RAW Converters Comparison
5. Shadow Recovery
The next section in this RAW converters comparison is to test the shadow recovery abilities of each application.
To test the RAW converters I have chosen an image of Bude Canal. It was actually the darkest capture in a 5 shot bracketed sequence intended for HDR processing. It was taken with the D80 and 18-200mm at 22mm, ISO 100, 1/250s, f/9, -2 1/3eV. It is, plainly, quite an extreme example but it will push the RAW converters’ shadow recovery features to the limit.
Dedicated shadow recovery features in RAW converters generally include a slider dedicated to just this function, but may also include ‘smart lighting’ type features (DXO, Photo Ninja’s ‘Ilumination’, RAW Photo Processor’s ‘Compressed Expsoure’), which appear really to be souped up versions of mid tone brightness sliders. Getting the best result generally involves balancing the adjustments, along with further tweaks to global and local contrast settings.
Raising such dark shadows introduces a massive amount of noise and thus some amount of noise reduction is necessary. Getting this right is very difficult and in the results that follow there is considerable variation in the amounts that have been applied and the degree to which the process has been effective. Following these adjustments the residual noise in the raised shadows generally doesn’t tolerate much further sharpening (In my own work I would generally apply different levels of noise reduction and sharpening to raised shadow areas than normally exposed areas of the image).
I’ve done my best to produce as pleasing a result as I can in the conversions but, as ever, this is a subjective judgement.
The RAW Conversions
The following are 1:1 crops from near the top right corner of the image. [Click on the image to bring up a larger version in a new tab; make sure you do this if you are a retina display user.]
Settings & Notes
Lightroom
Tonal – Fill Light: 80; Blacks: 5; Brightness: +70; Contrast: +30; Clarity: 10
Sharpening – Amount: 40; Radius: 0.8; Detail: 25; Masking: 30
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 30; Detail: 50; Contrast: 50; Color: 50; Detail: 50; Smoothness: 50
Notes: Adobe’s 2012 Process settings (Highlights and Shadows) is unable to raise the shadows any great amount, so the 2010 Process settings were enabled, providing the Fill Light slider. With a little luminance noise reduction and sharpening a fairly good result is possible, leaving me a little puzzled as to why the 2012 process is so underpowered in this regard.
Aperture
Tonal: Black Point: 1.0; Brightness: 0.1; Shadows: 100; Mid Contrast: 10.0
Noise Reduction – Radius: 0.8; Edge Detail: 2.0
Edge Sharpening – Intensity: 0.4; Edges: 0.5; Falloff: 0.69
Notes: Maxing out the shadows slider produces some fairly unpleasant artefacts in the darkest shadows but Aperture’s Noise Reduction panel is able to exert some control over this.
Capture One Pro
Tonal – Shadow: 100; Brightness: 10; Contrast: 10
Clarity – Algorithm: Neutral; Clarity: 0; Structure: 10
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 50; Color: 100; Single Pixel: 0
Sharpening – Amount: 40; Radius: 0.8; Threshold: 1.0
Notes: It is very difficult to strike a balance between removing noise with the luminance slider and avoiding the details getting too ‘plasticky’.
AfterShot Pro
Tonal – Fill Light: 2.50; Fill Range: 1.0; Contrast: -60; Local Contrast Strength: 20; Radius: 15
Noise Reduction – Raw Noise Removal: On; Perfectly Clear Noise Removal Strength: 50; Detail:10
Sharpening – Amount: 50; Sensitivity: 8
Notes: Fill light and fill range maxed out. Raw noise enabled but not the separate slider controls. Highlights look bad but actually they can be controlled with the highlight slider too.
DXO Optics Pro
Tonal – Smart Lighting Algorithm: DXO Optics Pro 7; Correction Intensity: 100; Gamma: 7.5; Shadow Radius: 6; Preserve: 80; Global Contrast: -5; Local Contrast: 20
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 20; Chrominance: 100; Low Freq: 100; Dead Pixels: 24
Lens Softness – Global: 0.5; Details: 80; Bokeh: 50
Sharpening – Lens Softness Global: -1.00; Details: 25; Bokeh: 50
Notes: DXO has the ability to raise the shadows much higher but I wanted to keep the tone in the same ballpark as the other images. The older Smart lighting Algorithm (DXO 7) works much better than current algorithm, which does very peculiar things to the sky (sky turns very orange with high contrast cloud edges), and has a far larger number of controls to make fine adjustments. The complexity of these adjustments mean that the somewhat crunchy result that I have achieved is suboptimal.
Irident Developer
Tonal – Shadow Fine Tune: +100; Brightness Shadows: +100; Brightness Midtones: +100; Contrast: +100; LAB luminance curve adjustments
Sharpening – Algorithm: Difference of Gaussians; Noise Reduction Radius 0.54; Sharpening Radius 0.57; Amount: 300
Noise Reduction – Adaptive Early Stage: 5; ChromaLogic: 2; ChromAdaptive: 5; Luminance: 10
Notes: Irident Developer doesn’t really have the tools for dealing with extreme tonal changes. All the relevant sliders are maxxed out here, and additional changes were made using its curves adjustment features, but it still results in an image that is particularly lacking in contrast and saturation.
Photo Ninja
Tonal – Illumination: 25; Shadows: .75; Contrast: -10; Detail: 5
Sharpening – Strength: 60; Radius: 0.8; Noise Masking: 100
Noise Reduction – Algorithm: Noise Ninja 4 Turbo; Luminance Smoothing: 7; Residual Noise & Detail: 25; Color Strength: 70; Defringe: 0
Notes: In making the tonal adjustments there is a complex interaction between the illumination slider and the shadow recovery slider and I may not have achieved the optimal result. As noted in the previous section Photo Ninja is slow when making changes to noise reduction settings (not as slow as this image has less high frequency details) so this time I have used the Turbo settings. Without noise reduction the image was noisier than any other rendition, but when it is turned on it is hard to control whilst still retaining detail.
RAW Photo Processor
Tonal – Compressed Exposure: 1.80; Contrast: -5; Brighness: 60
Topaz Denoise – Strength: .20; Shadow: -0.06; Highlight: 0.00; Red: -.76; Blue: -.78; Clean Color: .13; Black Level: 1.00; Recover Detail: 0.20; Reduce Blur: 0.40; Add Grain: 0.30
Color Efex Pro (Detail Extractor) – Amount: 10%; Contrast: 6%; Saturation: 6%
Notes: RAW Photo Processor, whilst having powerful tools for manipulating exposure, has no denoising capability, and the image that it produces has intense noise in the shadows. Topaz Denoise struggles to deal with the luminance noise and I have reduced it as best I can whilst still retaining a little detail. With considerable noise left there was little point in attempting to sharpen the image (certainly in the shadows) but Detail Extractor managed to extract slightly more detail.
Comments
Again, we find that there are some clear differences in this RAW converters comparison regarding the ability of each application to recover detail in shadows. To be fair, when looking at the original image, it is remarkable that any of them do as well as they do; if you took an out of camera jepg that looked like this then you wouldn’t be able to recover more than a fraction of what all the RAW converters can achieve.
On this image I would say DXO Optics Pro produces the best result. It is possible that Irident Developer manages to resolve slightly more detail but it does this at the expense of contrast and saturation. DXO’s rendition, whilst a little crunchy and noisy, is nevertheless detailed and has accurate colours. Behind these two both Lightroom and Capture One Pro produce very good results.
The other four renditions have issues. AfterShot Pro fails to resolve as much detail as the other converters but nevertheless delivers quite a pleasing result. Photo Ninja pulls out plenty of detail but also a vast amount of noise. Suppressing this involves Noise Ninja’s algorithm and, once again, I can’t say that I care for the results. RAW photo processor also delivered spectacular amounts of noise and attempting to deal with this (not entirely successfully) with Topaz Denoise results in a serious loss of detail. Finally, Aperture produces some particularly unpleasant noise, both colour and luminance, which its tools are quite unable to satisfactorily process.
At the other end of the spectrum of making major tonal adjustments to an image from shadow recovery lies Highlight Recovery; this will be the next section in our RAW converters comparison.
27 Comments
Wow, what an excellent article. This is the best RAW comparison that I have ever read. Extremely detailed and well explained. Thanks for your hard work!
Very detailed and through presentation. I to have used Lightroom since it was in the beta stages and it is now the raw processor of choice. However I have always been of the opinion that it is not the Gold standard of raw processing software, not the same way that Photoshop CS/ CC can claim to be as an image editor. For me there at least a half dozen other choices that can match or surpass Lightroom in this respect.
What keep me with Lightroom is the ease of use and the wide range of tools available.
Very interesting and comprehensive review. A couple of small points, some Capture one sliders such as noise reduction are calibrated in a relative manner rather than an absolute manner – thus even though the default setting is always the same it can represent quite different underlying settings.
When adjusting dark images such as your example I find it best, when using process 2012, to follow Adobe’s advice and make a mid tone adjustment using the exposure slider before making any darks and blacks adjustment.
Excellent comparison, lots of work. I started using LR early on, switched to A3 and recently bought C1P. I agree with your conclusion and I am very pleased with C1P. Most files (E-M1 and E-M5) require very little adjustment when using the auto adjust function. Now I only have to work out the DAM for which I still use A3.
I have found ACDSee Pro 7 to be the equal of CaptureOne in terms of raw development. I believe one would be hard pressed to tell the difference at all. Plus, I’ve found that I like the ACDSee user interface much better. If you like the CaptureOne output but don’t much care for the “experience”, ACDSee Pro is worth looking into.
ACDSee is not available for OSX, but I used it several years ago with a P&S
Well there is an ACDSee Pro 3 for Mac, though I’ve heard it is not the mature product that Pro 7 for Windows is. Being a Windows guy, I’m not too conversant on the Mac OS versions. I don’t know if it is available for OSX or not.
I agree. I used ACDSee Pro for years. I have also tried various iterations of DxO and CaptureOne. For the past year, I have been using Lightroom almost exclusively. Ultimately, I think ACDSee Pro, or Ultimate as they now dub it, probably offers the best balance of features and usability. I was disappointed with DxO for all but its lens correction features which are stellar. I found CaptureOne to be good but remarkably ungainly to use. Lightroom seemed a good alternative but frankly none of them offered the intuitive DAM functionality that ACDSee Pro did. I’m transitioning back to that product now.
Hello,
What a great comparison report!
Thank you for all the efforts and the pictures for the comparison.
Due to your result I checked CP1 as a long term LR and DXO user.
Since own several comparisons with LR and DXO and training with the new program CP1, LR is not used anymore and DXO very seldom.
I am completely satisfied with the possibilities and the results of CP1
CP1 is a great RAW converter but it needs more learning time than DXO an LR to discover the complete possibilities of CP1.
But afterwards it’s fast and quite easy to get perfect results.
Greetings
Thomas
Thanks for the RAW file processor comparison! That’s quite an effort and really appreciated!! Cheers, Jeff
I think you have completely dropped the ball with Aperture by claiming it has “no localised adjustments”. You can brush in and out practically EVERY single adjustment there is on the adjustment panel of Aperture and for a long time now.
Otherwise it is a nicely done comparison but you have to realise, that you would have to do this kind of work with every single camera out there to give a complete picture. Some are great with Canon/Nikon and very poor with Sony, Fuji etc. and vice versa.
I hope the next time you do a comparison that you’ll take a look at SILKYPIX at silkypix.us.
Hi Nik,
maybe, just maybe – in case you’ll do something similar in future – you could include DT http://www.darktable.org/ . It would be nice to see where it stands among these ‘Goliashes’.
Or maybe you can check separately and referred this article – e.g. “my rating among the rest would be ~5th place” – thank you! – and maybe you can thank me 😉
I thought for sure you’d include RawTherapee in the shootout. Do you have any experience with it and how do you think it would slot into your rankings?
very helpful article. thank you !
I was wondering what raw developer you use for the Merrill’s. I have a DP2S and love it except for one thing and that is the color noise. Even ISO 100 I get red and green noise in shadow and also can be in a bright sky. I process them in SPP which I actually like unlike most people however it does not have any way to edit color noise. I would love to invest in a Merrill if I knew how to cut down the red and green noise. Thanks.
That was helpful. Thank you!
What a fantastic comparison! This must have taken a long time to do. Thank you for this!
Many thanks. Any chance of an update?
Nice, detailed test. It’s interesting that while I agree with your general ranking in conclusion, when I look at many of the individual comparisons I quite disagree with your judgements. Which I think just goes to show how subjective it all is, especially once you start editing. e.g. several times you preferred renditions which I thought were overly noisy.
Had I known about this post earlier, I might not have done my own (much more limited) comparison (http://blog.wadetregaskis.com/raw-converter-comparison/). Though I’m glad I did, because now between the two of us we’ve provided more data. And it’s nice that our data leads to consistent conclusions.
when i was buying my 1st dslr i used Lightroom as a raw converter. Then I discovered DXO was there.
Well dxo is just superamazing. I can highly recommend it.
It can do a lot automaticly.
In the beginning I thought: automatic? can this be any good?
the answer is you bet!!
Thanks to the enormous data-base they have build during dxo-mark benchmarks testing dxo-optics pro knows every little bad thing about your camera and lens and can correct it automaticly(but you can do manual too).
I did testing and comparing lightroom and DXO.
DXO really is amazing and it beats lightroom everytime.
All my photos look so much more amazing when i use DXO.
and I don’t talk about a little better then lightroom. I am talking about a LOT better.
I have not tried capture one yet but i am very impressed with dxo. even when you just use the dxo standard automatic settings it already beat lightroom hands down.
I really don’t understand the whole uzz about lightroom.
Lightroom is not really good to be honest. but sometimes i get the impression the entire world uses lightroom.
Such a wealth of information here. Think you! I am testing the Picturecode Photo Ninja as aiming for batch converting RAW into TIF for 3D scanning purposes.
Excellent review. Actually, we’ve been on Capture One for years now, but for the first time ever we’re considering abandoning it due to Phase One playing software politics by deliberately disabling support for the Pentax 645Z, which in our view is entirely unacceptable for paid software. This makes users direct victims of boardroom politics, and benefits no one. True, some canny workarounds exist, but sadly these are not acceptable in a professional environment.
GREAT JOB!
thank you!
I am interesting if Serif labs company which makes Affinity Photo
if they build non-destructive photo editing sw and for windows
– maybe first step is here –
Affinity Designer for Windows is here 🙂
http://photo-typ.blogspot.de/2016/07/affinity-designer-for-windows-is-here.html
I’ve done a raw converter comparison here: http://sjp.id.au/digital-darkroom/raw-converter-comparison/
It includes the newly released ON1 Photo RAW, and the results are interesting. For me Photo Ninja is probably the most unique in terms of rendering quality, but it doesn’t have the bells and whistles that Lightroom does.
Thank you for sharing the results of your likely considerable time and effort.
Thanks for a brilliant review, but any chance of an update with so many changes having taken place since you wrote it?