Now that my project schedule is freeing up again (and most importantly, I'm finally free of my various university contracts / commitments over the past few years, with the rather onerous IP provisions those came with), my attention has again been turning towards what sorts of projects I may want to start working on in my free time going forwards.
The key operative principle though for any such projects I now take on is this:
From now on, any passion-projects I dedicate my free time to (and with full force) will necessarily only be ones that I fully control + own. Unfortunately, experience and hindsight have taught me that merely having something be open source (but still part of someone else's platform / hosted by some other funding org) is ultimately not the answer I once believed it to be.
Note: This is also NOT a firm commitment to actually embarking on building all of these things. But rather, just some open-air brainstorming, hoping that someone will build it all for me (and then not put it behind a hideous subscription-based paywall). Heck, maybe the mere act of brainstorming these designs then releasing them as blueprints to hopefully inspire a whole ecosystem of interfaces should be the actual project!
Enough framing boilerplate. Let's get down to the original topic for today's ramblings:
What my ideal "next-gen" photo management + editing tool solution should look like, were I to go through the effort to set one up.
Starting Point - Inspirations
First a bit of context: Thus far, I've been using Google's long-discontinued "Picasa" desktop app as my photo + video management and editing solution.
This is obviously not a very sustainable option - especially notable while typing this on a new machine that I have not yet installed that on (as I need to try to dig up my old Dropbox password to fetch the installers).
It's also very limiting, as there are a whole bunch of additional capabilities I'd love to build into it, to make it do what I want.
But with that in mind, do understand that I am approaching this problem with the following implicit constraints:
1) Ideally, my ideal replacement system would have 100% fidelity compatibility with my existing library (+ all the non-destructive edits I've gone through adding on those over the years)
2) There are many things I like about the fundamental workflows of that tool. Chief among them are:
A) The presentation of folders as all being part of a single flat-scrolling view, where photos + videos are grouped by the folders they are found in, but you can scroll through from folder to folder without having to stop to re-traverse the tree to find the next entries
B) Easy controls for rotating images, and applying "Fill Light" + "Shadow" + "Highlights" adjustments, and tagging images as "good"
3) While I like the basic approach, there are things I'd like to be "better" (to fix the cases where it can't do things I often need it to do), e.g.
* Being able to yank down overexposures, without making the images go all horrid-flat-grey looking... you know the look...
* Being able to push the exposure / rotation corrections beyond what the Picasa scrollbars let you do
* More fine-grained adjustments (e.g. only affecting certain parts of the image), but using similar controls - This is discussed more in the wishlist.
The Wishlist
1) Main collection view must have this continuous-folder-scrolling from Picasa (something which pretty much none of the alternatives I've tried do), (and ideally do all the above constraints as a baseline).
2) Within each folder, allow that folder's display to be filtered to only show the images that have made it past the nth-round of filtering / selecting.
I'm not talking about merely having say a 5-star rating system. But rather, I want to be able to keep tagging photos with a simple "spacebar == good" option, whittling down the set into a bunch of "passable" ones (with occasional ones able to be marked as "the best" right from the get-go)
Then, once you've got that set, I'd like to be able to hide all except for those ones, so I can repeat this process, being able to focus on just that subset (+ maybe doing additional rounds of filtering + selection on those)... But the kicker is, all of this is done non-destructively, and without having to export anything out first (i.e. my current workflow consists of exporting the best ones, then filtering those into sub-sets of the really good ones, once I can flick between the isolated subset and see where things duplicate / overlap each other).
BUT, I don't want to lose the ability to go back to the original unfiltered set again later, to see if there were gems I'd missed during the initial triage.
3) Within each folder, allow labelling ranges of photos as belonging to the same sequence - e.g. a rapid burst / timelapse / panorama sampling / focus stacking / bracketing / etc.
Trying to manage these currently is a bit of a pain on most of the desktop tools I've seen, and you end up having to shove them into separate folders if you really want that extra organising to manage them.
But the real killer features start happening once you have this:
3a) Editing any one of these images automatically ensures that the base recipe gets applied to the whole set (i.e. broad spectrum exposure + white-balance fixes for just that range, but with less admin than now)
3b) Special export tools / presets built in for handling assembling these sequences into their intended "post-processed" forms (i.e. joining panorama slices, or combining the focus/bracketing images)
4) Ability to apply the copy-edit history from a previous image to a bunch of other ones (i.e. leveraging the previous functionality, but not restricting it to sequences only)
5) Ability to define + automatically export multiple different crops (with rotation + tilt/shearing/perspective tweaks) from a single source image, maybe with additional exposure adjustments... all from a single source image
Right now, I can do this, but it needs up-front work to remember to duplicate the images I want to crop in multiple ways.
6) Advanced "Simple" Collage-Making Tool - See this post
7) Ability to use a "smart brush" to quickly mask off bits of the image to apply difference exposure + white-balance + brilliance / sharpening / quality-tweak adjustments to (i.e.
This is mostly to fix sky vs foreground wide-dynamic-range + exposure issues
Main difference / focus here is on the UX of the operation:
* There should be some kind of smarts (but overridable) for making it easier to define the regions using a brush-like interface (which will try to place the effect boundaries automatically)
* The subsequent exposure-fixing tools just use the standard controls
8) Ability to set up custom layouts / module-packs / etc. to adjust the UI to own workflows (i.e. commonly used tools in one panel, or a more optimal order for example)
9) Tool for syncing up + fixing timestamps for multiple streams of media generated via multiple cameras / devices
10) Best-in-class Motion-blur eliminator - I have a bunch of important family photos that have some really bad motion-blur / camera shake on them that would be great to fix someday.
No comments:
Post a Comment