Tag Archives: software

Will Rolla Replace Zwift?

Since I got a smart trainer for cycling, I have been using Zwift as my app for training rides. I have been very happy with the way it works and find it a great tool for training as I can do some pretty long rides on it without getting bored. I have done up to two hours which would have been inconceivable on older trainers. I did see a video recently of a new software tool that could provide similar functionality called Rolla. It is free for the time being, so I decided to try it out. Will it be a suitable replacement for Zwift?

One of the things I did like the look of was the graphics output. Zwift has a slightly cartoonish styling which doesn’t bother me at all – indeed, I quite like the odd things that they throw in like a bear falling out of a tree or a stag by the road – but having more realistic scenery was of interest. Rolla looked like it would be more like riding in real locations. As a new app, I knew it wouldn’t have extensive scenery databases yet, but they could be useful to try out.Having used it a few times, now, I have come across a bunch of things I didn’t like. First, the software doesn’t pick up my cadence from the trainer. I can come across the top of a climb and start speeding down the other side but my cadence on the trainer doesn’t change. It isn’t reading the cadence either so the data on screen and my data download has nothing of use. This is not helpful for training my cadence nor for having a realistic riding experience. I also had issues uploading to Strava. It now works but there is no way to get it to recognize rides already completed. The gradient is not connected so my trainer does not respond to changes in slope like it does on Zwift. That physical feedback of gradient change is very helpful, particularly as slope changes are not very visually obvious. The rider symbol looks weird too with an odd rolling motion of the hips. It’s not as bad as the runners I pass, though. They look like the T1000 from Terminator! Lastly, sometimes it just seems to have you riding off the side of the road for no obvious reason.All of this is to say it is a long way from being a replacement for Zwift. It is not going to be something I use for training for now but, with some time to develop it and implement new functionality (plus clean up some of the buggier elements) might make that change. I would also prefer to just use it on the iPad rather than having to have the phone app open along with the iPad to control things. We shall see. In the meantime, Zwift will remain my go to.

Lightroom Noise Reduction Update Testing

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One of the software tools that I find a lot of people talking about these days is DeNoise from Topaz. I have never been terribly bothered by noise in my images. Modern cameras do a pretty remarkable job of handling noise and, for most usage purposes, the noise is not really an issue if it is there. I have posted my efforts with PureRAW in its various forms where I have tried it out to see how the noise reduction comes out and, while I have seen strengths and weaknesses in it, I have never seen it as something I needed to spend on.

Lightroom Classic had one of its periodic updates recently. The big new feature was their own denoise functionality. Much like my experimentation with PureRAW, it analyzes the shot and creates a new DNG file with the noise suppressed. I was curious to see how it would perform and, seeing as it is included in the price of my subscription, I have it anyway. I decided to take some shots I had recently used for the PureRAW3 trial I had done and compare with the Lightroom version.

It defaulted to a 50 level of noise reduction. I don’t know whether this is a percentage and what of but it is a scale so I played with it. I did some at 50 and some at 75 to see whether more aggressive noise reduction had detrimental effects on other parts of the image. Comparing these things and then sharing the results is a touch tricky so I have created a single image from four layers. They are the original Lightroom develop settings, the PureRAW3 version, the 75 denoise settings and the 50 denoise settings. I mask them to make the image into four sections. Then, to make it useful on here, I have zoomed in to show the borders between them to provide some sort of comparison.

The PureRAW3 result is very aggressive on noise reduction. However, I find it can make some odd artifacts in the images where details were not that clear to begin with. The 75 setting in Lightroom provided a very similar level of noise reduction to PureRAW3. It is slightly noisier but barely enough to matter. A setting of 50 does show more noise. It is still a significant improvement over the basic Camera Raw settings and very usable.

What do I conclude from all of this? First, as I have said before when testing the PureRAW trials, it provides some interesting results but it is not relevant to enough of my work to matter to me sufficient for me to spend a bunch of money on buying it. Having denoise in Lightroom now provides me with a very similar option but within the existing price I am paying for Lightroom. Therefore, I will make use of it when the situation dictates. It would be a regular part of my workflow because really high ISO shots are only an occasional thing for me but having it there when I want it will be handy.

Experimenting with PureRAW3

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This blog includes a very infrequent series of posts reviewing the processing powers of PureRAW. The third version of this raw image processor has just been released and I downloaded the trial to see how it performs. I was impressed by what the previous version did to clean up some high ISO shots but the need was limited and the price was high enough that I didn’t see the point in signing up for it. I was curious as to whether the third version would change my mind.

When I download one of these trials, I always try to avoid installing it until I have time to play with it. The trial last 30 days so I want to make sure I make good use of the time. Once I got around to installing it, I put it to work. I was disappointed to find the trial was limited to 20 images at a time which is a little restrictive but, for the purposes of evaluating it, I could work around this. I had two things I wanted to do. First, I wanted to convert some shots that I had previously tried for PureRAW2 to see how different they were. Second, I had some recent night shots which I also wanted to try.

So, how did it perform? Results were mixed. I found the conversion process was quick sometimes and would slow down or stop on others. This was annoying but I suspect is something that they will fix before too long so I wasn’t that worried. What I was surprised about was that, when starting the process in Lightroom, the new DNGs will be reimported into Lightroom. However, this was unbelievably slow. I would set it off, the conversion would finish and then, a long time later, they would suddenly get added. Again, something that is probably going to get fixed but bloody annoying in the mean time.

As for the output, I was quite amazed by the results. I will show here some of the Lightroom edits along with PureRAW2 and PureRAW3 versions of the files. As you can see, the latest version really does clean up images a lot. However, I don’t think it is all good. Some of the shots feel like they have been over sharpened and look too crunchy. Also, the algorithm seems to get imaginative when it comes to lettering on airframes. Some of the results have created shapes that just are not there in the original shot. For some shots, this might not be an issue but, when something is supposed to be recognizable, the odd artifacts show up conspicuously. If the shot had been soft and noisy, you wouldn’t have worried but, because it is supposed to be clear and sharp, the weird results stand out.

Is it worth it? Not for me. I used it on some more normal exposures and couldn’t really see much benefit. Certainly not enough to make the effort worth it. For high noise, it does provide some nice results and some odd side effects but, I don’t shoot enough of them to make that really worthwhile. For now, it shall sit in the interesting but not interesting enough category. Maybe we shall have the fourth installment of this series when PureRAW4 comes out!

Delta/LATAM Comes in After Dark

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Delta picked up a few ex-LATAM Airbus A350-900s as part of that airlines restructuring during the downturn in the airline business caused by the pandemic. They went initially in to storage and then have been progressively moved to Singapore for updating to the Delta configuration. Seattle has been the location for them to come through on their way to Asia. I have missed a few but one was due to come through when I could see it. Sadly, it departed a little late from Victorville and was showing due in after dark.

Since it was an unusual movement, I figured it was still worth the effort. I would use the 500mm since it has a wider aperture and test the low light capabilities of the camera to the full. It still meant some very low shutter speeds but I let the tech compensate for my low skill levels. I was pleasantly surprised by how well some of them came out given the lack of light. Since this shoot, I did also reprocess with PureRAW3 and this improved the quality of the shot further.

Air Canada Special Early Sunday Departure And Lightroom Masking Options

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Air Canada brings a pair of A220-300s in to SEA each evening – one from Toronto and one from Montreal. They leave the following morning with the Toronto flight heading out early and the Montreal flight following a couple of hours later. The Toronto flight one weekend was the TCA special aircraft so I decided to head out and catch it departing.

The day started very overcast and gloomy but there was a sign that things were going to get better. This did happen but things were still not great when the jet departed. The light had improved a bit but the cloud was still there. When looking at the shots, I figured it was time to make use of the masking options that Lightroom offers. The latest update has improved their usability somewhat. First I drop the exposure of the shot overall to get the sky looking roughly how I want it. Then I select the aircraft suing the Subject option. It does a pretty reasonable job but I do then refine it with an addition brush to bring in the bits it has missed and a subtract brush to take out the detail areas where the mask has overlapped.

The new option is the click on this mask and choose the Duplicate and Invert option. This gives me a sky selection that matches what I have got for the aircraft. For the sky, I can work on the white balance to bring it back to something more cool which suits the overall look of the shot. I can similarly work on the white balance for the jet to make the reds pop more in the livery. The exposure can be brought up a bit with the shadows helping a little while bringing the blacks down while improve the contrast.

All of this is pretty straightforward. One nice feature of the latest update is that you can actually apply the same settings to multiple images. The brush adjustments are not going to work well for this so it is best to do the overall selections and sync to the various images and then, if a shot is worthy of further work, the refining of the mask can be done afterwards. If you know which shot is the best, you can just focus on that one.

Focus Stacking – Photoshop Versus Helicon

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I have played around with focus stacking a lot in recent years. Having a macro lens and a pandemic has given me plenty to opportunity to try stuff out. I was reading something along about stacking and it mentioned software call Helicon which is said was the standard for stacking software. I have been using Photoshop to date and, while it does a pretty good job, you do get some odd artifacts sometimes. I decided to download a trial of Helicon and see how it does.

I waited to use the trial until I had a bit of time available. The trial last 30 days but I wanted to make good use of it. Once I had installed it, I went through all of my focus stacks and ran through the software. It has a Lightroom plugin which made it easy enough to use. I found it was not so happy with some of my handheld stacks where alignment became an issue. Photoshop coped with that well. For the better planned shots, it worked a lot better. Overall, it seemed to do pretty well.

However, there was something that it struggled with. I had been playing with some shots of a memory card holder that I had shot when I had nothing better to do. Photoshop stacked them without any problem. The shots were in color but everything was either black or white. When Helicon tried stacking them, it introduced some strange purple coloration. I have no idea why it did this. It was almost like a chromatic aberration filter in reverse. I suspect there is a way to understand the more detailed settings and fix this but it was a weird outcome. Since I want something simple that basically works, this made me decide that buying the full version wasn’t worth it. I have already paid for Photoshop so I shall stick with that.

Lightroom’s New Content Aware Remove Tool

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The latest version of Lightroom Classic was recently rolled out. It comes with a bunch of new additions and refinements. The one that caught my eye was the addition of content aware remove. There was already the cloning tool and the healing tools built in and these could do a lot of what you might want. However, these have now been supplemented by content aware removal. The tool is really straightforward to use but you can customize it if you like, both by choosing what area to use as a reference and also the ability to get it to try again if you don’t like the result by hitting Refresh.

The thing I wanted to try out was using it to remove power lines. These can sometimes be a bit of a pain when taking shots but, rather than use an aviation shot with some power lines crossing it, I happened to be looking at a photo I took in California of some railroad which had a bunch of lines strung across it. I wasn’t bothered about making a great shot. I was just interested in what the tool would do with the power lines. It was surprising effective. Too close an inspection would show the flaws but, if you look at the overall image, it came out quite well with very little effort. I have the before and after shots here for comparison.

DxO PureRAW2 Review

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This post might look like it is an aviation post but, while the examples I am using are planes, this is about software. A while back I downloaded the trial of DxO’s PureRAW product. I liked it but didn’t see enough use for me to justify buying the full version. I was also a little put off by the lack of integration with Lightroom. You had to start in the app and then the output DNG file would be exported to Lightroom.

PureRAW2 has been released so I downloaded the trial version of that to see how well it works. I was interested not only in the processing capabilities but also the new Lightroom integration. Now it is possible to use the application as a plugin so I can go to a file in Lightroom and take it out to PureRAW before the DNG returns.

First, what is my experience of the integration? It is okay but not great. Taking the file out works well and you can get the processing sorted out. The return to Lightroom is not ideal. First, it gives you the option to either put the new files in a DxO folder or to go to a specific folder you choose. I would rather it went to the same folder as the original. That is not available. The second issue is that the re-import process takes a very long time. It was a couple of minutes after closing the file that it showed up in Lightroom. No idea why it takes so long.

Now for the processing. It is very impressive. I was working with some shots from very dark conditions with B-1s taking off. The exposure was heavily driven by the afterburner plumes so the rest of the airframe was very dark. When I tried to bump up the exposure in Lightroom to get something that showed the bare outline of the fuselage, the noise was really bad. The PureRAW DNG was so much cleaner and allowed me to move the exposure around quite a bit. For an ISO 51,2000 shot, this was very impressive. I think the processing is not massively changed from before but it clearly works well.

However, as before, the number of times I would want to use this are not many. The full version is now $129 which is a step up from where the original was priced when I reviewed it. I am still not sure I need it enough to justify the investment. No question, though, that it is a significantly improved tool from the original version.

Focus Stacking With The Camera’s Help

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One of the functions that my new camera has built in is a focus stacking function. I know this is not unique to this camera but it is a first for me so I was keen to play with it. The mode, when enabled, allows you to set how many shots you want taken and set a scale for how close the focus points will be to each other. You then pick you initial focus point and set it off and it takes the sequence of shots incrementing the focus slightly between each one.

The resulting stack of images can then be processed in Photoshop to get the focus stacked output. This is so much nicer than making minor focus adjustments by hand between shots. The sequence gets created really quickly. I also was able to do reshoots easily. On one of the sequences, I had left it on auto ISO so it shot at a really high ISO level. I could reshoot with the ISO set low (tripod mounting means this was not a problem) in no time at all. (As an aside, the focus stacking algorithm actually seems to do a good job of reducing noise as well.)

I experimented with how fine a scale to use. Initially, I was taking way too many shots with very little movement through the image so I coarsened up the scale a bit. The nice thing was, if it didn’t go all through the range, I could just hit the shutter again and it would keep going. Photoshop chunked through the processing pretty well. I was shooting a few things but also experimented with some coins on my desk. Not the most original subject but one that shows the result well unlike the other things I was shooting. The software seemed to struggle a little on some of the coin edges so maybe a finer shoot next time or maybe I should just hand blend those bits.

DxO PureRAW Testing

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Whenever you suddenly see a bunch of YouTube videos on a similar topic, you wonder whether a company has been sending out copies of its product to people to get them talking about it. I think this must be the case with DxO Mark since I have come across a lot of videos about their new raw convertor, PureRAW. Having watched a couple of the videos – the technique clearly works – I was curious about the capabilities of the product. Since they provide a 30 day free trial, I decided to give it a go.

One of the topics which seems to get people really worked up if they are too focused on the products and less on the photos you take with them is Raw conversions. You can shoot JPEGs in camera but, if you shoot Raw, you tend to have a lot more flexibility with post processing. (For those not in to this stuff – and I am amazed you are still reading this if that is the case – a Raw file is the data that comes off the sensor with very little processing applied.). Software developers come up with their own ways of converting this data into an image. Camera manufacturers provide their own raw converters but they don’t share the detailed understanding with the software manufacturers so they have to create their own.

The most widespread software provider is Adobe with their Camera Raw convertor built in to Photoshop and Lightroom. There are others with their own software and you can come across some quite heated discussions online about which is the best. Hyperbole abounds in these discussions with anyone getting in to the debate almost always dismissing Camera Raw as terrible. It’s clearly not terrible but it might have its limitations.

PureRAW is a convertor which doesn’t really give you much control. Instead, it takes the Raw file, does its magic and then creates a new DNG raw file which you can them import direct in to Lightroom (if you choose – which I do) to continue to edit in much the same way you would have previously. Watching the reviews, they seemed to suggest that for normal shots at normal ISO settings, there was not much in it. However, for high ISO images, they showed significant differences with reduced noise, sharper images and clearer detail. Some reviewers thought it might even be a bit oversharpened.

I figured I would try out my own experimentation with some really high ISO images. I have some shots at ridiculously high ISO settings that I took at night or in poorly lit environments. These seemed like a good place to start. The workflow is not ideal – this would not be something I do for all images but only for some that seemed like they would need it – because I have to select the shot from Windows Explorer (getting there by right clicking on the image in Lightroom) and then drag in to PureRAW. I can drag a whole bunch of shots over there before having to do anything to them.

The program will download profiles for the camera and lens combinations if it doesn’t already have them and you have to agree to this. Not sure why it doesn’t do it automatically to be honest but I guess there is a reason. When you have all of the shots of interest selected, you click Process and off it goes. It isn’t terribly fast but I wasn’t dealing with a huge number of shots. Interestingly, I took a look at Task Manager to see how much resource it was using and the processor was barely ticking over so it wasn’t stressing the machine at all. At a later stage, for reasons I shall explain in a while, I did deactivate the use of the graphics card and things got considerably slower.

When the processing is finished, you have the option to export them to Lightroom. It saves them in a sub folder for the original folder and they all import together. Since I have Lightroom sort by capture time, the new files arrive alongside the original which makes comparing them pretty simple. For the 204,000 ISO shot (an extended range ISO for that camera), things were slightly better but still really noisy. For the 51,000 ISO shots, things actually did appear to be pretty impressive. I have a normal profile for the camera that I use for the raw conversion and a preset for high ISO conversions and the comparison is not dramatic but it is definitely a sharper, more detailed and slightly cleaner result.

I have put pairs of shots in the post with crops in on each image to give a comparison of the output so you can judge for yourself. Will I buy the software? I don’t know. It is currently $90. That is quite a bit for software that does one thing only. The interface with my workflow is a bit clunky and it has benefit in a relatively limited set of circumstances from what I have seen so far.

Now for some further feedback as my experimentation has progressed. I did try the tool out on some more normal shots. There are some minor differences from a conversion of the raw within Lightroom but they don’t seem to be significant enough to justify the investment. I played with some shots that had very contrasty scenes and it was slightly less noisy but, again, not that big a deal. They also felt over sharpened.

I have had some problems with the program. After a while, I got conversions where the new DNG file was just black. This happened on a few occasions. I found switching to CPU only solved the issue but only after I deleted the DNGs that had been created. Interestingly, once I went back to Auto mode, it continued to work. A weird bug and not one unique to me apparently. I have also had erratic results when it exports to Lightroom with it failing to do so on a number of occasions. This is really laborious to deal with and, combined with the fact that the drag from Lightroom to PrimeRAW only works on a Mac and not on Windows, the lack of integration is really enough to put me off.

So far, I will let the trial expire. It is a tool that is capable of some interesting improvements in more extreme situations but the integration is poor and the benefits are limited for me so, with that in mind, it just isn’t worth the expenditure. If it made more of a difference to normal shots, I might consider it but it currently doesn’t offer enough to justify the cost or the process slowdown.