RAW Converters Comparison
7. High Dynamic Range
The next section in this RAW converters comparison is to test the ability of each application to deal with high dynamic range images, where problems exist at both ends of the histogram, and thus the competing demands of both highlight and shadow recovery have to be balanced.
The phrase ‘high dynamic range’ is familiarly associated with the processing of bracketed images, where a series of images at different exposure settings are taken such that between them all or most of the details in the highlights and shadows are correctly exposed. These are then merged according to various different algorithms and processes to produce a single image. These images often suffer from two flaws, low or compressed contrast and haloing around dark objects against lighter backgrounds. These problems can also emerge when we try to extract as much information as possible from a single image.
When confronting a scene with too much dynamic range one should if possible bracket the images but this is not always possible, especially when objects are likely to move between shots. As a landscape photographer living on the coast I frequently encounter this problem in sunset shots, where I want to get some detail into the skies to fully capture the range of colours, but also want some foreground illumination. The middle of the scene will likely feature the sea, which is moving, which would make the processing of a bracketed sequence of shots challenging.
Having said all that the image I have chosen to assess is a single shot from a bracketed sequence. It has been selected because the rock in the centre will show up any issues with haloing in a much more obvious way than many of the other sunset shots I have taken. The photo is of Unshore Rock at Northcott Mouth, North Cornwall, and was taken with the E-M1 and 12-40mm at 12mm, ISO200, 1/60s, f/7.1 with an exposure compensation of +1/3eV.
We have seen from the previous sections that all the raw converters have fairly powerful tools for recovering highlights and shadows, and will be able to easily extract available details from both in an image like this. This is not what I am seeking to assess here; what I am looking at is finesse i.e. how pleasing and balanced an image is possible. Yet again, this is another very subjective assessment. Raising the shadows creates noise of course so some noise reduction and sharpening has been applied to the image too, but no colour adjustments have been made.
The RAW Conversions
[You can click on the images to bring up a larger version in a lightbox.]
Settings & Notes
Lightroom
Tonal (Basic) – Contrast: +5; Highlights: -100; Shadows: + 75; Whites: +13; Blacks: -3; Clarity: +15
Tonal (Curve) – Highlights: -30; Lights: +10; Darks: +15; Shadows: -5
Sharpening – Amount: 40; Radius: 0.8; Detail: 25; Masking: 30
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 15; Detail: 60; Contrast: 50; Color: 25; Detail: 50; Smoothness: 50
Notes – Lightroom can go further in lifting the shadows but about three quarters of the way is sufficient. Slight haloing around the rock is partially ameliorated by lifting the midtones with a curve. The detail in the highlights is clearly gone forever.
Aperture
Tonal (Exposure) – Exposure: -0.18; Recovery: 1.5; Black Point: -.0.1; Brightness: 0.1
Tonal (Enhance) – Contrast: 0.12; Definition: 0.34
Tonal (Highlights & Shadows) – Highlights: 100; Shadows: 87; Mid Contrast: 14
Tonal (Curves) – A very shallow inverted S curve with its central pivot at 75%
Noise Reduction – Radius: 0.8; Edge Detail: 1.8
Edge Sharpening – Intensity: 0.71; Edges: 0.5; Falloff: 0.69
Notes – Slight haloing, which was difficult to fix as it was generally quite difficult to adjust contrast in the sky without severely crushing the blacks. I expect others could do better.
Capture One Pro
Tonal (Exposure) – Exposure: -0.05; Contrast: 6; Brightness: 5
Tonal (High Dynamic Range) – Highlight: 85; Shadow: 65
Tonal (Clarity) – Algorithm: Punch; Clarity: 13; Structure: 12
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 10; Color: 100
Sharpening – Amount: 100; Radius: 0.8; Threshold: 1.0
Notes – Very powerful and pleasing highlight recovery in the sky but at the expense of some haloing on the rock. The shadows could have been lifted much further.
AfterShot Pro
Tonal – Blacks: 0.14; Exposure: 0.02; Highlights: 100; HR Range: 65; Fill Light: 1.40; Fill Range: 0.12; Contrast: 16; Local Contrast Strength: 70; Radius: 45
Noise Reduction – Raw Noise Removal: On; Perfectly Clear Noise Removal Strength: 20; Detail:10
Sharpening – Amount: 65; Sensitivity: 8
Notes – Keeping the fill range value low allows fairly targeted adjustment of the shoreline without raising the clouds and the local contrast feature keeps the rocks dark beneath the sun. Whilst Aftershot’s overall image quality, in terms of detail, remains disappointing, its tools work very well in this instance.
DXO Optics Pro
Tonal – Exposure Compensation: -1.33; Smart Lighting Intensity – 181; Contrast: 5; Microcontrast: 10
Tonal (Selective) – Highlights: -20; Midtones: 5; Shadows: 10; Blacks: 2
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 20; Chrominance: 100; Low Freq: 100
Sharpening – Lens Softness Global: 0.20; Details: 60; Bokeh: 50
Notes – Quite substantial adjustments to Exposure Compensation and Smart Lighting but a pleasing result emerges.
Irident Developer
Tonal (In) – Exposure: -0.50; Shadow Fine Tune: +100; Highlight Recovery: 100
Tonal (Adjustment) – Brightness Shadows: +20; Brightness Midtones: +30; Brightness Highlights: -31; Contrast: +30
Tonal (Curves) – LAB luminance curve adjustments
Noise Reduction – Adaptive Early Stage: 5; ChromaLogic: 2; ChromAdaptive: 5; Luminance: 10
Sharpening – Algorithm: Richardson Lucy Deconvolution; Radius 0.60; Iterations: 20
Noise Reduction – Adaptive Early Stage: 5; ChromaLogic: 2; ChromAdaptive: 5; Luminance: 5
Notes – Whilst Irident Developer struggled with extreme shadow recovery it manages better with this less demanding example.
Photo Ninja
Tonal – Illumination: 25; Exposure Offset; -1.02; Highlighs: -0.10; Black: 0.70; Contrast: 1; Detail: 9
Sharpening – Strength: 50; Radius: 0.8; Noise Masking: 100
Noise Reduction – Algorithm: Noise Ninja 4 Turbo; Luminance Smoothing: 5; Residual Noise & Detail: 70; Color Strength: 50; Defringe: 0
Notes – Photo Ninja has a unique feature when it comes to dealing with completely blown highlights. It is able to substitute a nearby colour for which it does have data. I have done this here. Whether or not you like the effect is a matter of personal taste.
RAW Photo Processor
Tonal – Exposure: -1.12; Compressed Exposure: 0.90; Contrast: 5; Brightness: 75; Highlights Recovery: 1.80
Topaz Denoise – Strength: 0.05; Shadow: 0.14; Highlight: 0.00; Red: -0.62; Blue: -0.59; Clean Color: 0.11; Black Level: 1.00; Recover Detail: 0.21; Reduce Blur: 0.15; Add Grain: 0.10
FocusMagic – 1 pixel
Notes – For some reason it was far easier to use the documented highlights recovery workflow on this image with fully blown highlights than the previous one where they were only partially blown.
Comments
In almost all the other sections of this RAW converters comparison one or two renditions have jumped out at me as being preferable and there has been some small element of objectivity as to why. In this comparison it really does come down to subjective preference. Any judgement as to quality is made more difficult because the colour variation is so large. My personal preferences are based on the overall impact and on a couple of specific areas of the image.
The first is the haloing around the rock. Two types of halo are present in various images. All the images suffer from a very bright halo right on the boundary that is just a pixel or two wide, but beyond that some have a glow that extends beyond this. AfterShot Pro, Irident Developer and RAW Photo Processor are probably the best in this regard, but this is largely because their renditions have the least contrast in the sky.
The second thing that I look at in these images is the highlights in the sky and the beam heading out to the left of them. The clear winner here for me is Capture One Pro, but Lightroom, DXO and RAW Photo Processor do a pretty good job too. Photo Ninja is a strange case; it has the unique ability to paste colour detail back into an area with totally blown highlights. I’m not sure I care for it in this image; it may work better for others. To be fair, it’s not compulsory, and I could have rendered the sky very similarly to Capture One Pro.
My winner for overall impact would be Capture One Pro. However, none of the RAW converters does a bad job with this image and those with flat colour renderings could easily be improved with further processing.
We’ve spent three sections now looking at different aspects of shadow and highlight recovery. In the next section of this RAW converters comparison we’ll look at a different type of tonality problem, and see how well the applications can create contrast in Low Dynamic Range images.
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?