Jeffrey Behr Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Sniff...sniff (nose in air)...I don't need no stinkin' expensive converter software; I already got 2 and one of those cost me $105! he said (sort of).
Last week I bought Adobe's Camera Raw (that was the $105), and I started noticing more color noise in the dark sections of my newly converted images. Then my friend Jim got me thinking, and then I read all the threads about this on Miranda and Galbraith, and then I downloaded Phase One's Capture One DSLR Monday nite, and...guess what...I DO need a stinkin' expensive converter program. DAMN!
In preliminary results, Capture One DSLR (C1) was the clear winner--LOTS less noise but detail retained--over Canon FVU and Adobe Camera Raw, with ACR's results the noisiest. My friend reminded me that others have said that one must use some smoothing in ACR (I had used zero each for sharpness and smoothness), so I then used ACR's defaults for sharpness and smoothness, 25 each. Most of the noise was gone, but so was lots of the detail (hmm...maybe Adobe's smoothness filter is just gaussian blur!). So I converted again using 25 sharpness and 15 smoothness, and then 25 sharpness and 10 smoothness. Some of the detail came back with each reduction of smoothing but so did some of the noise.
I then figured out...no easy task with the useless online Help (what a laugh!) and User's Guide...how to set C1's noise suppression (File/Preferences/Develop settings). Discovered that Medium was used for the prelims; set it to Low and converted again. I saw slightly more noise and maybe slightly more detail with it on Low rather than Medium. I'll have to live with this for a few days to see what real images (prints) look like, but C1's results still look better than the other 2's results.
Overall, there's still no contest for me--C1 is the best, even if it is clunky to use. Its 'unintuitiveness' reminds me of the difference between the D60's and 1Ds's menuing systems--the D60's is effective and easy to use while the 1Ds's is difficult to use and effective in spite of itself.
Please e-mail me if you'd like to see my 8 samples. 100% crops in 8-bit TIFs will occupy about 900K, or if you want smaller files, quality-12 JPGs will occupy about 300K. If you don't state which you want, you'll get the JPGs.
Jeffrey Behr.
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