[agood214]

I am really not pleased at this point with the responses I am getting, so I am posting this to the message board as well.
I do appreciate feedback via tickets but days to turn things around just won't cut it, and in sum total although the software is powerful and interesting, I see it becoming less useful and not more useful in a semi pro workflow on more than one or two images and therefore having poor Return on Investment for me.

The software is not enhancing my productivity as this version is dramatically slower than the version 6 I previewed, due to the workflow involved in the enhancements to the point where retouching 15 event photos has taken on average 10 minutes a piece. Removing blemishes needs to be a batch type operation to have any value in a workflow, especially at this price point.
Now that the program has crashed on me as well I am not inclined to trust my workflow to it .

I've now run into severe selection inaccuracy problems in the following areas:
1. Eye selector especially the pupil, PP8 software is not accurate enough to determine location and place a proper located circle in the majority of images I have tested with, so far out of 50 images, not one has not needed an adjustment, many significant, and you must do this or the pupils are messed up by the size of pupil circumference and placement inaccuracy.

2. Hair selection - this is NOT a "ten second operation," each operation is under or over selecting dramatically, with Anglos, Asians, Latinos, anyone with dark hair basically - you are talking minutes even with zooming of getting the selection just so.

3. Skin Selection - The skin selection / neckline worked one time accurately on one out of 15 I tried it on - the rest proceeded to underselect dramatically, this is with full frontal, not 3/4 turned evening gowns on light skinned subjects with enough contrast to easliy demark skin from clothing tones.

4. The program has now crashed on me while editing a picture:
=======================
C++ Runtime Error
assistant.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
Appp Name Assistant.exe
Modver 8.0.50772.1433

[admin]

Hi there,

I'm sorry to hear you are having problems. If you want a refund, open a support ticket. However if you decide not to, I can give you some tips:

1. You mention that version 8 is dramatically slower than version 6. The problems you mention later are either new in v8 (like hair), or are unchanged in v8 (like skin selection). Which in particular are you finding slower?

2. The spot removal level is saved when you "Save Sliders", so can be incorporated into a workflow like that.

3. I'm sorry to hear that the software crashed. We always want to improve the stability of the software, so if you could let us know exactly what was happening when it crashed, that would be great.

4. Try adjusting the eye outline before the pupil. As the eye outline is improved, the pupil is automatically updated. Unfortunately as with all aspects of computer vision it is impossible to get a completely perfect result automatically, so you will have to mark up the eyes like the rest of the face to get a perfect markup. However, good, subtle results can be got with slightly imperfect markup.

5. Hair selection is much harder than skin selection due to the variability in hair. A quick way of getting hair right is to use a very large brush. The software automatically avoids going over edges so you can be very quick in getting a good selection. Unlike photoshop, you do not need to get the selection perfect and zooming into hairs is not necessary if you are doing subtle changes.

6. Skin selection will not work perfectly if the skin color is similar to the background color. Again a large brush can dramatically speed things up.

Hope that helps.

Tony

[agood214]

Thanks for the Reply, it's appreciated

In the end I got a refund, then decided you were worth trying again.
You really need to loook at my support tickets and the images I've sent to get an idea of what I am talking about - the pupil issue results in a "slipped contact" ring look around the pupil - you need some sort of an amount of feathering to not get that ring look. If the eyes are no good its not a portrait.

I know that software development is hard as I am intimately familiar with this since 1982.  I am willing to try beta's on my tougher for pp images to help you improve as this helps me as well, and if you'd like to set up an "image bank" to run quality assurance tests on maybe we should talk futher.

I do adjust the eye anchor points each time first, but there are many occasions with a 70mb tiff from a 12.6 mpix raw that there doesn't seem to be enough to get the eyes even close without full hands on adjusting.

As for hair, you have got to look at my sumbitted tickets, pp should easily be able to maks in 99% of a betty paige black bob on an anglo body, or handle blondes wearing black evening dresses without even needing to touch the selection.

I think the whole idea here is get the selctions bang spot on, let me play with the creative, and then pow shazam you've got a winner...
:-) :-) :-) :-)

I just wish it wasn't so tough to do ((( or I guess everyone would have done it .. :-) :-)  ))))

===

admin Wrote:Hi there,

I'm sorry to hear you are having problems.  If you want a refund, open a support ticket.   However if you decide not to, I can give you some tips:

1.  You mention that version 8 is dramatically slower than version 6.  The problems you mention later are either new in v8 (like hair), or are unchanged in v8 (like skin selection).   Which in particular are you finding slower?

2. The spot removal level is saved when you "Save Sliders", so can be incorporated into a workflow like that.

3. I'm sorry to hear that the software crashed.  We always want to improve the stability of the software, so if you could let us know exactly what was happening when it crashed, that would be great.

4.  Try adjusting the eye outline before the pupil.   As the eye outline is improved, the pupil is automatically updated.  Unfortunately as with all aspects of computer vision it is impossible to get a completely perfect result automatically, so you will have to mark up the eyes like the rest of the face to get a perfect markup.  However, good, subtle results can be got with slightly imperfect markup.

5. Hair selection is much harder than skin selection due to the variability in hair.  A quick way of getting hair right is to use a very large brush.   The software automatically avoids going over edges so you can be very quick in getting a good selection.   Unlike photoshop, you do not need to get the selection perfect and zooming into hairs is not necessary if you are doing subtle changes.

6. Skin selection will not work perfectly if the skin color is similar to the background color.   Again a large brush can dramatically speed things up.

Hope that helps.

Tony