Red Highlights

[Daniel Browning]

Daniel

What do you use for RAW conversion?

Mostly Lightroom. It has a ton of quality problems. Underexposed (high ISO) shots are especially poor. It lacks basic features such as nonlinear EC. The downsampling algorithm corrupts the image with aliasing artifacts. It applies different amounts of hidden exposure compensation for different cameras (e.g. you have to set -0.33 EC for the 5D2 to get counteract their hidden +0.33). There are plenty of other quality issues as well.

But for all its problems, I still prefer it over all the others for one single reason: ease of use. I can get on the computer, process hundreds of photos with various adjustments here and there, and get back off in a short amount of time. The plugins and integration with other software save more time still. Most of my photos look "good enough" with Lightroom, so I put up with the quality issues just to be able to zip through a pile of raws in less time. Before Lightroom 2 came out, I was using Bibble for the same reason: easy. But it took extra time to integrate with the DAM. Lightroom has the DAM integrated directly, which I think saves me some time (at a loss in flexibility).

When I am concerned about quality, I will take the time to load up a different converter. My favorites are RPP, DxO, but sometimes I try Bibble, DPP, or a dcraw derivative. I develop astro shots in a variety of more specialized programs such as IRIS, DSS, and MaxIm DL. I haven't used C1P, Aperture, or SilkyPix, but I hear good things.

[Mark Elberson]

I use DPP and find it very user friendly and with its"recipes" and batch processing I think it can bang out a lot of images in a reasonable amount of time as well. I am curious though what your thoughts are on its quality?

[Daniel Browning]

I think the quality of DPP is a sight better than Lightroom, especially for underexposed (high ISO) images. I really like that NR=off really means "off". (Whereas in Lightroom, NR=off means "a little less".) I also really like time-saving features like automatic falloff correction. However, I think it introduces a more demosaic artifacts (e.g. maze) than other converters, but they're not noticeable in most shots. One thing that really annoys me about DPP is that it doesn't implement 1/3rd stop ISO correctly. Those ISO settings have different white points (i.e. "highest number possible") than normal ISO, but DPP uses the same white point for every ISO setting, so it completely misses the very tippy top of the highlights in 1/3rd stop ISOs (whole stop ISOs are fine). It's only a small amount of highlights, but just the idea of wastage just bothers me. (You'd think that if they're going to mess up the camera by changing the white point for each ISO setting that they would at least handle it in their own converter correctly, but oh well.)


Also, as demonstrated in this thread, I can't figure out how to control clipping caused by color space conversion in DPP, but there's probably a way.

[Dumien]

Well Daniel, what can I say? Your insights into this kind of technology are very well appreciated.


Thanks you all guys for helping me out


Andy