Why old folks get crotchety

It started innocently enough. I have a photo taken with my iPhone which I had tilted up at a building to get what was important to me into the frame. That resulted in much perspective distortion. I don’t like that.

So I loaded the image into PaintShop Pro, my usual post-processing workflow, and from there went to ON1 Photo RAW. I recently upgraded to the latest version (2026) but had not used it much.

ON1 has been a favorite tool for many years. One of the features I especially like is the “Transform” tool which has sliders for adjusting the perspective both vertically and horizontally. Makes it really easy to get rid of the perspective distortion.

I knew from years of use that the top slider in that tool adjust vertical perspective. As I moved the slider nothing happened. I looked closely and saw that a new slider had been added labeled “Amount”. I was just a little irritated. But the slider below that was “Vertical” which is what I wanted. As I moved it to get the building columns and side vertical, I noticed that the flag was gone.

The image was being automatically cropped, not what I was used to, not what I expected. I got more irritated.

Allow be to digress a bit. To make the vertical perspective adjustment the image is stretched out at the top and squeezed together at the bottom. That is nicely illustrated in the old Microsoft “Image Composite Editor” tool. See what I mean:

The older version of ON1 would crop at the middle of the image and it would look like this:

Afterwards I could crop the image the way I wanted. What I was after is cropping so I could get most of the flag into the picture.

I could not do that in the latest version. I decided to write this post, lamenting about my little annoyances. I wanted screen grabs so I could illustrate what I was talking about. I loaded the photo directly into ON1 Photo RAW MAX 2026 – not from within PaintShop Pro.

Behold that “Amount” slider was not there. And the “Vertical” slider worked as I was used to.

Now I was really, really irritated. Seems that ON1 Photo RAW MAX 2026 works differently in standalone mode from what it does as a plugin in PaintShop Pro. That was not the case in prior versions.

Can you blame me for becoming crotchety?

Here is another example. I have some photos that I use to test image sharpening tools. One of my favorites sharpening apps is Topaz Labs Sharpen AI.

Sharpening of photos is something that has been done for many years, it was even done chemically when processing actual film (look up “acutance” to learn more on this).

Here is an example:

The “AI” part of the name tells you that it is not just an algorithmic, mathematical routine that makes edges steeper. The tool adds detail that isn’t in the original but that fits and makes it look a lot sharper. Note the lashes. Maybe a tad too much, but it is still realistic.

Topaz Labs Gigapixel AI has gone further, and I used to like it very much. But in the latest version is has gone overboard. Here is the same small detail from that photo as done in Gigapixel AI with “face recovery” off and on:

Note that the lashes don’t look the same and the pupil of the eye has been badly distorted.

You can see it better here by moving the slider:

The resulting image is not the same person anymore; it is a figment of AI’s imagination.

Not what this old man expected. Yes, that new version of this once wonderful tool has made me even more crotchety.

It is those little changes, in our continuing human quest to improve things around us, that go beyond what is desired, what is useful, what is real, that irritates us.

Now go ahead and look up “crotchety”.

.:. © 2025 Ludwig Keck