Beni wrote:
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....Show more →
If you opened my image in DPP and "as shot", I don't think you need any tweaking to get those highlight details. They are just there based on my camera calibration. ACR apparently only sees the WB setting when you choose "As shot" I take it and nothing else?
It would be great if you could post a 100% detail of the Containers out of ACR with all your tweaking because I have yet to see a way to force ACR to extract as much detail as DPP is capable of in the highlights. I just don't think it has it in itself to do so but I would love to be wrong as I must use LightRoom often. What I found was that if you use ACR for the capture sharpening(to an equal extent as DPP), you end up with the jaggie diagonals and still slightly less actual detail. If you donn't do this, then no amount of post sharpening after the RAW conversion will get you to what DPP gives. The detail is simply not there with ACR.
Tariq. You can use apple (ctrl) A to select all pictures or apple-click to select multiple pictures in DPP. You could also use the command path: edit-safe settings/read settings if you want to import settings from a different shot or share your settings with somebody.
This will also work with RGB settings if you want to finetune a shot in DPP. Most people would do this in PS of course but it also works here and for batches this is good enough for me.
I dont like so much the crop tool and the dust tool for the 5d, though I think once you beginn to work on your photograph you need to open PS anyway.
Tariq Gibran wrote:
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.
Yes, Bibble has the web gallery output as well. Fully customizable and very handy for weddings and for the magazine work my wife does regularly.
When I first saw Aperture, I was floored by how it is obviously a bad copy of Bibble. Slower, less features, lower quality, but a very pretty interface. I have no time for an app that puts a higher priority on the "pretty" interface than the functionality, speed, and quality. Function over fashion.
I had very little time last night to work with your RAW file, but here's what I threw together this morning. To be fair, I output from Bibble to JPEG and then loaded Eyeball's composite JPEG and added the Bibble JPEG crops.
In this first one, all Bibble settings are basically turned off. *No* sharpening, as you can see from the sample, and nothing else tweaked at all. No highlight recovery either, yet Bibble is already doing better than the others in the highlights:
Next, we have Bibble with sharpening set to 150 (on a scale of 400). No other changes. The highlights are very obviously better here, and no HR is turned on:
Next, Bibble sharpening at 150 and Sean Puckett's "Sharpie" plugin turned on. You can see the obvious contrast enhancement of the plugin here. Not always ideal, and I didn't tweak it at all, but often the plugin can bring exactly the type of local contrast that can give images that extra "pop":
If there is another part of the image that I could use to demonstrate Bibble's output in a more meaningful way, let me know and I'd be happy to show more samples.
Thanks very much cogitech. I'm downloading Bibble right now to test for myself. I think the area in the crops we have been posting which include the the Container and Decks/stairs work well. Another area is the rear of the ship which is in complete shadow down. Near the Bottom, there are the water line numbers. Thanks for doing all that work. I agree about Aperture. The interface looks like a freakin video game. Very busy looking to me.
Be careful not to let Bibble piss you off right away. It has a fairly steep learning curve for many users and the interface could be improved. I have been working with it for years, so it is a non-issue for me, but new users will need to have patience. It is rather unfortunate and they are addressing this issue in Bibble 5.
I have something very exciting to show you in the shadows, but I'll have to do it this evening.
Lotusm50 wrote:
Well, that sounds kind of illicit. The rest of us can leave the room if you like.
;-)
After reading that again, I am glad I decided to use my lunch hour to get this together.
This is a quick job, but it shows how I can pull 3 stops from the shadows with nearly no additional noise. I'm doing this via VNC into my home computer, as well, so it is difficult to get things right.
Here's the back of the ship with sharpen at 150 and the Provia curve loaded:
Cogitech - please be kind enough to explain how you can tell a RAW converter is doing some default sharpening even if the sliders are set to zero. I have never come across this with either C1, ACR or DPP?
shirozina wrote:
Cogitech - please be kind enough to explain how you can tell a RAW converter is doing some default sharpening even if the sliders are set to zero. I have never come across this with either C1, ACR or DPP?
Here, it is obvious to me that Bibble is *not* sharpening the image at all, whereas the others with "no sharpening" are obviously doing some hidden sharpening.
Here is the area which I think is most telling in this image as far as both highlight and shadow detail is concerned as well as sharpness. This is out of DPP with some tweaking to the tone curve. When I manipulate this file in ACR and Biblble(which I'm new at so perhaps it could be done mutch better), The two stacks of containers do not seem to have the distinct variation in brightness and tone between one another that DPP can give and there appears to be ever so slightly more detail in those containers with regard to the veticle lines on each one in DPP as well. Cogitech, have you used the Kelvin color temperture methond of WB in Bibble? I seem to be getting very odd results when I try to use it. Bibble does seem to correctly see the "as shot" WB though. As someone else mentioned, if your browser does not support color profiles, you may need to open this up in PS to see it correctly. SRGB is a joke. This is from DPP: http://www.gibranstudio.com/DPPtweak_MG_8446.jpg
Paul, DPP and Bibble seem to have two ways of understanding contrast and shadow recovery.
DPP needs about 1.3 stops and 2 stops to bring back as much detail in the shadow. If I get you right you need to push up in Bibble 3 and 5 stops to get the same result. You may check this out on your own PC
By the way Cogitech, the Kelvin WB appears to be working now. At first it was giving some really off color when it shouldn't have. The Bibble interface does seem to be all over the place. For instanace, in the first "STD" tab for WB. one can select "Custom Kelvin" for WB but there is actually nowhere to change it until one goes into the "ADV" tab next. A very "hodge podge", peiced together feel and not terribly logical. Looking forward to seeing what the next interface looks like. I first tried Bibble years ago and at that time, it was a bit "Crash Happy" on the Mac so I abondened it... Seems to be a lot more powerful now if they can get the interface ironed out.
Andi Dietrich wrote:
Paul, DPP and Bibble seem to have two ways of understanding contrast and shadow recovery.
DPP needs about 1.3 stops and 2 stops to bring back as much detail in the shadow. If I get you right you need to push up in Bibble 3 and 5 stops to get the same result. You may check this out on your own PC
I said stops, assuming that stops are indicated by the number scale in the "Shady" plugin. I must be mistaken.
Regardless of that, how's the noise in DPP when pulling the shadows like that?
Tariq Gibran wrote:
By the way Cogitech, the Kelvin WB appears to be working now. At first it was giving some really off color when it shouldn't have. The Bibble interface does seem to be all over the place. For instanace, in the first "STD" tab for WB. one can select "Custom Kelvin" for WB but there is actually nowhere to change it until one goes into the "ADV" tab next. A very "hodge podge", peiced together feel and not terribly logical. Looking forward to seeing what the next interface looks like. I first tried Bibble years ago and at that time, it was a bit "Crash Happy" on the Mac so I abondened it... Seems to be a lot more powerful now if they can get the interface ironed out....Show more →
I agree. That same WB quirk has often made me wonder, but I never use custom kelvin anyway. If I need to make that drastic of a WB change, I find click white to work fine for almost everything.
After using Bibble for so long, the wrinkles in the interface have grown on me. I don't even notice them anymore. Maybe I'm too distracted by all the excellent features they keep adding. I use it on a Linux workstation as well, and it has a "Linux" feel that I rather like. When loaded on a Mac (I owned a Mac for a few days) it looks kinda funny.
I really need to get some work done here, but later I'll try to find time to crop that same area you just posted and see what I can do with it.
Well, if anyone is interested, here is what I could get out of Bibble as a "Newbie". I tried to match the WB of the last image I posted out of DPP. My settings were:
Tone Curve: "Really Lw"
WB: Custom Kelvin 5300 with a Tint of 41
Everything else either 0 or defailt Except sharpening which I turned off. I then used PS for sharpening a little.
There are a number of "Gotchas" with Bibble for the Mac apparently. The built in sharpening can easily lead to sharpening halos and is not that great compared to DPP or C1 Pro. The "Sharpie" plug in appears from Cogitechs example to be better(its $20 as it appears most of the Plug ins are). A lot of the settings are duplicated on each tab which can be confusing and some settings seem to not work until you click on them in the various tabs once or twice. Also, some features such as the HR(Highlight Recovery) and the Fill(Shadow Recovery) don't seem to work as good as the similar tools in ACR. They seem to affect the whole image more instead of just the particular area your trying to work on. One setting really screws up both HR and Fill completely. That is the "Perfectly Clear" color/tone enhancement. Click this and then try to use HR or Fill in conjunction and HR will go the opposite way and majorly blow out the highlights alltogether. A pitty as using these together if they worked correclty could result in some great effects. Anyway, thats my quick review of Bibble. Seems like it has a lot of potential and better Raw conversion than ACR but is hampered by both program bugs and that user interface. Cogittech, If your not seeing these same bugs and issues, do let me know what I'm doing wrong or how they might be corrected. I'm using Bibble Pro on a Powermac G4 1.25 Dual Processor machine. Speed does not seem to be an issue.
Perfectly Clear is intended to be used without the other options. It is an "instant fix" or "I'm feeling lucky" button. Sometimes it is all an image needs, other times it is a joke. I rarely use it anymore.
You'll notice if you turn on auto levels, sharpening, and HR and then select Perfectly Clear, the other options will automatically be turned off. That's just the way it is. If you turn Perfectly Clear on and then enable those other options, you get the wacky results that you described.
Your comment about having to click options on various tabs in order to get a reaction seems a bit odd to me. I have not noticed this.
BTW, those tabs are completely customizable (as is much of the interface) so you could likely set it up in a way that makes much more sense to you. I know I did.
Sharpening. This is Bibble's weakest point, especially if you want to do all your sharpening in RAW. I find that a combination of mild Bibble sharpening (100-150) and the Sharpie plugin (I use the free version, BTW http://www.nexi.com/178 ) allows me to avoid the halos for the most part and get very nice results. Any final sharpening I do for print work I use Fred's Intellisharpen II plugin for PS. I'm in there for the interpolation phase anyway For the web galleries, I either don't need any more sharpening or, if I do, I have a Linux shell script that I run on the whole folder which applies some USM via ImageMagick.
Sharpening is going to be seriously addressed in Bibble 5 as well, but I do not find it to be a show stopper in its current form. Also, the extra features in Sean's "Sharpie PRO" version would likely be all anyone ever needed for high quality sharpening. I haven't gotten around to buying it, yet, so I cannot say with certainty. "LCE" looks very promising and is said to be even more effective than the new "clarity" slider in ACR.
Oh, and Sean's various plugins easily make up for what is lacking in the "fill light" and "highlight recovery". Shady, for instance, has a highlight de-saturater. If you use Bibble's HR and it results in funky coloured highlights, you can de-saturate them quite easily and still retain the recovered detail. Shady also, as seen in my example, can bring up tons of shadow detail without increasing noise the way a standard "gain" does in other RAW tools. He wrote a special algorithm just for that purpose and it blows away anything I have ever seen.
For the web galleries, I either don't need any more sharpening or, if I do, I have a Linux shell script that I run on the whole folder which applies some USM via ImageMagick.