RAW Converters Comparison
6. Highlight Recovery
The next section in this RAW converters comparison is to test the highlight recovery abilities of each application.
As a landscape photographer I typically encounter three problems requiring highlight recovery: lack of detail in skies; lack of detail in surf; and completely blown highlights in sunsets. The first two are broadly similar and can generally be recovered if the image is only clipped in one or, less desirably, two channels; with the third the question tends to be more about how the RAW converter handles transitions between areas that are completely blown, to areas that are partly blown, and on to areas where full data is available. We’ll deal with an example of a sunset in our next section on high dynamic range; here we will take an example of one of the first two scenarios, a sky that lacks detail.
To test the RAW converters I have chosen an image of the Gola del Furlo in Marche, Italy. It’s actually the central exposure in a five shot bracketed sequence used to create an HDR image. There are a handful of tiny clipped areas in the tree shadows but the foreground is otherwise reasonably well exposed, but small central areas of the sky and parts of the sunlit cliff on the left are missing data (converted in Lightroom on default settings).
As was the case with shadow recovery, dedicated highlight 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 Exposure’), which appear really to be souped up versions of mid tone brightness sliders. Getting the best result generally involves balancing these adjustments, sometimes reducing overall exposure, and further tweaks to global and local contrast settings.
On this occasion I have made only tonal adjustments and have not made any changes to whatever the RAW converter sets as defaults for colour correction, noise reduction or sharpening in the processed images.
The RAW Conversions
[You can click on the images to bring up a larger version in a lightbox.]
Settings & Notes
Lightroom
Tonal (Basic) – Contrast: -6; Highlights: -80; Shadows: + 26; Blacks: +10; Clarity: +20
Tonal (Curve) – Highlights: -24; Lights: +4
Notes – Whilst I struggled with Adobe’s 2012 Process settings when recovering shadows here the tools work very well, offering a sophisticated set of controls. This sophistication proved necessary as some control was enabled over the high levels of undesirable contrast in the top left cliff that a simple manipulation of the highlight slider caused.
Aperture
Tonal (Exposure) – Exposure: -0.11; Recovery: 1.5; Black Point: -2.0; Brightness: 0.1
Tonal (Enhance) – Contrast: 0.7; Definition: 0.28
Tonal (Highlights & Shadows) – Highlights: 100; Shadows: 26; Mid Contrast: 2.1
Tonal (Curves) – A very shallow inverted S curve with its central pivot at 75%
Notes – Again, whilst it was a struggle to get a decent result when recovering shadows, recovering highlights using a variety of Aperture’s tools was relatively easy.
Capture One Pro
Tonal (Exposure) – Contrast: 5; Brightness: 5
Tonal (High Dynamic Range) – Highlight: 100; Shadow: 14
Tonal (Clarity) – Algorithm: Punch; Clarity: 10; Structure: 10
Tonal (Curve) – A very shallow inverted S curve with its central pivot at 75%
Notes – Capture One Pro’s highlight recovery tools are a pleasure to use.
AfterShot Pro
Tonal – Blacks: -2.20; Exposure: -0.35; Highlights: 100; HR Range: 100; Fill Light: 0.20; Fill Range: 0.40; Contrast: -80; Local Contrast Strength: 20; Radius: 60
Notes – Every control that can recover details in the sky is maxed out.
DXO Optics Pro
Tonal – Exposure Compensation: -1.15; Smart Lighting Intensity – 160; Contrast: -20; Microcontrast: 10
Tonal (Selective) – Highlights: -100; Midtones: -66; Blacks: 13
Notes – DXO’s tonal controls can be a little confusing and work quite differently to other RAW converters. The method to recover highlights involves bringing down the overall exposure and then compensating for this shift with Smart Lighting.
Irident Developer
Tonal (In) – Exposure: -0.50; Shadow Fine Tune: +100; Highlight Recovery: 100
Tonal (Adjustment) – Brightness Shadows: +100; Brightness Midtones: +100; Brightness Highlights: -100; Contrast: +36
Tonal (Curves) – 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 – As noted when discussing shadow recovery Irident Developer doesn’t really have easy tools for dealing with extreme tonal changes. I’ve done what I can with the sliders here and the rest is done with multipoint RGB and LAB Luminance curves, the adjustment of which was a pretty joyless experience. I have no doubt that others could improve on my efforts here.
Photo Ninja
Tonal – Illumination: 27; Exposure Offset; -1.22; Black: -0.06; Contrast: 4; Detail: 8
Notes – Photo Ninja’s assessment of an image and automatic application of its Smart Lighting algorithm applies automatic highlight recovery and gets it very close to perfect. A little extra tweaking is necessary, not least because it doesn’t automatically compensate in the same way for the resulting loss of light in shadow areas.
RAW Photo Processor
Tonal – Exposure: -0.85; Compressed Exposure: .85; Contrast: 5; Brightness: 70; Highlights Recovery: 0.9
Notes – I struggled a great deal with RAW Photo Processor’s highlight recovery workflow, as detailed in their manual. Whilst I managed to pull some detail back into the sky I was unable to simultaneously compensate for the problematic highlights in areas on the cliff. RAW Photo Processor’s highlight recovery abilities are allegedly one of its strengths so this is probably a case of pilot error I’m afraid.
Comments
In this RAW converters comparison there is considerably more variation in these renditions than I was expecting.
If we were judging the results of this on the sky and clouds alone then the clear winner would be DXO Optics Pro, which pulls out superb levels of detail, especially in the wispy cloud, but it struggles with the highlights in the cliff (as do many of the RAW converters). Capture One Pro and Photo Ninja both manage a good job of both, but I marginally prefer the contrast that Capture One Pro manages to inject into the cliff and its rendition of the wispy cloud. Lightroom closely follows these three. It does a good job of the cliff but pulls out marginally less detail in the sky.
It’s hard to choose between AfterShot Pro, which lacks detail as usual, and Aperture, where the sky is a little weird and there is some haloing on the right hand cliff edge. Irident Developer pulls up about as much detail as Aperture and could probably do a bit better if I could manage its curves tools better, but the overall result is a bit flat and disappointing. RAW Photo Processor is the weakest of all but again this is quite possibly down to user error. I doubt though that a massive improvement is possible.
The results for highlight recovery are different to those for shadow recovery. These differences can be image dependent however, and each RAW converter will get another chance in our RAW converters comparison in the next section, on High Dynamic Range, where we will look at an image that has problems in both the shadows and the highlights.
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?