Oh man, I got spooked today!
While I was browsing Hive earlier today, I was mainly looking for undervalued photography to curate. As I was doing my curation, I stumbled upon a profile that stood out and I decided to check out his other work through his LinkTree. Can't recall the name though as I got distracted rather quickly after reading about AI being able to help with post-processing photographs. And not long after that, I found myself in a pretty rare situation (if you know me for a longer time, finding myself in rare situations is pretty common to me. #rip), as I somehow managed to delete nearly 40.000 photographs in one swing, but without my knowing.
You may know that I've been trying to clean up my HDDs to make room for more photographs. Well... then you may think that deleting 40.000 photographs wouldn't be a bad thing then right? Except, for the fact, it was all client photographs that went MIA.
This happened when I was trying to load a folder into Luminar NEO. I bought the software minutes before winding it up to give it a go. "Let's try to remove the background of a business portrait on a white background", as I was navigating through my carefully organized folders, I felt something was missing. This can't be right, I know I should have a lot more folders here, and some random work in the main folder... I was shocked. My entire "CLIENT" folder was GONE. Not even in the trash bin.
I'm like, what just happened? A little bit freaking out is at its place, but ey... I'm used to rare situations, so I based my options and knew that one of my best options was to use recovery software to bring back all the files. I honestly wouldn't know what to do if this didn't work.
On the bright side, I haven't done a lot of work these last few years due to my mental illness, and the current situation we're in. That's the only bright side though. I would've been A LOT MORE stressed if I just had done work for a client with a tight deadline. Thankfully, I use a well-structured folder system so I could do a lot of damage control. And I have a feeling why this may have occurred. I tried to import a huge folder, and I think this may have been the case (100K+ files).
But man, what the hell. I wasn't expecting to pay for software that could work so destructively. This must have been a bug, so I reported this to the guys on Twitter. I received an answer from them and they send me to their website for more information, but I think they misunderstood what I was saying.
https://twitter.com/SkylumSoftware/status/1623701309005209605
- SkylumSoftware
So, instead of going straight for a refund, while losing nearly 40k highly valuable photographs, I do want to give it a go and be extra mindful with the files that I import. I will have to set up a dedicated folder for images that I want to process there to make sure nothing goes wrong. I actually bought two additional plugins/extensions after this happened lol. Curiosity strikes again.
So here I am, wasting 4 hours
Since the recovery tool works best when you don't use your computer heavily, I couldn't do much on it, other than browsing and a few small tasks. I have 32GBDDR RAM so I should be good. It took the machine to recover almost 40,000 files, where just 49 were unrecoverable. Let those 49 include a few "important" files, which sucks a lot. I'm more than happy that I've retrieved 99.8%.
I mentioned I work with a pretty organized folder system right?
Well... here is where things are rapidly going to consume a lot of time. You see, the recovery file does not copy/paste folders and such. It simply recovers files and dumps them into another HDD.
The catch?
It gets dumped into one big folder. Yeah, have fun organizing nearly 40,000 files. If that wasn't "bad" enough, another thing is that most, and unfortunately my DSLR can only count to 9999. This is where things can become quite a hassle. For example, it is possible to have the same 1234.ARW (or .CR2) name file made on two different dates. Furthermore, the dates can't be trusted since there is a chance that they are a tiny bit corrupted. It's not 100% accurate, unfortunately.
Positive mindset
Well... this spooked me quite a lot. As I'm still in the process of backing things up. But before backing everything up, I want to have scanned through everything and only back up the "important files". So, in a way, it's a good waking-up call. Going through all of these files is going to be a blast through the past. It will take me a few weeks to have everything sorted again. Not looking forward to that.
Luminar NEO AI
So, I initially wanted to talk about the Luminar NEO AI, which is an interesting concept. I used to hire someone if I had to go isolate 50 portraits for companies. That work can get quite boring and I need (technical) creativity with whatever I do.
I was really curious about how well it could isolate portraits, products, and so on. But yeah, there's that... Instead of isolating portraits, I was desperately trying to isolate and recover my files. I tried to do some post-processing, but I'm more interested in its isolation capabilities, portrait, and product. This is something that I have to explore once I have a bit more time.
Oh well, scratch that... let's do it real quick, right now.
Sky replacer
One of the things that caught my attention was that the software automatically detected blown-out skies or skies that could be replaced. That's pretty insane.
Do note that this is a pretty old photograph, it's actually one of the first jobs I did for Univé, a pretty big insurance company in the Netherlands. Let's see if we can replace the sky, and remove some noise. Unfortunately, I can see a little bit of damaged data in the photograph. Not sure if it already was in the photograph, but I wouldn't expect to see any kind of blur in the photograph.
Even though I like my sky more than the one it got replaced with, it does look very realistic. On the left side of the Univé building, you can see that the photograph is altered. Other than that, it looks quite amazing. This job took me less than 5 minutes, which is just incredible.
What about portraits?
This is one of the most difficult things (at least, for me) to get right. I remember that I have spent quite a lot of time on this photograph. Hair like this is already one thing. What makes it a little bit more tricky is that the woman has red hair. When you work with dark or light hair, it is rather easy to brush the hair color on top of it. You wouldn't notice a thing. But because this is red, you will have to work a lot more securely.
I'm pretty impressed. Especially since I have spend very little - to no time on it. There were a few things that could be a little bit better, but this is so much better than how I received them back in the day when I paid people. And just to think about how difficult it is due to all the stray hair, this is a magnificent job.
Denoising
Let's also try to denoise a photograph that I took of the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. It has a lot of noise in it, and I always thought it had a charm to it. However, I do wonder what it would look like without the noise. Let's try!
Before:
After Denoising:
The change is there, definitely, I think it's even sharper now. Although I know how destructive denoising can be, I'm not sure if it is my cup of tea. Knowing that it does seem to do its job properly, is pretty good to know.
Do note that the photographs uploaded here are already compressed, so you might not see or notice the noise as much in the first photograph, but on my end, I can clearly see a big difference.
Got a reply from the support team in the meanwhile
And just as I'm writing this post, I got a reply from the support team on Twitter
https://twitter.com/SkylumSoftware/status/1623789186384797696
- SkylumSoftware
All right, I think I will just fast-forward them this blog post, so they know exactly what has been going on.
We got a keeper
Despite the funny business about my files being removed, I managed to recover them. If this ever happens to you, it is utterly important to stop all work that you're doing on the same hard drive. This is due to data writing that is happening on your disk. You do need an additional hard drive to which you can send the recovered files. This is also important due to data writing. Like, if you were to send the recovered files to the same hard drive, it could mess up some other data and you could risk replacing the very data that you want to recover during the process.
Anyway, I'm going to use this software for fine-tuning, and some pre-work. I got a lifetime license, so I'm pretty curious about what updates they will come up with next.
Cheers,
Ruben
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