CHANGELOG FOR VERSION 3

We have not been idle over the last few years and piccure+ has come a far way. It was released as the first Photoshop plugin to correct camera shake (see: Link) in May 2013. In October 2014, piccure+ (v2.0) was released. With the introduction of Lens+, it was the first software to correct complex optical aberrations by the means of blind deconvolution. piccure+ also came with a RAW processor as a standalone program and as an extension to DxO and Capture One. piccure+ is currently the only software solution to individually correct spatially varying optical aberrations without using lens profiles for your equipment.

Version 3 of piccure+ was released in May 2016 and offers some very significant improvements: GPU acceleration in Windows (Nvidia®)—nearly 6x as fast as version 2.5 and almost 10x as fast as version 2.0. Faster processing on CPU (speedup >2x) for Mac and Windows. It also has a refined user interface, now offers full Retina support, and in addition several bugs were fixed. Upgrading to piccure+ v3.0 will be free of charge for any piccure+ customer.

The full list of improvements contains

  • FASTER PROCESSING & GPU SUPPORT

    Completely redesigned and improved AHCE (adaptive heterogeneous computation engine) rendering engine for a maximum increase in speed (Windows only, Quality+ setting), providing 6x faster processing. Significant overall speed increase even without AHCE: 50–75% faster RAW processing speed; 20–50% reduction in computation times (CPU only, all platforms).

  • REDESIGNED INTERFACE

    Improved and redesigned user interface.

  • MORE CAMERAS

    New cameras are supported. Fifty-six cameras were added to the list bringing the total to 689 (RAW).

  • MORE CONTROL

    Two additional settings for finer adjustment of optical aberrations (five instead of three). Finer adjustment of “Sharpness” (now called “Rendering”) in Quality+. Sharpness setting 10 in version 3 equals a Sharpness setting of 0 in version 2.5 or earlier. There are 10 new “lower and smoother” sharpness settings available with version 3.

  • MANY BUGS WERE ELIMINATED

    • Full Retina support (Mac OSX).
    • Color space bug in Adobe Photoshop® where certain color spaces were not displayed correctly.
    • Opening the standalone program caused problems in Mac OSX if the user did not have administrator rights (“Could not create … folder”).
    • piccure+ sometimes disappeared (focus lost) in Adobe Lightroom®.
    • You can now edit other images in Adobe® Lightroom® while processing an image in piccure+.

Important notice: If you are running Windows with a nvidia® GPU and run into crashes with the setting “Quality+”, please update your nvidia® driver and the on-board graphic card driver to the latest version. Restart the system and try again. If the problem persists, deactivate the GPU processing in piccure+ through “Menu/Do not use GPU” (on the piccure+ user interface). Also see handbook p.6. We generally recommend to restart the system after updating piccure+.

HOW TO UPDATE

The update is free of charge. In order to update, please click “Menu/Update”. If you run into problems, you can also download the latest version from the website and reinstall it. Please note that this update affects the compatibility of certain operating systems and plugins. piccure+ requires Mac OS X 10.9 or later and Windows 7 or later. You can check that piccure+ successfully updated the new version by clicking “Menu/About”. It should read version 3.x.x.x.

If you cannot run the Updater in Mac, please do the following:
• Close piccure+ and any image-editing program
• Then delete all files in “Applications/Piccure+” except the folders “Projects”, “Profiles”, and “Logs”.
• Download the latest installer from the webpage
• Run the installer.
• Restart piccure+.

If you cannot run the Updater in Windows, please do the following:
• Uninstall piccure+ (see: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uninstall-change-program#uninstall-change-program=windows-7)
• Download the installer from the webpage. Close all image-editing programs. Run the installer and start piccure+

Test some more?

You already tried an earlier version and want to take another fresh look at version 3? No problem. Simply enter the following extension code:
FR3H-7T8X-59VT-Y8V9-YBIW-ISNY-R6XT

Please make sure your date/time/timezone settings are correct. Please restart piccure+ if you get an error message.