Opening a RAW file used to be the longest wait in Emulsion. In 0.6.0 it is about four times shorter, whatever the camera.
What's new
Two colour tools, Selective and Colorize. You point at the picture to pick a range of colour, and the edges of that selection fade rather than stopping dead. Selective moves colours you already have; Colorize tints ones too grey to move. Both sit ahead of the film simulation, so what you change is developed and printed with the rest of the frame.
Fujifilm files get a quality setting of their own, under Input ▸ Demosaic quality: draft while you work, full when you export.
What's better
Fujifilm files open in under a second, where they used to take nearly six.
The denoiser measures your sensor's noise instead of asking you to describe it, and the four blur modes it replaces are down to three controls that do more.
Grain, sharpening and HDR no longer hold the app up. Grain alone used to cost about a fifth of a second on every adjustment.
The two HDR sliders no longer pull against each other, and the middle of the picture stays where it is when you move either one.
What's fixed
- Zoomed-out photos no longer shimmer; fine detail and grain used to crawl and moiré.
- Exposure no longer shifts when you change the working resolution.
- Canon CR3 files took the slow path, and would not open at half resolution.
Worth knowing
Two defaults changed, and both alter how your photographs look.
Highlight recovery is on now, so bright areas that used to clip to flat white keep some tone instead. Exposure is measured from the whole frame, that bright end included, which can leave an image reading a little darker than before.
The default demosaic changed too. The new one is much faster, which is part of why files open quicker; at full resolution fine detail can come out differently.
Input ▸ Highlight Recovery and Input ▸ Demosaic put the old behaviour back.