Anyone Heard of Piccure+?

Marcin 3M said:

Phil Hill said:

I upgraded to the new version from the original because not all of my lenses have DxO correction modules. Also, I sometimes work with scans of negatives going back many years. This will help with both, so I think I'll be using it more frequently than the original release.

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Do they offer any reduced upgrade price?

--
Marcin_3M

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Yes, it was a nice discount. 75% off.

Send an e-mail to [email protected] and include the previous order number. They'll reply back with a discount code.

Hi everyone,

we put up a special challenge for all the other software solutions out there. It's not a "nearly sharp image" but one that really sets a high bar in terms of optical aberrations (the nifty fifty @1.4)... The image was purchased from an independent third party and can be found here (its large!):

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/piccureplus/Images/VP__1251_50mm_f1.4_iso100.tif

Description: Canon 50mm/1.4 @1.4. This lens is known for having a low overall sharpness and strong loss in sharpness towards the edges at open aperture. And just in case you wonder: no, it is not out of focus, this really is how "not great" images come out. I think many of you know this lens and it's downsides... It's great at f5.6 and beyond though.

The settings used for this image and the description can be found on our homepage (How can.... help me). I refrain from posting a link directly to the settings as I want to avoid being accused of advertising.

You can try what effects you get with the other tools out there - and I am curious about the results.

Best,

Lui

Co-Founder

Intelligent Imaging Solutions GmbH - Hintere Grabenstr. 30 - 72070 Tuebingen - Germany
CEO: Prof. Dr. Hanns Ruder
Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 740303

piccure said:

Hi everyone,

we put up a special challenge for all the other software solutions out there. It's not a "nearly sharp image" but one that really sets a high bar in terms of optical aberrations (the nifty fifty @1.4)... The image was purchased from an independent third party and can be found here (its large!):

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/piccureplus/Images/VP__1251_50mm_f1.4_iso100.tif

Description: Canon 50mm/1.4 @1.4. This lens is known for having a low overall sharpness and strong loss in sharpness towards the edges at open aperture. And just in case you wonder: no, it is not out of focus, this really is how "not great" images come out. I think many of you know this lens and it's downsides... It's great at f5.6 and beyond though.

The settings used for this image and the description can be found on our homepage (How can.... help me). I refrain from posting a link directly to the settings as I want to avoid being accused of advertising.

You can try what effects you get with the other tools out there - and I am curious about the results.

Best,

Lui

Co-Founder

Intelligent Imaging Solutions GmbH - Hintere Grabenstr. 30 - 72070 Tuebingen - Germany
CEO: Prof. Dr. Hanns Ruder
Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 740303

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You wouldn't happen to have access to the RAW file for this image, do you? As I'm sure you are aware, DxO needs a RAW file to apply it's lens softness correction. So you are effectively precluding DxO from your challenge.

It is nice that you can do this with a TIFF, though.

Hi Bill, thanks for the comment.

Here is the RAW file:


We don't exclude anybody on purpose. But since RAW processing itself can lead to very different results we uploaded the TIFF. piccure+ also works with RAW files.

Best,

Lui

Intelligent Imaging Solutions GmbH - Hintere Grabenstr. 30 - 72070 Tuebingen - Germany
CEO: Prof. Dr. Hanns Ruder
Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 740303

billythek said:

You wouldn't happen to have access to the RAW file for this image, do you? As I'm sure you are aware, DxO needs a RAW file to apply it's lens softness correction. So you are effectively precluding DxO from your challenge.

It is nice that you can do this with a TIFF, though.

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Actually, DxO Optics Pro can do the lens corrections if you feed it a JPEG from the camera. There are some features that are lost, such as PRIME noise reduction, but the automatic optical corrections can be applied to a JPEG.

I don't know whether that would work with a TIFF, though.

piccure said:

Hello,

thanks for the question. The workflow would be Motion+ then Lens+, however the algorithm would need to do a really stretch here and I doubt it would yield "visually appealing" results for visible shakes. The Lens+ feature can also take into account micro-shakes to same extent - so going Lens+ by default is a good idea unless you can see blur traces visibly.

..

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Thanks. I need to continue to play with this some. I went out yesterday and took some new photos with the one lens I really want to test (Tamron 28-300). This lens is decent, but not as sharp as some of the other lens that have IS or vibration control built in. I especially want to test it at slower speed like 1/60 sec, where I know there is some shake present, especially with the lens wide open at 300 mm. So you are saying that Lens+ accounts for microshakes automatically?

I'll be honest - I've had mixed results so far. Some of the photos at 300 mm have benefited more from motion+, a few from Lens+, and quite a few show no real improvement or not much better than I can do with creative sharpening.

I am using your software as a plug in to Lightroom, and am generally passing you a tiff with some capture sharpening and some noise reduction, and some clarity.

I'll keep at it for a few more days.

Hello Jim,

thanks a lot. However, the strength of our software is the correction of optical aberrations. Camera shakes are very difficult to reverse if they exceed a certain limit. It's not our greatest strength - even though we are no worse than competition.

However, I find 1/60 for 300mm extremely challenging to be honest.

What we do best is correcting optical aberrations. The improvements get larger the more apparent optical aberrations are.

Best,

Lui

PS: My posts still require moderator approval - that's why it usually takes a while...

Intelligent Imaging Solutions GmbH - Hintere Grabenstr. 30 - 72070 Tuebingen - Germany
CEO: Prof. Dr. Hanns Ruder
Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 740303

piccure said:

Hello Jim,

thanks a lot. However, the strength of our software is the correction of optical aberrations. Camera shakes are very difficult to reverse if they exceed a certain limit. It's not our greatest strength - even though we are no worse than competition.

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I agree. And you are probably a bit better than the one I have recently tested.

piccure said:

However, I find 1/60 for 300mm extremely challenging to be honest.

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This doesn't surprise me. Most of the time I use this lens in really good light where I can shoot at 1/500 sec or better when I shoot at anything over 150 mm or so. The 1/60 sec would have the most jitter when handheld.

piccure said:

What we do best is correcting optical aberrations. The improvements get larger the more apparent optical aberrations are.

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OK. From that perspective, I think that this one lens is quite decent, as I don't see a lot by eye.

I do have a Canon 50 mm f1.4 which I don't use much. Maybe I'll give that a go.

I have also not looked at my better lenses. That will be next.

Hello Jim,

a hint for the shake reduction: there is a feature called "SmartSpot" which also is explained in greater detail in the handbook (Menu/Handbook). It may help you get much better results for images suffering motion blur.

I would encourage you to send us an email in case you have some more specific questions -we'd be more than glad to help out. And yes: the smaller the optical aberrations, the less we can do.

Best,

Lui

Intelligent Imaging Solutions GmbH - Hintere Grabenstr. 30 - 72070 Tuebingen - Germany
CEO: Prof. Dr. Hanns Ruder
Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 740303

Hi,

please allow us a general clarification that may also ease some of the tension. I keep my statements general - and my discussion is more of a general nature.

There are physical laws at work which cause lenses (especially at fast apertures) to suffer from optical aberration. Through complex designs and expensive materials lens designers can correct them to an "acceptable amount". Any additional improvement means an exponential growth in expensed for design and material. The Zeiss Otus really is astonishing at open aperture. It really is. It's a great piece of work.

The problem with most lenses at open aperture really is the physical laws they are bound to. Lenses (in particular: prime lenses) who are used at fast apertures usually suffer quite visible from optical aberrations - and it's just all physics. So the idea behind computational photography essentially is shifting these physical boundaries. In the classical "by optical design only", it is simply not possible to achieve a certain (and uniform) level of sharpness throughout the picture. The goal of computational photography essentially is "overcoming existing physical boundaries through post processing".

I do understand that our communication may be a little bit, well, "prone for misinterpretation" - but we also learn through feedback.

To cut a long story short: the research stream of computational photography unlocks new possibilities in use cases that are currently constrained by physics. We provided an example for such a use case in the thread further down.

So, a product in this field can be thought about a "new way to make lenses even more usable where their field of application has been restricted by the laws of physics so far". This also means "areas which work perfect" will yield less improvement.

I must really admit, that we do enjoy the discussion here - especially the criticism. It gives us a better understanding of "how people perceive the upsides of computational photography and where use cases still need to be explained better".

Thanks.

Lui

Intelligent Imaging Solutions GmbH - Hintere Grabenstr. 30 - 72070 Tuebingen - Germany
CEO: Prof. Dr. Hanns Ruder
Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 740303

I have been doing a series of comparisons between these capabilities, and simply doing more advanced sharpening with software like Topaz Detail.

It appears to me that one of the strengths of Piccure+ is in dealing with "smooth" surfaces like skies and skin eg portraits. It seems to sharpen the edges well without introducing mico defects (looking like noise) into the smooth areas.

I don't shoot a lot of portraits, but I do shoot a lot of landscapes.

Hi

I'm just curious: how difficult is to port Piccure+ on the gfx card? I would assume it will be a few magnitude faster than the current CPU implementation.

Is it still worth it to go the CPU way when creating programs like this?

Lui,

Thanks for all your comments and attention to feedback in this thread and elsewhere. I have been very impressed with your software's capabilities. It does a very nice job with my lenses. I've been especially pleased with the results on images shot with the Canon 24-105/L. I see a real difference in most shots I've tried. Below is a 100% crop screenshot of an orchid. The image was imported into Lightroom. A few tonal corrections and capture sharpening. I then edited the image in Piccure+ with the Lightroom corrections. The Piccure+ settings are Lens+ out of the box except that I used Quality+. The workflow isn't necessarily the best way to use Puccure+, but it does show two crops in which the only difference is Piccure+.

The image is shot with a 6D on a tripod. Canon EF24-105mm f/4L IS (IS off), 1/10 second, f/4.0, 105mm.





From my perspective, the results are excellent with Piccure+.

Going forward, things I would love to see:

• Speed optimization
• Numerical values and line markings or notches in the settings
• A little more information about best practices, especially integration with photo editors like Lightroom
• A way to avoid having to output TIFF files, at least until export. I realize this one is perhaps impossible, especially since Adobe doesn't let plugins play nicely with its software. I would love it if Lightroon's XML files or the DNG format could hold both the Lightroom and Piccure+ instructions, which would help keep image file sizes under control. Maybe there could be some way to maintain full quality without having to output large TIFF files. Maybe I'm missing a way to do that currently.

Thanks for the good work that has gone into Piccure+.

Dudleyrose said:

...The image was imported into Lightroom. A few tonal corrections and capture sharpening. I then edited the image in Piccure+ with the Lightroom corrections. The Piccure+ settings are Lens+ out of the box except that I used Quality+.

...

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Very nice results. I just found the quality+ for the Lens+; I have only used the quality setting to this point

I have tended to use normal optical aberrations and sharpness about 1/4 above smooth in the Lens+ module. I also only use capture sharpening in LR (set to about 25).

Your results look pretty good. I've only seen something comparable when I have some large smooth surfaces ( as I said in a comment above). Your flowers have a lot of smooth surfaces as well.

--
Jim
"It's all about the light"

There's a lot of good information in this thread (thanks in particular to Lui for participating). My understanding is that piccure+ can correct for optical aberrations and as a result recover detail that would otherwise be lost due to the limitations of a lens design. I have looked at the examples on the piccure+ website, in this thread and elsewhere, and I am still unclear as to whether the better images produced by piccure+ are due to recovered detail or just from sharpening that could be applied with any software. I think I am seeing some detail being recovered in some images, but the sharpening that is also applied to the images is confusing the issue for me.

I will download piccure+ and give it a try. I am particularly interested to see how it performs on photos from my iPhone and my soon-to-arrive Canon G7X (which has a considerable amount of distortion in its lens that is corrected by software in-camera or in RAW processing). In the meantime, however, I would be interested in any insight that Lui or others can offer regarding the question of detail recovery vs. sharpening.

Richard Drdul said:

In the meantime, however, I would be interested in any insight that Lui or others can offer regarding the question of detail recovery vs. sharpening.

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You probably can't "recover detail" if the necessary data isn't present. However, software definitely can correct aberrations that are degrading an image, and that's one of the reasons I was an early adopter of DxO Optics Pro and its optical correction modules.

Deconvolution is a valid technique for correcting optical defects, and bringing the color channels into better alignment can reduce "smearing" of fine details caused by various chromatic aberrations. In both of these cases, the information needed to improve the image is present, but it's in a form that isn't visually useful. Ordinary sharpening would not be of much value except possibly to mask the flaws.

Even so, the differences between sharpening and actually correcting the flaws might not be obvious or important unless you're making very large prints.

Thanks for the explanation, Phil. The idea of correctly aligning the colour channels to "recover" detail makes sense. As many of the sample images include sharpening that increases the contrast of fine details, I'm still uncertain as to how much actual benefit piccure+ could provide in "recovering" or improving fine details in an image. I'm going to have to test it myself.

Richard Drdul said:

Thanks for the explanation, Phil. The idea of correctly aligning the colour channels to "recover" detail makes sense. As many of the sample images include sharpening that increases the contrast of fine details, I'm still uncertain as to how much actual benefit piccure+ could provide in "recovering" or improving fine details in an image. I'm going to have to test it myself.

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Think of it like having a better lens. As print size decreases, so do the differences between economy lenses and premium lenses.

Richard, I will be interested in what you discover. I consider myself pretty good at using sharpening in Lightroom and Photoshop, but in my head to head experience I can't get close to what I'm seeing with Piccure+.

Jim B (MSP) said:

Dudleyrose said:

...The image was imported into Lightroom. A few tonal corrections and capture sharpening. I then edited the image in Piccure+ with the Lightroom corrections. The Piccure+ settings are Lens+ out of the box except that I used Quality+.

...

Click to expand...

Very nice results. I just found the quality+ for the Lens+; I have only used the quality setting to this point

I have tended to use normal optical aberrations and sharpness about 1/4 above smooth in the Lens+ module. I also only use capture sharpening in LR (set to about 25).

Your results look pretty good. I've only seen something comparable when I have some large smooth surfaces ( as I said in a comment above). Your flowers have a lot of smooth surfaces as well.

Click to expand...

I have had time to look at a sharper lens that I have from Tamron, the newer 24-70 mm with VC.

The shots I have at the ends of the lens, ie 24 and 70, are definitely better after Piccure+. I use the lower sharpening in Piccure+, and do my final creative sharpening in Topaz Detail.