What's new
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Let your graphics card do the waiting. A switch in the settings, under Models, hands denoising, click-to-select and the depth map to the graphics card instead of the processor. The picture that comes out is the same one; it just arrives several times sooner. FerrumPix tells you which card it found and can try it out on the spot, and if there is more than one in the machine you choose. Off to begin with, and anything the card cannot take simply runs on the processor as before.
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Enlarge with a learned model, in batches and on export. Resize and Export to now offer a model that computes the enlargement instead of averaging the pixels it already has: it puts edges, hair and brickwork back rather than smearing them. Eight to choose from - twice or four times, thorough or quick, one that keeps the grain, one for pictures that came off the web, one that adds as little as possible, and two for drawings. Each says in a sentence what it is for. It runs before any target size you enter, so four times through the model and then down to a set width gives you exactly that width. Transparency survives it - a cut-out PNG comes back cut out. The models are fetched once from the settings, where they sit under a single entry, and the choice starts empty every time because a run costs seconds to minutes per picture.
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Removing an object is quicker and fills with more texture. The same spot on a full-size photo now takes about ten seconds instead of fourteen, and what appears in the gap carries far more of the grain and detail of what surrounds it, rather than coming back as a smooth patch. Nothing about how you use it has changed.
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Saving over a file that already exists now asks first. Save as used to write straight over it, without a word - if you typed a name that was already taken, the older picture was gone. It now shows the same dialog you get when copying files, with overwrite, rename or cancel. Batch runs ask as well, and there the answer can be given once for everything that follows; they used to quietly invent a free name instead, so files ended up in the folder under names nobody had asked for.
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Esc gets you out of the eyedropper. Picking a colour from the picture - in the colour mixer, on the colour wheels or from any colour field - could only be ended by clicking somewhere, and the click left you with a colour you did not want. Esc now cancels it, and nothing is picked up.
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The long jobs can be stopped, and they hold the door while they run. Denoising and removing an object put a spinner over the picture; now there is an X on it, and Esc does the same. Denoising stops at the next tile, removal after the pass it is in - either way the photo comes back exactly as it was, and the message says cancelled rather than failed. While one of them runs, the whole editor is held shut - tools, sliders, filmstrip, the bar along the top and the menu behind the right mouse button - so a click cannot land in a picture that is halfway through being computed. Undo and Save were the ones that mattered there.
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A distorted object moves as smoothly as any other. Dragging one used to re-render the whole scene on every step, because its distortion was only drawn while baking. It is now drawn once into the object's own picture, so moving, resizing and changing it are as immediate as with a plain shape. An object that is distorted and rotated still takes the slower path, where the result is the one you would expect.
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Batch runs can bring that saved work along. Resize, look, watermark and Export to now offer a tick box for it, and it only appears when photos in your selection actually carry something - it says how many. Off to begin with, because computing it in costs several minutes per photo. Printing and collages ask the same question before they start.
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Work that is computed into the pixels is no longer lost on a RAW. Denoising, removing an object, retouching and brush strokes all change the picture itself rather than a slider, and next to a RAW or PSD file there are no pixels of ours to keep them in - the photo is developed afresh every time it opens. Until now that work quietly disappeared with the next open. It is now noted beside the photo, and when you open it again FerrumPix asks whether to put it back, so you can also just look at the picture without waiting minutes for it. Thumbnails and the viewer deliberately show the photo without it, and resetting the noise group drops the note. Save also stays available afterwards: on a RAW or PSD it writes the note beside the photo, never the photo itself. It used to go dead the moment you denoised one, sending you to Save as for no reason.
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Say how much denoising you want. A strength slider sits above the two denoise buttons. Turn it down and more of the fine drawing survives, turn it up and more grain goes - on a night shot the first is usually what you want, in a dim room the second. Colour noise is always removed in full, because that costs no detail at all. The slider starts where most photos are well served and applies to the next press of either button.
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Denoising now comes in two kinds. Denoise: thorough is the one described below. Denoise: quick does the same job in about a sixth of the time - a full-size photo in well under a minute instead of several - and pays for it with a little more smoothing. Which one suits depends on the picture and on how long you want to wait; if one disappoints, one step back and the other button is right there. Both come from the same entry in the settings.
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The settings say where the model files come from. Technology now lists them apart from the libraries FerrumPix is built on, with the project and the licence behind each one - they are not part of the application and are only fetched if you ask for them. The list of models itself is shorter: what belongs to one feature stands under one entry, and it says how many of its files you already have.
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Denoising with a learned model, as a separate step. Next to the noise sliders there is now a button that runs the whole picture through a trained model. It tells grain from fine detail instead of weighing one against the other, which is what a blur has to do - on a noisy shot it gets visibly closer to how the scene looked. It needs its own model file, fetched once from the settings.
Be aware that this takes minutes, not seconds - roughly four for a 12-megapixel photo, and longer for larger files. That is the nature of the model and not something a faster computer changes much; the progress display counts the tiles while it works. The sliders stay where they are and remain the quick way.
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Picking an object by click no longer stops short of its edge. The selection used to end a little inside, which left a bright rim around a person and a strip of untouched sky in front of a treeline - and everything built on that selection carried the rim along. The extent slider now starts where it should; on a hard edge this costs nothing, and you can still adjust it either way.