Now....CaptureOne. Getting tired of doing these comparisons....

Started 4 months ago | Discussion thread
sgoldswo
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Re: You didn't read the blog post??
In reply to David McGaughey, 4 months ago

David McGaughey wrote:

sgoldswo wrote:

Let's not fall out over use of English and who has read what. Everything posted on an internet forum is more or less anecdotal and I'm probably a wee bit sensitive to the number of trollish comments I read here with little substantiation myself. This isn't applicable to you but it's particularly irritating when the people concerned don't even seem to own Fuji cameras at all (so why are they here?).

However, I did think your blog post was damning C1 with faint praise, though I confess I'm being unduly dismissive of your efforts to consider the differences between C1 and other RAW converters, having focused solely on C1 and the Fuji jpegs.

Let's ignore the foliage for a second and look at the detail in your first example shot. Do you not think the rendering of the tree branches is a good bit more impressive in the C1 shot than the jpeg? Turning to the foliage, I agree that it's hard to see the difference in the darker greens, but in the lighter greens it looks a bit more detailed in C1.

My own impression/opinion of the results that you've posted and my own experiences of Capture 1 (which included running some E-M5 and M9 files through it) is that it picks up a small but material increase in the level of detail over ACR/LR in all of the cameras. It's shadow recovery is almost as good as ACR but not quite (though, that isn't so much of an issue for Fuji RAW files compared to the other two cameras I mentioned). However, C1's weakest point is its rendering of dark greens, which isn't that much better than (or is similar to) the jpegs. However, the overall image is more aesthetically pleasing in its totality than the jpegs and can be made to look (through further processing) far more pleasing than the OOC jpegs without introducing watercolouring or colour bleeding. That's what sold it to me, together with the intuitive and adaptable user interface.

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Sorry, but I genuinely wasn't sure whether you actually read my post. What PhaseOne has done is impressive, but the bar (for me) is to be clearly better than the JPEG in all circumstances. It is in some cases (like the first example, which again I have already stated) and isn't in other cases (foliage, highly patterned moire-prone scenes).

The images were chosen intentionally to separate out the RAW converters. It makes the XTrans issue seem worse, but it's worthless to show scenes where they all look identical to each other.

To be clear - CaptureOne is the best all-in-one tool available now. And unlike the other all-in-one tool (ACR) it produces output comparable to the JPEG. Which is great. AccuRaw performs well, but it needs to be combined with Lightroom or Bridge/Photoshop to maximize image quality.

I don't know how much time you waste here, but I've been a bit rankled by all of the random postings talking about how astonishingly amazing the C1 beta is. Hence my "measured" approach in discussing how it performs.

Now, partially because of that frenzied fanboy-ish enthusiasm for C1 the blow-back will be intense as people actually realize that this software doesn't add two megapixels to their RAW files. From the frenzy going on in the DPReview C1 post on the front page, the internet moaners are making it sound like C1 and XTrans is an abomination........which also isn't true!

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David, I apologise if I assumed you were a troll! In any event I'm not sure I would describe it as producing comparable results to the jpeg because it is a RAW converter, not a camera. While I have adjusted photos in camera when despairing at lightroom watercolouring, it's a real pain.

I think it's fair enough to say: (i) it generally deals with difficult areas (dark green vegetation) as well as the OOC jpegs; (ii) it gives you the ability to process the photos without having to adopt workarounds; and (iii) it pulls detail out in non-difficult areas. The downside is a touch of moire (which is the flipside of (iii)) but frankly it isn't as bad in that regard as either the M9 or the EM-5. To me that's a very big deal indeed - hence my excitement and that of others. What's the downside in any of this?

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