What in-camera settings? What settings in DPP? What setting in Lightroom...C1? It makes a huge difference in DDP just as it does others. I shoot 1D bodies in Neutral in-camera and Adobe RGB. I also use custom setting in-camera to control the inital input to DPP based on the shooting situation. This is typical in-studio as well. Settings make all the difference in the world. But if your tests don't give you the results you want, stay with what you got! Lot's of people seem to get excellent results from C1 and it is a great program no doubt.
Will also say that the one-stop shop start to finish approach from C1 is very appealing...going to look at it again tonight...maybe time to re-think, workflow is everything for volume shooting...well, almost everything..
Shane Canfield wrote:
I've been looking for the one-stop shot start to finish Raw to Jpeg solution...several things work. You can go Lightroom, C1, even Bridge/ACR/CS3 is an option. I just prefer the DPP conversion over the others and not willing to give up the extra bump in that step. Agree the interface is a clunky and does not have that polished Adobe look. The Ugly Duckling story.
But I use batch for most stuff, which would do with the other programs too...so in the end, I don't consider it a big deal because no matter what I do, I live in batch.
Others disagree of course...and many poeple have found the C1 solution perfect for start to finish for years now. Lightroom is getting more and more converts. I will say Lightroom is the only major brand converter I have not tried, but my guess is it uses the same conversion engine as ACR so the results would be similar.
But adding DPP does change the workflow and that can be a big turn-off...not wild about that aspect either....Show more →
LightRoom is an amazing time saver for culling through hundreds of RAW images. The ability to cut and paste settings as well as crops is indispensable for a lot of work I do. You should give it a try but yes, it does use the exact same RAW engine as ACR. Hopefully Adobe will improve on things. I suspect that the raw converter speed is a major consideration for them. If so, they should at least offer an option for Conversion quality vs. Speed or something similar.
belsha wrote:
A lot of errors should be in there: confusion about downssampling, color profiles, etc. But the results seem pretty obvious to me. DPP colour is pretty bad, but LR maybe worse. LR really astonished me with the lack of detail in the blonde girls hair. Overall best deal still seems to be C1. Then again, editing these shots would change a lot of things, and while the default conversion of LR seems the worst, it offers more editing possibilities than any of the other two.
Which Canon camera did you shoot with out of curiosity? One other thing which I noticed with both your shot and mine is that even C1Pro by default tends to blow the highlights before DPP. I see this on the ladies legs facing us. DPP seems to roll the highlights off more and there seems to be some tone still there, unlike the others. This can be fixed in C1Pro with tweaking but its odd that by default it behaves almost as bad as ACR when it comes to highlights. I use the 5D Magnes profiles in C1Pro by the way.
OK guys, this is going to be a little long. One of the things I like about the Alternative Forum though is that the people here usually have a little more patience and are willing to delve into things a little deeper than on some of the other forums. Hopefully that is the case here.
In starting out with the comparison of Tariq's photo in DPP and ACR, I wanted to sort of calibrate between the two. I set DPP color balance to 6500K. I have noticed before that ACR interprets color temperature a little differently so I made a slight correction to ACR and set it to 6100K. This made the color balance more or less similar in appearance. By the way, Tariq, it appears that you forgot to convert colorspace on those posted Jpegs. They appear to be in ColorMatch so people with non-color-managed browsers are probably seeing them a little off from what you intended in terms of saturation and contrast.
In DPP, I started off with settings of:
Brightness -0.50
Color Temp 6500 (and no tint adjustment)
Contrast -1
Color Tone 0
Color Saturation 0
Sharpness 0
All RGB and NR settings were at 0 except for saturation, which was at 100.
From there I made adjustements in ACR to make the ACR histogram come close to matching the Luminance RGB histogram in DPP. Here is what I ended up with in ACR:
Color Temperature 6100
Exposure -2.05
Recovery 0
Fill light 0
Blacks 3
Brightness +96
Contrast +50
Saturation -15 (to compensate some for increased saturation from contrast adjustments; DPP uses a luminosity-mode type adjustment that doesn't impact saturation)
Also, since DPP applies pretty aggresive compression of highlights and shadows, I applied the following control points on ACR's Point Tone Curve:
Input 23 Output 20
Input 65 Output 77
Input 133 Output 152
The above adjustments make the histograms similar. There are still some color differences (the oranger reds in ACR, for example) but I think they are pretty close. The ACR version shows just a very few clipping spots on the stairs area and some on the red rowboat (?) in the middle of the pic. Here is what they look like as complete pics reduced to about 10%:
Here are 100% crops of the main highlight areas:
The ACR version has noise reduction and sharpening sliders all at zero. Jaggies appear to me to be more or less identical. I believe the reason you saw jaggies on the ACR pic you posted Tariq is because you had sharpening turned up in ACR. I thought the new sharpening feature in ACR was pretty cool at first but now I think it could still use some work. It produces artifacts very easily. I prefer to bring the unsharpened pic into PS and do my sharpening there.
To me, they look awfully close in terms of detail and highlight retention. There are very minor differences in detail and micro-contrast but remember that the ACR sharpness sliders are at zero. We don't know exactly how much baseline sharpness Canon is adding in DPP so I think any remaining differences could be handled by very light USM in PS or even in ACR. The artifacts/jaggies from ACR sharpening are not going to show up unless you are doing extreme enlargements and/or applying high levels of sharpening.
In cases where the highlights are even more blown, ACR will recover more detail than DPP. I have seen this with my own pics and here is a link to the 5D's review at dpreview that explains the behavior in pretty good detail: DPReview - ACR vs DPP for the 5D
As explained in the article, the detail shown by ACR in these cases can have "errors" but I think there are situations when it is nice to have a little texture there, even if it isn't a perfect representation of the tones. You also always have the option of clipping highlights in ACR and making them look pretty much like DPP if you want.
Here is a link to the full-size Jpeg in case you want to do further comparisons:
Also, just to give you an idea, here is a comparison of 100% crops where one has been adjusted using camera calibration adjustments I obtained from using the Rags Gardner script and a MacBeth ColorChecker:
I think it's better although probably not perfect. Keep in mind though that this is using calibration adjustments made for my 20D instead of your 5D.
Here are the calibration numbers in case you are interested:
Shadows +1
Red Hue -14
Red Sat +17
Green Hue -7
Green Sat +15
Blue Hue +1
Blue Sat -13
Nice set of comparisons eyeball, and quite a bit of work to get there. Even looking at your 100% crops of the containers, the lettering still appears more detailed to my eyes on the DPP version, with the ACR version still a little blown out. The Sharpening on my DPP posted version was set to 3 and I did try and match this in ACR as best as possible. I had thought that the current sharpening in ACR was much improved but this appears to definitely not be the case, as evidenced by those terrible jaggies in the diagonals. Both DPP and C1Pro incorporate much superior RAW sharpening, something I use every time for "Capture" sharpening. I would add that when using LightRoom exclusively, using the built in sharpening becomes a necessity. Again, Adobe has probably and purposely taken the route of quicker versus better as regards RAW sharpening.
Even in your posting of the complete reduced pics, the color from DPP looks better, particularly the red at the bottom of the boat and on the individual containers.
Your results seem to pretty much verify that DPP's default settings are far superior to ACR's.
To get close, you had to result to some pretty major tweaking of the ACR tone curve. Even still, ACR has a flat, washed out look with very little local contrast in comparison to the DPP version, at least thats what I'm seeing with the Containers and the intricate stairs and decks.
As far as the colorspace is concerned, doesn't everyone use a web browser that supports color profiles such as Safari? Just kidding but that is where things are heading. The difference in the highlight detail and contrast is so dramatic that it was easily seen on both my calibrated monitor in the studio and my laptop screen. The ColorMatch gamut of course falls somewhere between AdobeRGB and SRGB and comes very close to the display capabilities of both my monitor and printer. Its my preferred working color space for now but I'm sure I will move over to ProPhoto RGB at some point.
Having to adjust exposure that much is ACR is going to product worse results in print. For color space, working in Adobe and converting in the last step seems to retain more color detail for web display or print. NR from DPP and ACR is really terrible compared to a product like Noise Ninja. I like the final results with to use some USM in DPP and finish it off on the edited tiff before converting to jpeg. I'm also not convinced that using montiors, no matter how good, is the best way to judge aspects of the final product, prints are the end game and so recommend each person doing a test on final print.
One final comment, as a sports shooter, I like products that require little or now RAW adjustments to get the proper look. This is best done by proper exposure to begin with and a product that requires less RAW adjustments and therefore less total time in post.
These are great examples and thank you all for spending the time.
Anyone else notice the red fringe on the boat with the DPP version? Also the shadows with DPP look like they have a slight color cast. Can't understand why this is on the Alternative Gear and Lenses forum. Maybe post it on the Canon Gear or Post Processing forums instead?
pdmphoto wrote:
Anyone else notice the red fringe on the boat with the DPP version? Also the shadows with DPP look like they have a slight color cast. Can't understand why this is on the Alternative Gear and Lenses forum. Maybe post it on the Canon Gear or Post Processing forums instead?
True, would be better on a diff board...but somehow got started here and was interesting.
pdmphoto wrote:
Anyone else notice the red fringe on the boat with the DPP version? Also the shadows with DPP look like they have a slight color cast. Can't understand why this is on the Alternative Gear and Lenses forum. Maybe post it on the Canon Gear or Post Processing forums instead?
Sorry, your right in that it probably should be in Post Processing. This is just my "home" forum so I thought a lot of people here might find it interesting, particularly given recent threads such as the infamous 'Big Prints, Leica M8 vs. 5D" and the "upsizing methods" thread. Hopefully if it offends anyone, they will just ignore it as I think the thread title gives a really accurate indication of what they will be reading.
One thing that I notice is that ACR neutralizes a shadow or highlight color cast for good or bad, even one which is natural and existed to begin with. For instance, if you download my ship example, notice the water right next to the ship. DPP gives this water a distinct reddish color cast which was actually there from the red paint of the bottom of the boat. Same with the other yellowish shadows near the containers and stairs. ACR seems to remove the color cast automatically yet that cast was there in the original scene.
I think the red fringing is probably due to some CA from the lens as this was an extremely contrasty scene. Perhaps the color saturation/color contrast difference between DPP and ACR goes a little ways in explaining this but also ACR seems to be using some additional noise reduction even when the settings are at 0 perhaps.
Shane Canfield wrote:
Andy, are you using the mono conversion in DPP too? ...it is under picture styles. You get a Filter effect and Toning affect if you want it along with the contrast, etc. I've found it makes very sharp conversions and you can tweek it even more with RGB tab...the changes are lossless of course.
Hi Shane
yes, I very often use the mono picture style, another reason to use DPP because you have a b/w picture when you shoot and when you process. ACR shows you a colour photograph even when you were shooting b/w.
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I actually think ACR is more complicated to control, with DPP you can get the overblown reds like in Belshas shot but it is easy to use neutral picture style. Another way around is to use the (red) saturation tool in PS
Tariq, it is easy to copy paste settings in DPP, alt-apple C and alt-apple V if you use a Mac
yes, I very often use the mono picture style, another reason to use DPP because you have a b/w picture when you shoot and when you process. ACR shows you a colour photograph even when you were shooting b/w.
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I actually think ACR is more complicated to control, with DPP you can get the overblown reds like in Belshas shot but it is easy to use neutral picture style. Another way around is to use the (red) saturation tool in PS
Tariq, it is easy to copy paste settings in DPP, alt-apple C and alt-apple V if you use a Mac...Show more →
Thanks Andi, I have to spend some time in DPP and learn its ins and outs. Can you paste the settings onto a bunch of selected RAW images at once such as in LightRoom? or just onto one image at a time?
Anybody figured out what the x axis on the dynamic range diagram means? the scale goes from -10 to +4 ... can't be stops can it ? Also one of the vertical dashed lines are always darker than the others but not sure what that means?
I found the 5D blows reds and other things if I shoot in anything besides faithful so I aways select faithful before converting to TIFF for import into CS3.
Thanks a lot Tariq, for me is very interesting all this thread. I have Photoshop CS and not using ACR cause my raw files are not recognized, so i use DPP, that's all i have and not going to change after seeing your tests and results.
Tariq Gibran wrote:
LightRoom is an amazing time saver for culling through hundreds of RAW images. The ability to cut and paste settings as well as crops is indispensable for a lot of work I do.
Add straightening, healing/cloning, Noise Ninja, auto hot-pixel removal, lens distortion and CA correction (and a dozen or so excellent plugins) to that list and you have Bibble Pro. Oh, and it is very fast, too. And cheap.
I'll try to show you it's quality on that RAW file later.
For a start I had to do far more playing about in DPP to get the highlights back. If you are processing using your cameras (picture style) setting of neutral with your contrast set all the way to -4 as you did then of course you will get far more highlight detail as standard. Adjust the image to 'default' and the picture looks far worse than in ACR.
In ACR (I use 4.0, hate what they did with 4.1 and 4.2 vis a vis NR so rolled back a version), once in Adobe '98 and 16 bit, exposure -65, bump up a little in 'brightness' and highlight recovery at '9', all within about 3 seconds on the same panel (can't say that for DPP) and my histogram has held all the highlights.
ACR has the least 'base sharpening' of any raw converter I've ever seen. DPP mimics the cameras setting which is never truly at zero, capture sharpening is always applied from my experience.
Once you work with the fact that YOU and not the camera are determining the defaults for ACR then you are far more in control. Set up defaults based on the way you like to work, set them up using the curves window not just the first panel. You can then apply the defaults either by camera (automatically based on serial number) or with a couple of clicks.
Of course I do wish that skin tones were not so orange with ACR! When you try and equalise it you get green instead.
Beni wrote:
ACR has the least 'base sharpening' of any raw converter I've ever seen. DPP mimics the cameras setting which is never truly at zero, capture sharpening is always applied from my experience.
Bibble has *none*.
Of course I do wish that skin tones were not so orange with ACR! When you try and equalise it you get green instead.
You'd love Sean Puckett's "Gina" skin tone correction plugin!
Looking forward to it cogitech as I have not tried Bibble in years. Santi-u, glad that you found this helpful, thanks. Jon, I use either Neutral or Faithful, can't remember which as I tested all of them when I first got my 5D, found the one that worked(which at the time meant coming close to matching what I was used to out of my Fuji S2), along with a few other tweaks, set it and forgot about it. I will check all my settings and post back.
cogitech wrote:
Add straightening, healing/cloning, Noise Ninja, auto hot-pixel removal, lens distortion and CA correction (and a dozen or so excellent plugins) to that list and you have Bibble Pro. Oh, and it is very fast, too. And cheap.
I'll try to show you it's quality on that RAW file later.
You have most if not all of these(or similar) in LightRoom as well. Hot pixel removal is automatic in a lot of converters these days. I am curious as to the quality of the RAW converter engine in Bibble Pro though. LightRoom goes beyond just image correction of course with features such as creating a quick flash based web gallery for a client to see. Very handy and painless. Its direct competitor is Apple Aperture which I have not used yet as its hardware requirements are fairly high.
