posted January 18th, 2008

Naked light Beta 1.0 is arriving next week!

Sorry for the huge delays this time around. December was a torrent of disasters in both my personal life and at my day job, and probably saw about two or three hours of work total on Naked light.

Right now I’m on a leave of absence to work full-time on Naked light, so at least the next two releases should be on a more regular 1-2 week schedule.

After that, if Naked light’s where I want it to be, I’m considering a pre-purchase program. If that works out, then the final version of Naked light will come out much faster. Beta 1.0 should bring me mostly there, but before I start charging for it, I want to make sure it’s mostly usable, that it has at least the beginnings of the documentation, and that the reaction to it is mostly positive.

posted by Brandon Rosse | 11 Comments

posted November 30th, 2007

On our Public Beta FAQ, Frank asked for some clarification on why Naked light doesn’t support HDR—a topic I felt deserved its own blog post rather than just a comment.

HDR—or high dynamic range—refers to an image that stores color information outside the limits of your current color space. HDR is absolutely huge: it’s important for accurate representations of reality, and almost essential for high quality 3D renderings. It’s also incredibly forgiving—even if you don’t need HDR, it’s nice to know it’s there.

Unfortunately, Naked light is built on Core Image. Where Core Image excels, Naked light excels. Where Core Image fails, Naked light follows. Read more…;

posted by Brandon Rosse | 10 Comments

posted November 28th, 2007

As of this week, naked.la is out of the Google sandbox!

Yahoo! had us frontpaged within a day or two of Naked light’s announcement.

Live and Ask has us there within a week.

But Google. Oh, Google. Google had us around page 10 for almost the whole month.

We now—finally—come up #2 for Naked light.

We also come up #2 for node-based compositing, and are doing okay for searches like Mac OS X image editing and non-destructive image editing (#10 and #6, respectively). Oh, and less importantly, 590 quintillion.

Amusingly, we also rank highly for fendu (merci, MacGeneration), nacked in public (but not naked in public), and Take That tour lighting.

posted by Brandon Rosse | 3 Comments

posted November 23rd, 2007

Listening in on conversations from various web forums, a lot of Mac users are nervous about Core Animation’s implications for overly-delicious applications.

I actually don’t see this as a problem. With or without Core Animation, apps are going to smoke, burn, or otherwise feature more-or-less awesome/obnoxious jiggy-wiggies. Opinions differ wildly on how much high-fructose corn syrup belongs in applications, and as such, having a variety of choices to choose from is what’s important. Y’know, the free market and all that.

What’s the real problem in Core Animation? Implicit animations.

Any time you change anything in a Core-Animated-view, it animates that change, by default. Each time you need something to be changed instantly, you need to explicitly tell Core Animation not to do so.

This is what’s causing all kinds of mayhem in Naked light’s inspector. Ostensibly, a single well-placed line of code fixes this:

[CATransaction setValue: (NSNumber *)kCFBooleanTrue forKey: kCATransactionDisableActions];

In practice, though, you want some things to animate and not others. And you have multiple code paths modifying each attribute you want to change. Or, like in our Inspector, you’re changing lots of things at once.

So it’s really one line of code, put into 50 difference places. It’s a lot of work to not animate something.

These are all pseudo-bugs. Apple’s code is working as expected—Core Animation is designed that way, and you can’t really fault Apple. But ultimately, your app doesn’t move as fast or as smoothly as the user expects because of random animations cropping up.

Again, with our inspector, these bugs are painfully obvious (unfortunately, it won’t get fixed in the next beta but the one thereafter). Others less so: the Opacity slider for blend modes also suffers from this. From the user, there just seems to be a lag when sliding. It’s actually animating your changes.

My Core Animation fear: not enough of these pseudo-bugs will be fixed.

posted by Brandon Rosse | 2 Comments

posted November 20th, 2007

Writing the FAQ yesterday, I wanted to—but didn’t—go into much detail about why Naked light is Leopard only. Since Tiger support is probably the most requested feature (outside of Windows support), here goes!

Read more…;

posted by Brandon Rosse | 2 Comments

posted November 19th, 2007

Is Naked light Universal?

Naked light will be Universal. The current beta, however, only runs on Intel machines.

Why does Naked light require Leopard?

Leopard introduces a lot of features for programmers, in addition to users.

Some of these, like Core Animation, garbage collection, and Core Text bring about significant performance benefits. Others—like properties and NSOperationQueue—just make life simpler. In either case, Naked light’s development is coming together much faster thanks to Leopard, Naked light won’t be backported to Tiger.

Will you ever release a Windows or a

Linux version?

Naked light is based pretty heavily in Mac OS X technologies—most notably Core Image, but also Core Animation, Quartz, and of course, plain old Cocoa. None of these are available Windows, or Linux. (Although there are two separate projects underway to get alternate Cocoa implementations on these platforms, similar to WINE.)

I’m not saying there won’t ever be a Naked light for Windows or Linux, but certainly not in the next few years.

How much will Naked light cost?

The price for Naked light is still undecided.

Will Naked light support raw images?

Naked light will support raw images in a future release. The current beta does not handle raw images properly.

Will Naked light integrate with Aperture,

Photoshop, or iPhoto?

Naked light will integrate your iPhoto library in a future release. Like other images, photos first have to be imported into your own library in order to be used in a composition.

Naked light may integrate with Aperture and Photoshop. Currently, this isn’t at all implemented, so no promises.

Does Naked light support HDR

(high dynamic range) images?

Naked light does not support HDR.

While Naked light internally uses a 32-bit floating point format, virtually all Core Image filters and blend modes clip color to low dynamic range. Since Naked light’s compositing engine is built on top of Core Image, Naked light is bound to Core Image’s limitations.

Naked light does still put most of the 32 bits per channel to good use though: it still allows for unprecedented color precision within the low dynamic range.

Where do 590 quintillion colors come from?

Warning: High technics ahead.

590 quintillion colors is a very rough and conservative approximation of the number of colors Naked light can handle.

Naked light stores colors using a 32-bit floating point number for each channel, ignoring values outside the 0-1 range. On processors that support the IEEE 754 standard (like the G4, the G5, and Intel Core all do), this allows for 1,065,353,218 values per channel in the 0 to 1 range—or 1.2 octillion colors. (For comparison, 8-bit color stores 256 values per channel, for 16.8 milion colors, and 16-bit color stores 65,536 values per channel, for 281 trillion colors.)

Graphics processor, however, generally don’t conform to the IEEE 754 standard (although some newer ones are pretty close). This means two things. First, the floating point format used on your graphics processor likely won’t handle as many colors. Second, when Naked light converts images and colors from your CPU to GPU and back, rounding errors occur.

590 quintillion is (2²³)³, which is really just a very safe guess of the minimum number of usable colors in Naked light. Your mileage will vary, for the better.

Is Naked light color managed?

Naked light will be fully color managed, but the beta currently is not.

Will Naked light support CMYK?

Not in version 1.0. In most cases, this isn’t a problem—Naked light will export images with appropriate color profiles that your printer can use to accurately print the right colors.

In specific cases, this is less than ideal—but being a prepress solution is outside the scope of Naked light.

posted by Brandon Rosse | 3 Comments

posted November 12th, 2007

Public Beta 0.1 is out! Compared to the last one, this is a lot juicier. Keep it mind though, this is still lacking in features—although it’s mostly the filters that are missing.

Read more…;

posted by Brandon Rosse | 62 Comments

posted November 12th, 2007

I just upgraded to a new host (since I was literally inches away from getting shut off before. There might be some wonkiness depending on how fast your ISP upgrades their DNS listings (I’m already redirected to the new server, but it might take you up to 72 hours).

For the record, you’re seeing the new server right now.

Beta 0.1 should drop soon, but it’s only going up on the new server, for obvious reasons.

posted by Brandon Rosse | No Comments

posted November 10th, 2007

I got a nice email this morning that we’re fresh out of bandwidth!

So for right now, I’m pulling the beta and moving all of the images to Flickr.

Beta 0.1 should drop in a few days, and I’ll probably take advantage of MacUpdate‘s free hosting service.

posted by Brandon Rosse | 13 Comments

posted November 9th, 2007

WARNING: THIS BETA RELEASE

IS FOR THE ADVENTUROUS AND

BRAVE OF HEART ONLY

Seriously, most users should wait until the next beta release.

It’s a bit of a shame that the first beta also has to be the beta-iest. Especially since the response so far has been around 20× beyond what I ever expected—almost 20,000 visitors a day. Hopefully no one will judge this release too too harshly. It’s just a child.

Had I known people would’ve been this interested, I would’ve delayed the beta another week or so—this is still probably much closer to an alpha.

This beta release is called the Stark Edition for a reason—it’s glumly defined by what’s missing rather than what’s new. Rather than leaving open lesions of bugginess oozing, most of the dangerous parts (mainly the tools) have been roped off.

As a head’s up, you’re not going to be able to get any real work done in this release—this one’s for the bleeding-edger’s that want a taste of the future. If you wait another two weeks until the next, more stable beta edition (Beta One), you won’t miss too much. Hopefully this isn’t too much of a disappointment—again, I had no idea people would be this eager!

Anyway, on with the release notes! Read more…;

posted by Brandon Rosse | 92 Comments