Bitpainter75/FerrumPix 0.9.14

FerrumPix 0.9.14

on GitHub

This release rebuilds the ground your RAW photos stand on, lets the brush correct a graduated or radial mask, and gives the repair brush back the structure it used to smear away.

What's new

• RAW photos start from a truer base. Until now the raw decoder brightened every photo until its brightest parts were almost white, and that stretch - not your shot - decided how light or dark it came out. A dim stage looked washed out, a bright beach looked flat. FerrumPix now develops the sensor data itself and puts a film-like base curve over it, of the kind Adobe uses: a photo keeps the exposure it was taken with, and midtones and colours land much closer to what Lightroom shows for the same file. This applies to every RAW file, with a preset or without one. Photos you have already adjusted will look different when you open them again - your slider settings are untouched, the ground they sit on has changed.
• Graduated and radial masks can be corrected with the brush. Pull a graduated mask across the sky, then brush the roof back out of it — or add a corner the gradient does not reach. Pick the mask in the layer list, switch the mask tool to the brush, and paint; Subtract takes areas away again. The gradient stays a gradient: you can still move its handles, turn it and change how softly it runs out afterwards, and the brushed correction stays where you put it.
• The repair brush keeps structure and stops leaving a dirty line. A long stroke used to end up with a visible band down its middle: the repair fills from the edges inwards, and every patch it copied left a small seam where they met. Those seams now fade into each other instead of butting up against one another. The pieces the repair works with also scale with the size of your photo - they were fixed at a size that suited a small web image, which is why a window grid or a railing used to dissolve into mush on a full-resolution file. Structure now survives a repair far better, on big files and small ones alike, and it is no slower. One case is still not good: a repair straddling a hard boundary, like a horizon between sky and field, still leaves a ragged edge.
• The colour noise slider is calibrated properly. It used to need almost the whole way up before coloured speckle disappeared, so a preset that asked for a gentle setting left the grain sitting there. Now a low setting does what a low setting should, matching what the same number does in other raw developers - the upper half of the slider is still there for the coarse blotches of a pushed-up night sky. Photos you already edited will look cleaner in the shadows; if that is more than you want, pull the slider down.
• Graduated and radial masks are handled directly on the picture. The marks that show where the soft transition begins and ends can be dragged - the two lines across the axis of a graduated mask, and the inner ellipse of a radial one - instead of reaching for the slider. Dragging anywhere inside a mask now moves it, where before every drag beside the axis started a brand new one. And the handles have a more forgiving grab radius.

Smaller things

• Lightroom presets are now called XMP presets. Nothing about them changed; the name was promising more than any import can keep. An .xmp preset is a list of slider values - FerrumPix reads them and applies its own sliders, which gets close but is never pixel-for-pixel Adobe. Your saved presets stay where they are.
• The frame around an anchored watermark sits on the watermark - this time properly. 0.9.13 already claimed this one, but that fix only went half the way: pick a watermark anchored to a corner and the frame with its handles still turned up in the opposite corner, out of reach. The frame is now worked out in the same place the watermark itself is drawn, so it also follows a photo you have rotated or cropped.
• The editor opens with the tool you want, in the order you want. Under Settings → Tools you can choose which tool is active the moment the editor opens, and put the tool groups of the left-hand bar into the order that suits how you work.
• A default target format. Settings now holds the format that comes preselected in Save as, Convert to and Export to. The editable project format .fpx can be picked where those dialogs offer it; where it is not on offer, JPG steps in.
• How a photo fills the window is your choice. Viewer and editor each got their own setting: either only shrink a photo when it is larger than the available area, or always scale it to fill that area.
• The button says what it makes. New correction layer is now New mask layer in the mask tool and New selection layer in the selection tool. A selection can also be turned straight into a layer, without changing a setting first.
• Painting a mask no longer bogs the machine down. Brushing a correction into a graduated or radial mask was recalculating far more than it needed to on every movement of the mouse, and again for the whole picture on every stroke. Both are gone: on a 20-megapixel photo a stroke went from over two seconds of work to a fraction of it, and the same result comes out.
• Adjusting several mask layers at once reaches all of them. Whether you picked a group or ctrl-clicked the layers, the change landed on one of them only - the multiple selection was quietly collapsing to a single layer behind the scenes while the panel still showed them all highlighted.
• Picking a layer outside a group replaces the selection instead of adding to it, and picking an object clears the layer selection (and the other way round).
• A group of mask layers survives reopening a project. Groups made only of masks and selections were dropped when the file was loaded - the layers came back but the group around them was gone, while the menu still offered to ungroup them.
• The Adjustments group has a reset button, like every other group. It takes back the automatic enhancement and any adjustment you applied - your crop, objects, masks and retouching stay.
• Picking a mask layer no longer leaves a tool armed. The Text button kept its accent frame after you came from the text tool, and the next click on the picture would have placed a text object.
• Deleting a mask layer clears its red overlay. It used to stay on screen as if the mask were still there.
• Undo keeps the mask visible. Undoing while editing a mask used to make the red overlay disappear altogether, as if the mask had gone with it.
• The mask tools are a compact icon row, matching the selection tools instead of three full-width labelled rows.
• The gallery list keeps its thumbnails clear. Stars no longer sit on top of the picture - at 56 pixels they covered most of it. They now live in the row, just left of the heart, and hovering a row also brings up View, Adjust and Delete, the same three you get in the grid. The only thing left on the thumbnail is the selection circle.
• Clicking an empty spot in the gallery clears the selection. In the grid and in the list. A right-click still leaves the selection alone, so Paste keeps its target.