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Question

As a photographer, PP sucks!

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
September 5, 2024
5 replies
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I really don't know how you video people do it!

So many things about PP are just weird, like I've just spent 15 mins trying to figure out why the transform handles are not showing up as I want to scale by visibly adjusting the frame itself in effects control but they're not showing ... turns out if your project is over a certain resolution, they just dissapear.

So, no joy on that one. I'm now going to export, but to get decent colors I have to use a gamma LUT otherwise the colors are a wash out.

Want to export to mp4 but the frame size isn't a factor of 8 ... have some black bars around the edge! Want to zoom in a bit, hold it, then zoom in again via scale in effects control ... nah, that's just going to give you weird motion.

I really don't get why everything is so clunky and just plain weird! I know PS, ID, XD, yadda yadda, but does that help me with anything in PP? No! 🤯 You guys need to get your PP s*** sorted out 😑

Editing

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R Neil Haugen

Legend

I came into video post production from a then 30+ year career in pro portrait photography. We had our studio, both the missus and I as photographers. We were picky sots, so we even had our own full "wet lab" not just for BW but for color also.

Our first Photoshop use was around Cs 4.5, using it with a flatbed scanner to do copy & restoration work, back in the '90's. Which was me as the instigator, teaching the missus & staffers.

We were among the earliest adopters of digital imaging cameras for portrait work, around 2002. Clearly a year before we should have. But hey, we survived. And mastered Photoshop.

We started with LIghtroom in Public Beta 0.8.

So I've got some chops there, you see? And am quite comfortable with replying to your post.

Your ignorance of the massive difference between stills work and video is both expected and needs correcting.

Seriously, almost nothing about stills work translates to video. As I found out the hard way myself! Yowza ...

First, if you don't have the setup, gear, and plan for good quality sound, don't bother getting the camera out. That ... wowza, did that hammer me at first.

Second ... I was hot at darkroom printing, one of the better custom printers in the country, truly. We did competition prints for other photographers that had the big labs ... puzzled ... as to how we did it. I was good in Lightroom and decent at Photoshop, but then, the missus is a meister of Photoshop. All covered.

And that knowledge ... was next to useless. Which also banged my load at first.

But ... I got better!

And early on I learned why video production, and video processing apps, cannot be anything like stills work Period, end of story, and until you learn that and why, yea, it's frustrating.

Among many other things, video involves such a truly massive frame count, that you are likely dealing with several hundred thousand images at once, not one or three or even twenty. The scale difference between the computer workloads is beyond belief.

So ... welcome to video. Which, like pro level color darkroom work, makes sense after you learn HOW it actually works. And not before.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

S

sk_23734Author

Known Participant

Ahh, similar to me! My first use of Photoshop professionally was Photoshop 4! Lightroom wasn't the beta, but I guess it must have been v 1 as I was sold immediately on not having to process each frame separately. (I used to shoot profesionally on film and transparency, so I know what you mean about the darkroom too!)

Your ignorance of the massive difference between stills work and video is both expected and needs correcting.
Seriously, almost nothing about stills work translates to video. As I found out the hard way myself! Yowza ...

Ahh, but here's where we disagree. Have you ever hired a car, and sat in it for ages, trying to figure out where the wipers are? Or how to work the radio?! That last one can be a killer! The thing is, you know how to drive, you know where you want to go, how to get there, where the petrol station is ... but the interface is all wrong! One way you go about this is hiring a car from the same manufacturer all the time. So you might only hire Fords, or I might only hire VWs.

It's the same here with PP! I know what I want to do, but I don't know how to do it. I know how other Adobe apps work, I know the language, I know the lingo, but when I come onto PP, it's all worth nothing. That should not be the case. Or at the least, there should be a setting that runs the app with the language that I'm farmiliar with. There's one to seting to change the workspace into something suitable for editing, or for this, or for that. There should be one to make it understandable from a PS school of thought.

There isn't a great deal of difference in the medium of film or stills, I disagree with you there. They both do the same thing, they both use the same light, they both use the same type of attention, they both use a similar languge. There are foibles, yes, but it's not like thinking 'I'm a photographer, I'll take that skill set and apply it to poetry'.

The point that I was trying to make is twofold:
First - the point I made about cars. When you use any Adobe app, it should all work in the same manner.

Second - the PP app is wrong-headed in so many ways in my opinion.

On this last point, take for example something I've said above: why should I have to use a LUT in the export to create a file that looks the same as it does on my screen? That really doesn't make any sense, no? (unless there's only two colour spaces that it can export into ... and why should that be the case?! A google search turns up "Premiere is a broadcast focused application, and the only color spaces it can output are rec709 for SDR and rec2100 for HDR". Now I've no idea if that's right, but if it is, it's weird having to find a LUT to make the colours on a regular mp4 the same as they are on my monitor.)

You say that "video processing apps, cannot be anything like stills work Period, end of story" but I think that's not correct, it needn't be that way. Sure, the way things are set up with PP, it's a killer trying to transfer PS skills to PP, but that is just because of how Adobe sets up the interface, not because of anything inherent to stills or motion.

Hope you're well 🙂

R Neil Haugen

Legend

First, a professional needs to understand the overall 'environment' of the trade. Stills work is heavily solo or at most 2-3 person work. And in image processing, the stuff you do in Photoshop, all you are doing is essentially contrast and color changes. Adding in some other elements as your skills grow. But all you are doing are image manipulations for one image. Even if stacking montages.

That's what Photoshop was built for.

Professional video production is normally a crewed thing ... 5-10 people working the crew on small jobs, up to 50 or more in TV/film prodution work.

But in processing the video imagery after the shoot, the stuff you do in Photoshop? That's an afterthought for most of the code for Premiere! In Premiere you are editing bits and pieces of thousands of images sequentially with different image sizes and typically even framerates, often different original color spaces and gamuts, into one smooth image sequence. With time ramps, transitions, and other effects thrown in, all computed on the fly.

And then you add in sound, graphics, and video color ... the processing load per second is several orders of magnitude different.

That's what Premiere was built for.

They aren't the same jobs. And if you want a handy video app, something a lot closer to stills workflows, there are many out there. They do fine, nothing wrong with them ... but they are built for a solo worker to just spiffy up a frew frames here and there.

Premiere Elements is Adobe's offering for that work, and might be the app you should be using.

As to the color after you export ... say thank you to Apple for messing you up there. Seriously.

There are long-established standards for Rec.709 video processing and display. Apple chose not to follow the standard. Period.

The display transform used by everything around the world, except for Apple devices without Reference modes!!!!! ... specifies a display transform approximating gamma 2.4.

Even Apple devices with Reference modes set to HDTV use the display transform essentially of gamma 2.4.

But all Apple devices without Reference modes use a rough equivalent of gamma 1.96 for the display transform.

Neither Adobe nor BlackMagic (company producing Resolve) nor Avid can "fix" the file so that it looks the same when displayed with two different screen transforms.

On your machine, check your exports in QuickTime Player, which allows Apple's ColorSync utility to set the display transform ... you'll get the light look ... then check on VLC or Potplayer, which do not allow ColorSync to control the screen ... and you'll get the image closer to the 'normal' look within Premiere.

And that is the image that my machines, all set to proper Rec.709 specs, and most all other PCs, TVs, and Android devices will see.

You can choose to set your viewer gamma within Premiere to 1.96/QuickTime. And then after you work the color/tonality of your image, outside of Premiere in QT player, Chrome and Safari browsers, you'll see a similar image.

Of course, anyone not on a similar Mac to yours, will see a much darker image.

So say thanks to Apple ...

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

Peru Bob

Community Expert

Also see here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/color-management.html
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/timeline-tone-mapping.html

S

sk_23734Author

Known Participant

That's awesome, particularly the top one! Appreciate you taking the time, thank you 🙂

John T Smith

Community Expert

>as a photographer

S

sk_23734Author

Known Participant

You're a gent! Thank you so much, it's really appreciated 🙂

Averdahl

Community Expert

You guys need to get your PP s*** sorted out 😑

By @sk_23734

Don´t get me wrong, but it seems that you need some basic training on how Premiere Pro works. Without knowing the basics, you will be lost since there is a steep learning curve for Premiere Pro. There are a ton of great tutorials on YouTube and other places. They will among other things learn how to set up a timeline, how to export without getting black bars. Getting black bars is not Premiere Pro´s fault, that´s a user error if they are not present in the edit. Knowing the basics will help with that. 🙂

S

sk_23734Author

Known Participant

Don´t get me wrong, but it seems that you need some basic training on how Premiere Pro works. Without knowing the basics, you will be lost since there is a steep learning curve for Premiere Pro.

By @Averdahl

Yeah, you're right ... I was just hoping that working with Photoshop professionally for 28 years might allow me to figure some of it out without endlessly combing the web each time. It's just that so much of PP doesn't seem to make sense to me - like when you want to change the size of a mask, correct me if I'm wrong as I'm doing this from memory, you have to hover the mouse over the corner, then press shift, wait for the icon to change, then drag the anchor. It's a world unto itself as far as I can tell. Sorry for being snarky.

R

Richard M Knight

Community Expert

It's interesting, I often edit photos in Premiere because I hate the way Photoshop works.