I have recently heard about Tropy and spent a few hours today learning how to use it, reading the documentation and the forum. This is an amazing tool.
I would like to know if it is possible to copy the advanced edits from one image to another (it seems to me it’s not possible).
For example: I have multiple photos in one item, then open the Item View. Since I took all photos on the same circumstance (say, low ambient light, no flash), I will need to do the same brightness and contrast adjustments to all images. I couldn’t find a way to batch edit the images, or copy the settings from one image to another.
There’s another issue: I edit the brightness and contrast of an image, then create a selection. When I click the selection on the Photos pane, the Item view shows the selection without any adjustments - i.e., the selection does not inherit them, and I need to adjust it again.
Is there something I am missing? Or is it the current way Tropy deals with the advanced photo editing?
I think your observations are all spot on. Sadly, it’s not yet possible to apply the image adjustments to multiple photos. We have a plan to address this in two ways: support selecting multiple photos to enable bulk editing (both metadata and the image); and to allow to copy a photo’s adjustments and apply them to other photos. We hope to implement both of these approaches, but there’s no timeline for it yet.
All the advanced filters are saved as numeric values for each image; it would be relatively easy to set a given set of numbers on a wide range of images directly in the project db with SQL. If you need a way to quickly set the same adjustments on hundreds of images but unfortunately you currently can’t do it in Tropy proper.
Regarding the selections, yes, each selection can have adjustments independent of the photo itself. (Though we should consider inheriting the current values upon creation of the selection).
Thanks for your reply! I think I can manage to copy the adjustments with SQL, I’ve seen a couple of messages in other threads about this possibility. Right now, I’m still evaluating the tool - I’m not a historian or archivist, I’m a forensic document examiner. I think Tropy may be a great tool for organizing case files, specially because of the annotation feature.
Another useful feature (for my workflow, at least) would be color level adjustments, which would require 4 additional sliders and possibly a lot of additional coding. I know the advanced editing is focused on improving legibility, though…
Sometimes I need to take pictures of handwritings under sub-optimal conditions, and need some color corrections to better illustrate my reports. If it is just a simple correction, I usually use “Adjust Levels” tool in the software Fast Stone Image Viewer. Here are two screenshots:
On the right side, I choose either RGB, Red, Green or Blue and adjust the sliders - that’s why I mentioned 4 sliders. (There’s also the “Output Levels”, but I usually don’t touch it.)
If I need something more complex than that, I either use the “Adjust Curves” tool in the same software or GIMP. This is usually enough most of the time in my activity.
I’m not sure if this could be useful for research photos.
Edit: “auto color correction” tools never produce good results for document images, in my experience.
Thanks! We’ll certainly consider this. After discussing it briefly internally, I think that we could achieve the effect relatively easily, but the controls (especially if we want to include the histogram) would take an effort.
Side note: you can click on the photo’s path in the photo panel to show the photo in Windows Explorer; if you then open the photo in tool such as GIMP, change the levels there, and save/overwrite the image Tropy will pick up those changes (you may need to select ‘consolidate photo’ from the photo’s context menu to force the update). Changes to the original would also affect all photo selections of course.
Hi,
there is no doubt that levels would give you finer control (especially for separate color channels), but for the examples provided above Tropy’s ‘brightness’ slider (and ‘contrast’ to a lesser extent) would cover a lot already.
Hi,
I agree with you, I didn’t provide a good example - that one could easily be fixed with brightness and contrast only.
I provide here another example: a picture that was taken without appropriate white balance configurations on the camera. All pictures taken that day had a bluish tone.
As I said before, editing the color levels will be useful when pictures are taken under sub-optimal conditions - which is undesirable but still may happen sometimes. Also, I’m not sure if this level of fine tuning is important for other users - for document and handwriting examination it often is (I do know Tropy is not focused on this kind of use ).
Yes, I do use the histograms, I forgot to mention. What I do most of the time is move the right (white) slider to the left, until it touches the curve (you can see this in the image where I selected the blue channel) - I repeat this process for all three channels. This is usually enough. Since I have numbers associated with this (a number for each slider on each channel), it’s easy do replicate to a set of similar images when needed.
I think Tropy may be a great tool for organizing case files, specially because of the annotation feature.
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