4 ms·

1) Your site's burning, pitty most people won't see your article/images. 2) The claim to "unlimited everything" repeated numerously in the article as well as "

by pyalot2 14y ago

1) Your site's burning, pitty most people won't see your article/images. 2) The claim to "unlimited everything" repeated numerously in the article as well as "instant" anything is just hyperbole. There's no such thing in software. It might've been cleverer than photoshop about things, but unlimited and instant? No. 3) The claim to complete resolution independence is false. You might store editing operations/layers as parameters, but the source material is still resolution bound. 4) 48-bits is not that great honestly. At RGB (no word about alpha) that's 16-bit per channel. If it's normalized that's 64k graduations vs. 256 graduations. If interpreted as half float you'll only get 2 bits more per channel (half-floats use a 10-bit significand). That's cool, but not all that cool, either you get a non HDR format with a cool channel resolution, or you'll get a HDR format with 4x more graduations than 8-bpc. No you know what's cool? 32-bit single precision floats. 4 bytes, 32-bits per channel, 128-bit per pixel. You'll get 23 bits in graduations and HDR. Desktop graphics cards use this format internally anyway.

jawngee 14y ago
As someone that used it, it did indeed have all of those features. Sorry to burst your bubble. As for resolution independence, what they mean is that all of the operations and manipulations you performed were resolution independent. If you upscaled the image, any manipulations weren't simply upscaled, but reperformed at the new scale which provided significantly better results. It was indeed instant. You could load a 500 meg image on a machine with a quarter of the ram and zoom, pan and mess with it in realtime. It was amazing at the time.
- pyalot2 14y ago
  Sorry to burst your bubble, if you think there's such a thing as unlimited and instant you're sorely mistaken. It might've been fast in simple cases compared to the alternatives, but there's no two ways about it that all computation takes time, and you can make tradeoffs where you cache more and compute less, but that's it. It's not instant and unlimited. It's Limited and fast, or more limited and faster, or more ram and faster, or more data and slower.
  - jawngee 14y ago
    Stop bending semantics to fit your binary view point. Instant in this case means you move the brush and it distorts as you move the brush. No parallax, no beach ball waiting for it to do the computation. It happened as you moved it. It was instant. Even with brush sizes the size of the image you were using. It had unlimited undo. It had unlimited layers. That's not an arguable point.
    - pyalot2 14y ago
      Right, unlimited everything, got it. /me wonders why he even tries to point out the folly to people with no clue about how computers work...
      - stagas 14y ago
        Don't take words literally. Instant in this context means what jawngee said, that it was so responsive to the degree that people conceived it as instant. Awesome. Layers were unlimited meaning you could add as many as you want. Undo operations were unlimited meaning you could work on it for 10 hours straight and undo to the point it was before you started working on it. I believe that's what everyone gets from these words, except you. It's not like people will think it's unlimited for real, there's no such thing. It seems to me you are having problems interpreting words in context. EDIT: I mean, if he said you could have 8K undos, or 8K layers and the response time is <15ms would that make you feel better? Does it make a difference?
      - nerme 14y ago
        We write software for humans. The same humans who can't tell the difference between instantaneous events and events separated by less than a few milliseconds. The same humans who won't be around for long enough to recognize the difference between a really large number of events and an unlimited number of events. So, by all means, continue to write software for those ideal beings that live in a world of comprehensible instantaneous and unlimited events, but you'll find that most people on this forum are operating under a different assumption.
      - 14y ago
virtualritz 14y ago
I dunno how this particular app worked but there is this thing called "deferred processing". The thing to realize is that the max resolution I can ever see on screen is the resolution of that screen I am working on. Even a retina MacBookPro has only 4 Mpixels on screen, at any time. Now lets say I am painting a mask on a 30 Mpixel medium format image with a brush of 500 pixel diameter. Lets say I am zoomed out, so the image is displayed filling the entire screen. This requires a zoom level of 13% for the retina example. That means I only have to paint with a brush of 67 pixels diameter on a 4 Mpixel image in realtime and record the stroke! Because the brush path is recorded, the brush is resolution independent. That is what the claim refers to, no to the source material. When I zoom into such a 30 Mpixel image, to better see what I am doing, the area visible on screen remains 4 Mpixel. Many image editing apps (or most) completely ignore this. What's more, while I am working, I do not have to use sub-pixel precision when blitting brushes onto the image )or doing whatever else) because this level of precision, in general, but specificially when editing, is almost always irrelevant at that high resolution. Memory wise, too, I don't ever have to hold (many layers) of 30 Mpixel res in ram. When a user loads an image, I build a pyramid (a mip map) dump that to disk and load tiles into a cache, as I go. This never changes. When I have finished my 6 hour editing session, I press 'render' and everything is carried out, at 30 MPixel res. and subpixel precision. This render may then take an hour, but I don't care, I can go to bed and deliver the result to the client the next day. When I do this in Photoshop, everything is always done at full res, with full subpixel precision. Ok, since a few years PS, too, uses a pyramid (mip mapping) in RAM, but it is far from optimal. That is the reason why Photoshop's speed always sucks (because as hardware specs increase, so does the res. and number of layer people use when editing images). It always uses too much RAM and too much CPU because it carries out a shitload of stuff you can't ever see until the final image is used in print or you zoom in at 1:1 and pan the entire image. Two things that, together, almost never happen in image editing. P.S.: the only acceptable minimal bitdepth for image editing is 16bits/component float (linear space). Anything else will compromise quality, one way or the other. P.P.S.: I was the product manager for Eclipse after Alias/XYVision sold it to Form & Vision in 1998. AMA. :)
- pyalot2 14y ago
  Deferred processing is fine, until it isn't. For instance it's fine for things that don't have a lot of non-local changes, such as addition, subtration, multiplication, etc. as in brightness, contrast, compositing and so on. It breaks down however when you do have processing that produces nonlocal changes, such as convolution, blurring, sharpening, distortion, etc. as in soft filter, gaussian blur filter, distort filter and so on. You can run these at screen resolution only, but the result you will get can vary wildly from what the ultimate render will be.

by pyalot2 14y ago

jawngee 14y ago

As someone that used it, it did indeed have all of those features. Sorry to burst your bubble. As for resolution independence, what they mean is that all of the operations and manipulations you performed were resolution independent. If you upscaled the image, any manipulations weren't simply upscaled, but reperformed at the new scale which provided significantly better results. It was indeed instant. You could load a 500 meg image on a machine with a quarter of the ram and zoom, pan and mess with it in realtime. It was amazing at the time.

pyalot2 14y ago
Sorry to burst your bubble, if you think there's such a thing as unlimited and instant you're sorely mistaken. It might've been fast in simple cases compared to the alternatives, but there's no two ways about it that all computation takes time, and you can make tradeoffs where you cache more and compute less, but that's it. It's not instant and unlimited. It's Limited and fast, or more limited and faster, or more ram and faster, or more data and slower.
- jawngee 14y ago
  Stop bending semantics to fit your binary view point. Instant in this case means you move the brush and it distorts as you move the brush. No parallax, no beach ball waiting for it to do the computation. It happened as you moved it. It was instant. Even with brush sizes the size of the image you were using. It had unlimited undo. It had unlimited layers. That's not an arguable point.
  - pyalot2 14y ago
    Right, unlimited everything, got it. /me wonders why he even tries to point out the folly to people with no clue about how computers work...
    - stagas 14y ago
      Don't take words literally. Instant in this context means what jawngee said, that it was so responsive to the degree that people conceived it as instant. Awesome. Layers were unlimited meaning you could add as many as you want. Undo operations were unlimited meaning you could work on it for 10 hours straight and undo to the point it was before you started working on it. I believe that's what everyone gets from these words, except you. It's not like people will think it's unlimited for real, there's no such thing. It seems to me you are having problems interpreting words in context. EDIT: I mean, if he said you could have 8K undos, or 8K layers and the response time is <15ms would that make you feel better? Does it make a difference?
    - nerme 14y ago
      We write software for humans. The same humans who can't tell the difference between instantaneous events and events separated by less than a few milliseconds. The same humans who won't be around for long enough to recognize the difference between a really large number of events and an unlimited number of events. So, by all means, continue to write software for those ideal beings that live in a world of comprehensible instantaneous and unlimited events, but you'll find that most people on this forum are operating under a different assumption.
    - 14y ago

virtualritz 14y ago

I dunno how this particular app worked but there is this thing called "deferred processing". The thing to realize is that the max resolution I can ever see on screen is the resolution of that screen I am working on. Even a retina MacBookPro has only 4 Mpixels on screen, at any time. Now lets say I am painting a mask on a 30 Mpixel medium format image with a brush of 500 pixel diameter. Lets say I am zoomed out, so the image is displayed filling the entire screen. This requires a zoom level of 13% for the retina example. That means I only have to paint with a brush of 67 pixels diameter on a 4 Mpixel image in realtime and record the stroke! Because the brush path is recorded, the brush is resolution independent. That is what the claim refers to, no to the source material. When I zoom into such a 30 Mpixel image, to better see what I am doing, the area visible on screen remains 4 Mpixel. Many image editing apps (or most) completely ignore this. What's more, while I am working, I do not have to use sub-pixel precision when blitting brushes onto the image )or doing whatever else) because this level of precision, in general, but specificially when editing, is almost always irrelevant at that high resolution. Memory wise, too, I don't ever have to hold (many layers) of 30 Mpixel res in ram. When a user loads an image, I build a pyramid (a mip map) dump that to disk and load tiles into a cache, as I go. This never changes. When I have finished my 6 hour editing session, I press 'render' and everything is carried out, at 30 MPixel res. and subpixel precision. This render may then take an hour, but I don't care, I can go to bed and deliver the result to the client the next day. When I do this in Photoshop, everything is always done at full res, with full subpixel precision. Ok, since a few years PS, too, uses a pyramid (mip mapping) in RAM, but it is far from optimal. That is the reason why Photoshop's speed always sucks (because as hardware specs increase, so does the res. and number of layer people use when editing images). It always uses too much RAM and too much CPU because it carries out a shitload of stuff you can't ever see until the final image is used in print or you zoom in at 1:1 and pan the entire image. Two things that, together, almost never happen in image editing. P.S.: the only acceptable minimal bitdepth for image editing is 16bits/component float (linear space). Anything else will compromise quality, one way or the other. P.P.S.: I was the product manager for Eclipse after Alias/XYVision sold it to Form & Vision in 1998. AMA. :)

pyalot2 14y ago
Deferred processing is fine, until it isn't. For instance it's fine for things that don't have a lot of non-local changes, such as addition, subtration, multiplication, etc. as in brightness, contrast, compositing and so on. It breaks down however when you do have processing that produces nonlocal changes, such as convolution, blurring, sharpening, distortion, etc. as in soft filter, gaussian blur filter, distort filter and so on. You can run these at screen resolution only, but the result you will get can vary wildly from what the ultimate render will be.