Missing something in the Pro6.2-Plugin

[Hoogo]

I just upgraded to the 6.2-pro-plugin for 64Bit-Photoline.
Nice surface-improvements, but so far I miss 2 things from my older home+.

-The old image viewer had contrast/brightness/gamma-slider. I found only brightness in the new one, and I miss the contrast. I used it to make tonal steps(?) distinguishable, for example to detect banding.

-The old version offered RGB working space. In the viewer I can switch to RGB, but the sliders of the noise filter are still YCrCb. For the extreme noise of old cellphones RGB looked better.

[NITeam]

-The old image viewer had contrast/brightness/gamma-slider. I found only brightness in the new one, and I miss the contrast.

Yes, we deciced to drop those adjustments, at least for now. You are the first person to mention that so far. Perhaps we will change the adjustments in the future updates.

-The old version offered RGB working space. In the viewer I can switch to RGB, but the sliders of the noise filter are still YCrCb. For the extreme noise of old cellphones RGB looked better.

In our experience, YCrCb always works better, which is why we always made it the default working color space. We removed RGB as it often confused our users ("if it is an RGB image then I perhaps should switch to RGB space" - to avoid that) and because it was not really that much useful. If you need to work in the RGB working color space you can still do that in the current 32-bit version of Neat Image. However, we will most likely remove it from there in the newer updates as well.

Vlad

[Hoogo]

We removed RGB as it often confused our users ("if it is an RGB image then I perhaps should switch to RGB space" - to avoid that)

I can agree.

...and because it was not really that much useful.

There was another occasion when I intentionally switched to RGB: De-rasterizing scanned prints. I assumed that the noise created by the raster should alter the signal (at least roughly) along the RGB-axis. But I'm not sure if I ever reasonably compared RGB and YCrCb for this purpose, and since Win7/64 my scanner is out of work anyways.
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When processing a grayscale-layer, the view-selector is not available in the 64pro-plugin. In 32bit it is. Viewing RGB or YCrCb would be silly anyways, but the frequency views would be nice.
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What about Lab and CMYK-layers? If I had CMYK-sliders, I would not care about the missing rgb-sliders anymore. I do not use Lab too often, though, but having to convert to RGB, just to see it converted to YCbCr sounds a bit strange to me.

[NITeam]

Thank you for noticing that about the grayscale mode, we will check why the view selector is not available in that case, it may be a bug.

Regarding CMYK, RGB, etc., it was a decision of algorithm design to use YCrCb as the working color space, as it is specifically good for the purposes of noise reduction. The goal is not to just directly work in many existing spaces but to convert to one special space that allows to accurately separate actual image details and noise and thus enables accurate noise reduction. YCrCb may sound strange but it works pretty well for that purpose.

Thank you, we will check what is going on with that selector.

Vlad

[Hoogo]

Thanks for adding the missing selector for gray layers to the new version V7.

Meanwhile I have found another denoising tool that allows me to choose between RGB, Lab and YCrCb as working space. The results of using Lab and YCrCb were very similar. So maybe you could give it a try and treat a Lab-layer as if it was already converted to YCrCb? That would be better than the current behaviour (nothing happens when I click on the Neat-Menuentry in Photoline) and would save me 2 times converting.

[NITeam]

Thank you for the suggestion. We will consider this possibility for the newer versions.

Vlad