
LR's catalogue is very much designed for single user, single instance, whereas with Bridge just browsing a folder, it's possible to have multiple people accessing the same folder at the same time, as long as they don't actually edit the same image at the same time. Bridge is also designed as a more general asset manager, so it supports more file types than Lightroom which is very much targeted at photographers.
Personally, I've got used to the LR workflow, and Bridge seems more clumsy for what I do, but I can also understand why it might suit other people better.

---------- Post added 10-30-19 at 08:18 PM ----------

In my view, "non-destructive" means just that — it does not destroy any information. Where I think the nuance is, is between a simple "undo" function (keeping a buffer, possibly limited in size, of prior versions) and a true parametric approach which layers up every effect each time it renders the image and thus allows any of those effects to be altered at any time — which is how DxO works. And Lightroom, and Aperture, and Luminar, and Photoshop if you know what to do.


The control points are content-aware. See this example I was playing with. The full-colour image shows how I placed the two control points (each with an effective radius), and the monochrome one is with "show masks" turned on.

That looks just like how Nik Effects control points work.

I just took a look at the pricing of Capture One, and took a bit of a deep breath. DxO looks pretty reasonably priced in comparison.

[richandfleur]

Lightroom which is very much targeted at photographers.

Yep, the clue's right there in the name. Lightroom is very much photoshop for photographers, with the aspects that relate more to photo development, rather than image manipulation.
Nothing in Lightroom can't be done in Photoshop as well, but the interface is much more aligned to doing photography things quickly.

[GUB]

Reminds me of when video moved from tape to tape machine queuing, where you had to build your final video up piece by piece, to digital and the age of non linear video editing, where you can chop and change as much as you want before outputting to the final product.

Yeah good comparison.
I compare it to Oil painting technique vs water colour. In oils you keep scratching away and painting over till you get your final masterpiece. Whereas with watercolours you constantly restart with a blank piece of paper till you master your technique. On any important image I will often go back to the DNG and restart my process several times and not because I can no longer manipulate the image but because I prefer the fresh approach and increased deftness that comes from the experience.

[GUB]

From what I've seen from the video that zkarj posted the Nik controls points are like radial gradients without the flexibility of radial gradients in Capture One. Also in the example used, it seemed much easier to hand-brush the mask instead of combining five or so control points with some of them negating the effects of others.

And that is what generated my question about just what non-destructive editing was. All I could see was something that could be done simpler and with more control with a layer mask and brush. Apart from size and softness options of the brush you also have opacity options in the brush, opacity options in the top layer and an effective undo and adjust feature in using white as well as black brushes. And all is completely editable until the point you flatten the image and move on.

[GUB]

A good 28mm for anyone. Don't let the Tak bayonet bias put you off - they are great.
Pentax Takumar f2.8 28mm lens PK mount | Trade Me

[Kiwizinho]

Yeah good comparison.
I compare it to Oil painting technique vs water colour. In oils you keep scratching away and painting over till you get your final masterpiece. Whereas with watercolours you constantly restart with a blank piece of paper till you master your technique. On any important image I will often go back to the DNG and restart my process several times and not because I can no longer manipulate the image but because I prefer the fresh approach and increased deftness that comes from the experience.

I like the painting comparison, as I do both oil and watercolour. It's not quite an exact analogy, as with oils you can't quite go back to any point in time, but close. Watercolour, you mess up, and you start over.