Impossible Things Core Update

Salutations from the future,

Hello friends, I am here with a flurry of announcements and goodies. First, I would like to extend a massive amount of gratitude from the team at Impossible Things. We started our ‘Early Access’ journey back in January and have been climbing a mountain of feedback ever since. Anyone who has shared their experience, reported bugs, requested features, uploaded troublesome raw files, or just enjoyed the progress of our editing solution, we would like to say thank you.

It is with this update that we will be leaving ‘Early Access’ and beginning our long journey towards editing perfection. There are a number of changes that are in effect as of today that will greatly improve the Impossible Things experience.

Let us begin with the AI Engine itself –

NEST ENGINE

A few days ago, we integrated a bit of a consistency silver bullet into our predictions with what we call the ‘Nest Engine’, This engine will be at the core of our predictions and will solve the number one bit of feedback we received during early access: consistency. The Nest Engine has a visual memory and will recognize images that are shot in sequence, in the same lighting scenario or in the same setting. It will group like images into ‘Nests’ and treat them as similar with a little bit of mathematical magic. The results you should see when editing images in a set now are that similar images will be given nearly the same visual treatment as the others, while still allowing for the individual needs of the image to be met. This means no more wavering of temperature, tint or other settings among sequential or similar images.

PREDICTIVE IMPROVEMENTS

Along with the incorporation of the Nest Engine, we have completely overhauled our predictive and training methods. There are fewer and fewer edge cases or editing anomalies, and the predictions are significantly improved across the board. If you have been editing over the past few days with the plug-in, you might have noticed huge improvements. If not, we highly recommend running a set of images to see the difference.

Next, let’s cover improvements for the Plug-in. Note: This requires a plug-in update. Please run the latest DVLOP & THINGS installer found in your account.

CROPPING + STRAIGHTENING

We have added two new editing options with ‘Perceptive Cropping’ and ‘Perceptive Straightening’. These can be used separately or together and they work beautifully. These options will not fight with your compositions and they are fully content aware. The cropping predictions will avoid cropping out key people or objects, while the straightening option will work towards proper straightening without forcing an image level against the intended artistic composition. These options are available now and will respect the photos original aspect ratio.

PLUG-IN SELF UPDATE CAPABILITY

In addition to these options, the plug-in itself will now look for changes and update itself. This will be the last time you will have to run the DVLOP & THINGS installer to keep up to date with the plug-in. It will check for updates when Lightroom starts; If there is one, with your permission, it will update itself in about one or two seconds.

LIGHTROOM CRASH DETECTION

We have also built in clever system to detect Lightroom crashes. As many of you already know, Lightroom can crash whenever it gets overworked. If you are running Impossible Things in the background while editing in the Develop panel, Lightroom might just quit. Upon restart, Impossible things will now report the number of images successfully edited before the crash, ensure that those are added to the free re-edit list (for subscribers), and automatically return the unused credits after a few short minutes. Along with automating re-edits and returns, the crash report might share a tip or two to help avoid crashes in the future.

THE FUTURE

There are many wonderful and upcoming surprises, improvements and editing styles we have planned in the near future and we can’t wait to share what is in store. For now, go update your plug-in from your account, just one more time, to experience all of the new magic. Thank you for joining us on this journey. This is just the beginning.

Jeff and the Team at Impossible Things

Header image by Jose Villa