RAW Converters Comparison
8. Low Dynamic Range
The final image comparison in our RAW converters comparison is a test of the abilities of the software to deal with an image where there is a low dynamic range; other ways of expressing this problem would be to say that the image has a compressed histogram or low contrast.
As a coastal landscape photographer this problem occurs on a fairly regular basis for me. Large amounts of spray in the air, misty conditions and shooting through a telephoto lens are common occurrences and all can result in a low dynamic range in an image.
The image I have chosen contains two of these problems. It was taken above Millook Haven looking North past Widemouth Bay and up the Culm coast towards Bude. It was shot with the EM-1 and 75-300mm lens at ISO200, f/5.0, 1/1600s.
Processing an image such as this is generally a matter of placing the white and black points close to, or at the margins of, the available data by whatever means the RAW converter allows. However, this can (and will) result in the creation of substantial amounts of noise and problems on the data margins; for this image this manifests as loss of detail in the surf, mid ground rocks that are too dark and have lost detail, and noise in the sky and cliffs.
The RAW Conversions
[You can click on the images to bring up a larger version in a lightbox.]
Settings & Notes
Lightroom
Tonal (Basic) – Exposure: +1.30; Contrast: +33; Highlights: 0; Shadows: -50; Whites: -56; Blacks: -34; Clarity: +100
Tonal (Curve) – Highlights: +88; Lights: -25; Darks: -11; Shadows: +81
Sharpening – Amount: 25; Radius: 0.9; Detail: 78; Masking: 78
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 30; Detail: 59; Contrast: 50; Color: 25; Detail: 50; Smoothness: 50
Notes – Every method (of which there are many) that Lightroom offers to increase contrast has been thrown at this image.
Aperture
Tonal (Exposure) – Exposure: 0.62; Recovery: 0.02; Black Point: 18.07; Brightness: 0.09
Tonal (Enhance) – Contrast: 0.3; Definition: 1.0
Tonal (Highlights & Shadows) – Highlights: 5.13; Shadows: 41.82; Mid Contrast: 49.02
Noise Reduction – Radius: 1.88; Edge Detail: 2.44
Edge Sharpening – Intensity: 0.39; Edges: 0.22; Falloff: 0.69
Notes – Aperture has plenty of tools for manipulating tonality but I couldn’t find any easy way of lifting the crushed blacks in the rocks without losing a large amount of overall contrast in the image. This included a long time spent with the the curves tool but I abandoned it in the end.
Capture One Pro
Tonal (Exposure) – Exposure: -0.20; Contrast: 12; Brightness: 8
Tonal (High Dynamic Range) – Highlight: 0; Shadow: 10
Tonal (Clarity) – Algorithm: Neutral; Clarity: 15; Structure: 32
Tonal (Levels) – Black Point: 7; Mid Point: -0.10; White Point: 180
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 59; Color: 100
Sharpening – Amount: 60; Radius: 1.0; Threshold: 1.0
Notes -The magic happens here with Capture One Pro’s fantastic Levels tool. Considerably more detail can be pulled out but at the expense of losing shadow detail in the rocks.
AfterShot Pro
Tonal – Blacks: 53.97; Exposure: 1.11; Fill Light: 0.27; Fill Range: 0.08; Contrast: 100; Local Contrast Strength: -19; Radius: 29
Noise Reduction – Raw Noise Removal: On; Perfectly Clear Noise Removal Strength: 40; Detail:10
Sharpening – Amount: 80; Sensitivity: 6
Notes – A general lack of fine grained control of contrast; this plugin could probably benefit from some sort of curves tool.
DXO Optics Pro
Tonal – Smart Lighting Intensity: 142; Contrast: 80; Microcontrast: 15
Tonal (Selective) – Highlights: -9; Midtones: -3; Shadows: 14; Blacks: -3
Tonal (Curves): Black Point: 9; White Point: 194
Noise Reduction – Luminance: 40; Chrominance: 100; Low Freq: 100
Lens Softness – Global: -0.50; Details: 50; Bokeh: 50
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: 13; Exposure Offset; 1.28; Highlights: 0.30; Shadows: 0.05; Black: -0.56; Contrast: 17; Detail: 17
Noise Reduction – Algorithm: Noise Ninja 4 Turbo; Luminance Smoothing: 17; Residual Noise & Detail: 70; Color Strength: 50; Defringe: 0
Sharpening – Strength: 50; Radius: 0.60; Noise Masking: 100
Notes – For the first time when adjusting an image with Photo Ninja I struggled to get a result I liked the look of. It was very difficult to retain any detail in the foreground rocks whilst injecting sufficient contrast in the background.
RAW Photo Processor
Tonal – Exposure: 1.20; Contrast: 20; Brightness: 55
Topaz Denoise – Strength: 0.00; Shadow: -0.67; Highlight: 0.00; Red: -0.67; Blue: -0.61; Clean Color: 0.11; Black Level: 1.00; Recover Detail: 0.21; Reduce Blur: 0.15; Add Grain: 0.10
FocusMagic – 1 pixel
Notes – After a little bit of head scratching about how best to approach RAW Photo Processor’s tools for this type of shot I actually found that they work well together and offer some very fine grained adjustment.
Comments
There are some quite clear differences in image quality here. Capture One Pro produces the most pleasing result for me, getting good detail across the image, but DXO and Photo Ninja are close behind (with the usual caveat about Photo Ninja’s noise reduction, particularly noticeable on the cliffs).
Whilst a little flat both RAW Photo Processor and Irident Developer manage to increase the contrast very well; Irident Developer’s noise reduction and sharpening algorithms work well, as do the third party ones on RAW Photo Processor’s rendition. Both produce a result that is optimal for subsequent editing.
As usual, Lightroom’s luminance noise reduction lets down its rendition and smears details, particularly in the cliffs, where it does a marginally worse job than Aperture. Maybe I didn’t find the right technique or settings in AfterShot Pro because it fails woefully to produce a useable image.
This discussion of low dynamic range completes our image analysis in our RAW converters comparison. We’ll turn now to a brief discussion of the additional features that each RAW converter offers the landscape photographer.
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?