DTCOP Loc: Camarillo, CA

Earlier today I THINK I read on UHH about someone using a program called "purity" or something possibly similar and it was put out by Athens???? It was for post processing pix... did batch work too. All very fuzzy now. The gremlins erased it all before I could DL a trial. Can anyone help.
Thanks
Don

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Perfectly Clear 2.0

http://www.athentech.com/

It's a plug in for Photoshop or Lightroom. I use it myself. I don't know if there's a stand alone version now or not. There wasn't when I got mine, it was plug-in only.

It's very good 95% of the time. You can put a photo of kids playing in a yard through it, for example, and it sharpens, increases contrast, boosts color saturation, etc. with a sort of artificial intelligence. You have several presets to use such as vivid, landscape, portrait, etc. The preset settings determine what it does to the photo. When the photo comes on the screen inside Perfectly Clear, it chooses what it thinks is as good as it can provide by analyzing (they say) every pixel of the photo. If you don't like what it came up with you can adjust any of the things it did with sliders along the right side. They also imply their software is used in photo processing kiosks all over North America so that when you tell the kiosk machine at Walgreens or CVS or wherever to auto adjust your snapshots that it's Perfectly Clear doing so.

You can also make your own presets and save them so that if you have a specific situation that you shoot regularly, your preset that you custom created can be used over and over.

As far as batch work, I'm not familiar with that. I only use it on each photo individually as a plug-in to Photoshop. For me, it's mostly a big time saver. In my work I create and edit 25 HDR real estate interiors per day and use Perfectly Clear with a custom made preset that gives me pretty much what I want that could actually be done in Photoshop but it's doing that bunch of steps for me all at once as a single mouse click instead of me having to do them individually.

It's not absolutely perfect. There are times when I'll process a room that is, let's say a brightly lit beige bathroom that has a brown marble-look tile walk-in shower. At times it guesses wrong and to control the beige walls it will make the shot so dark that the brown marble is almost chocolate brown and corners with shadows become so dark that it's very ugly. So I either cancel it and go without, or I decrease the intensity of what it recommends by at least 50% to get it under control (with one slider).

So if you're expecting to put a file in it and have it come out magically perfect, or put a bunch of files in it and have them all come out perfect, that's wishful thinking. I consider it to be a beneficial tool to go along with Lightroom or Photoshop, not a replacement for them.

DTCOP Loc: Camarillo, CA

Wow... you nailed it perfectly. Since I seldom if ever use PS or LR I need to find out if it will operate with PSE 13. I'll pull up the trial and see what it does. Thanks for your help. I shoot stock for Getty and iStock and I do about 3 or 4 shoots a week of about 70-90 pictures each so I think this might help. I know there's no "magic bullet" but every little bit helps. Thanks..... very much
Don

quote=marcomarks]Perfectly Clear 2.0

http://www.athentech.com/

It's a plug in for Photoshop or Lightroom. I use it myself. I don't know if there's a stand alone version now or not. There wasn't when I got mine, it was plug-in only.

It's very good 95% of the time. You can put a photo of kids playing in a yard through it, for example, and it sharpens, increases contrast, boosts color saturation, etc. with a sort of artificial intelligence. You have several presets to use such as vivid, landscape, portrait, etc. The preset settings determine what it does to the photo. When the photo comes on the screen inside Perfectly Clear, it chooses what it thinks is as good as it can provide by analyzing (they say) every pixel of the photo. If you don't like what it came up with you can adjust any of the things it did with sliders along the right side. They also imply their software is used in photo processing kiosks all over North America so that when you tell the kiosk machine at Walgreens or CVS or wherever to auto adjust your snapshots that it's Perfectly Clear doing so.

You can also make your own presets and save them so that if you have a specific situation that you shoot regularly, your preset that you custom created can be used over and over.

As far as batch work, I'm not familiar with that. I only use it on each photo individually as a plug-in to Photoshop. For me, it's mostly a big time saver. In my work I create and edit 25 HDR real estate interiors per day and use Perfectly Clear with a custom made preset that gives me pretty much what I want that could actually be done in Photoshop but it's doing that bunch of steps for me all at once as a single mouse click instead of me having to do them individually.

It's not absolutely perfect. There are times when I'll process a room that is, let's say a brightly lit beige bathroom that has a brown marble-look tile walk-in shower. At times it guesses wrong and to control the beige walls it will make the shot so dark that the brown marble is almost chocolate brown and corners with shadows become so dark that it's very ugly. So I either cancel it and go without, or I decrease the intensity of what it recommends by at least 50% to get it under control (with one slider).

So if you're expecting to put a file in it and have it come out magically perfect, or put a bunch of files in it and have them all come out perfect, that's wishful thinking. I consider it to be a beneficial tool to go along with Lightroom or Photoshop, not a replacement for them.[/quote]

sodapop Loc: Bel Air, MD

What does it do that Lightroom and/or Photoshop does not already do?

Db7423 Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

Nothing I can see that Lightroom doesn't do... you can setup presets in LR or simply edit one pic, go to the next one and press Previous. ;)

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

I looked at Perfectly Clear, and at first it seemed great, but then I realized all that it did can be done in Lightroom or Photoshop, or any number of editing apps.


If I recall, it also gave you a "baked in" image, where it would output a JPG, but not one that you could go in an fine tune anything afterwards.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

With Lightroom and Photoshop, you are tweaking and tweaking to get a final result that you want, looking at that result, and tweaking some more. You're depending on your eyes, which get tired after 2 or 3 hours of staring at a screen, and that can end up with inconsistency because as the session goes on your judgement becomes skewed somewhat. If you're working on one or two or three photos per night for personal use, it doesn't matter much because you can go back another day and readjust. Or if you're doing 25 or 30 and they're for personal use, the work isn't mission critical - and you can again go back and fix things later.

But when I have to choose 25 to 30 HDR photos per night out of 60 or 70 I took during the day, edit them, and upload them for business purposes, I don't have time to go back another day to fix what my tired eyes didn't see correctly. Perfectly Clear does the same process over and over by making calculations and applying them. It doesn't have eyes to get tired or be personally biased. In the beginning, I let it adjust as it liked and then refined the settings and saved as a custom preset. Then I used the preset and refined it some more. I did this probably a half dozen times until I have a custom preset now that I use exclusively and most times I don't need to adjust anything when it's done.

As I said, it works as it should about 90% of the time. The other 10% are very obviously not what they should look like and I have to adjust those manually.

Perfectly Clear analyzes the file and comes up with a final result fast without me tweaking and tweaking endlessly. As I think I said, or should have, it doesn't do anything that Lightroom or Photoshop or Paintshop Pro can't, but it just does it faster because it's a one click solution. I'd say I save 1 1/2 to 2 hours of Photoshop time per night out of a potential 4 hours of processing time. So to me it's worth the small investment to save 7.5 to 10 hours of time per week that I'd rather spend with my family.

I also tend to be conservative in my Photoshop editing while Perfectly Clear has no bias to be shy. It will push contrast, for example, to levels I would normally feel are too aggressive but after I look at the result for a while I realize that I actually like it although I wouldn't have gone that far manually. I'm not so proud as to think I have perfect eyes to edit to magazine quality in Photoshop without massaging each photo several times and over a two day period. And I don't have that amount of time available anyway. But with Perfectly Clear to override me, my consistency is better throughout each batch and my edited photos get a bit closer to magazine quality faster. I just know that my realtor clients immediately noticed when I started using Perfectly Clear and complimented on how much better "my editing" was getting compared to previous years.

It's a tool to help get to your desired result faster, not a replacement for editing software or for the process of editing.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

If you put in a TIFF, it gives you a TIFF out. It doesn't add a layer like ReMask or Viviza 2 and it does "bake" it into the image, but I found out that you can use the edit menu of Photoshop or CTRL-Z and remove the Perfectly Clear edits if you decide against what it did. And Photoshop will still edit the TIFF as it would any other TIFF.

DTCOP Loc: Camarillo, CA

Does anyone know of it works in PSE 13..... I haven't had time to go through a trial?

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I just checked the website and it is available as a plug-in for Photoshop OR Lightroom, or as a plug-in for Photoshop AND Lightroom... but not for Elements. Sorry.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

I think that's a bit confusing of them to say "or" then say "and." When I bought it the installation installed both - for Photoshop and Lightroom. I guess it means if you only have Lightroom, that's what will install. Or if you only have Photoshop, that's what will install. But if you have both, they'll both install. In reality, if you have Lightroom now and get Photoshop later, you can go back to your saved installation file and re-install and it will go into Photoshop too.

And it's true that it won't work with Elements 13. Nor does it work with Apple's OS.

It's important to remember that Photoshop Elements 13 is not actually a direct brother or sister to Photoshop. Originally Elements was just Adobe Elements and did not carry the Photoshop name. It works differently, came from completely different code that Adobe bought from some other source, and was actually given away free with computers for a very long time. It was, and I have to assume still is, a distant "step-cousin" with a different heritage than big Photoshop. It was originally quite buggy, locked up frequently, wasn't very intuitive, and the times I tried to use it (it came on a disk free with a new PC back then) it locked up my computer so many times that I took it off. Much later it became "Photoshop Elements" and they revamped it quite a bit or there wouldn't be so many users who are happy with it.

So you shouldn't expect Photoshop Elements and Photoshop to have much in common, especially when it comes to plug-ins. You're more likely to get a plug-in for Photoshop to work with Paintshop Pro and that's not always guaranteed either. Perfectly Clear is an example, the older version came with Paintshop Pro Ultimate package, but it's not in the Ultimate package anymore and the Perfectly Clear people say in their FAQ that version 2 doesn't work with Paintshop Pro.