Useful Programs

[deepsepia]

this "new" recommendation is of a very old piece of software, now in its version 12.

The venerable Graphic Converter, from Thorsten Lemke - a one man shop -- is remarkably good for image management and manipulation, particularly for folks with giant hard drives filled with images they've downloaded, or photographs they've shot.

Its cheap and a remarkably good alternative to the image management tasks of Lightroom.

Excellent batch processing, great conversion from oddball formats like JFIF and Webp

All around highest recommendation. This is old school software - done by "a guy" -- (a very smart and focussed German engineer, who approaches this like a German engineer) who has been working on these tasks for decades now

Interview with Lemke here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02mzP-tySfA

-- you can see how much he's thought deeply about this

[hotshot]

Image grabber II does not work so good any more. Probs with formats for example.
Which one is better? - Thanks in advance!

[deepsepia]

Generative AI makes its way to image editors -- Adobe Photoshop's new "Generative Fill" feature in the Photoshop Beta, just dropped. Stable Diffusion users have had such a feature (with the possibilities of NSFW, which Adobe doesn't have) -- but the integration here is better. Expect to see this kind of thing everywhere . . . a big change in image editing.

For a look at how it works, from a photo vlogger -- Fstoppers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm0CkFbWzoY

-- I've been using Stable Diffusion for a long time, so this was new to this guy, you can see how well this works, and in a way that really changes the game for folks who haven't been using AI applications

. . . and for the hardcore, there's a one click install to install Stable Diffusion A1111 into Photoshop, as a plugin. I haven't tested to see if it can work as a plugin to other image editors that have some support for Photoshop Plugins, like GIMP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3KJli8ohKI&t=371s

[NoahBarker]

Let me ask a little question: when I tweak it again, will it affect the applications or files I'm saving? Because my computer contains many work-related applications, for example, yo whatsapp plus and games, i'm afraid it will go away when i refine it

[nhy5]

Originally Posted by NoahBarker

Let me ask a little question: when I tweak it again, will it affect the applications or files I'm saving? Because my computer contains many work-related applications, for example, yo whatsapp plus and games, i'm afraid it will go away when i refine it

I have to ask, when you tweak what again? What is it?

[aximili55]

I use Bulk Image Downloader myself.

[veilexxx]

VideoProc Converter AI
Super Resolution in VideoProc Converter AI is an AI-generative video upscaling and enhancement technology that can maximally scale up your videos and images by 400% to up to 4K or 8K while delivering a natural result without artifacts and losing details.

https://www.videoproc.com/video-converting-software/feature-ai-super-resolution.htm?ttref=w1bd-dhm2311-askw

Not tested...

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by NoahBarker

Let me ask a little question: when I tweak it again, will it affect the applications or files I'm saving? Because my computer contains many work-related applications, for example, yo whatsapp plus and games, i'm afraid it will go away when i refine it

Not sure what you.re asking here.

with Photoshop, you generated tweaks sit as a layer on a PSD file. So both the original file and all the edits can sit in this giant file. Turn visibility for those layers on and off, any time. Only downside is that you can end up with some really big files.

[deepsepia]

Folks here collect a lot of images . . . and managing these images can be a chore. Selecting only landscape images, selecting only images that don't have a human face, changing colors -- all of these things are easy enough to do one by one in an image editor, but what if you want to apply changes over hundreds or thousands of images?

Batch processing does exist in various Adobe products, and even free stuff like Irfan and Xview. And I use the cheap but indispensible Graphic Converter a lot.

. . . but what I'd really like is a node based workflow, so that I can readily see what I was doing. Years ago there was a node based image editor called Photoflow, but it hasn't been maintained in a long time. . .

. . . but now "ChaiNNer" is here, and free, and so far, very good. Did I mention that it has hooks into all the open source AI technologies, Upscalers, Stable Diffusion, you name it? It does. This is a toolbox where you can build workflows that you can repeat across hundred and thousands of images . . . highst recommendation. It pretty closely resembles ComfyUI which is oriented toward AI image generation, ChaiNNer is more about image enhancement and batch workflows.

https://github.com/chaiNNer-org/chaiNNer

and here's a somewhat dated tutorial illustrating how you'd use it for upscaling -- 18 months ago, which is an eternity in imaging, but still useful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOiK8z-Ffp4

-- that's what it could in 2022, what it can do in 2024 is much, much more. There's an active Discord