Quattro - SPP vs RawTherapee

Lin Evans said:

In these examples I find that SPP appears more natural. RAWTherapee seems to unnaturally boost micro-contrast and has a leveling effect on the greens in the vegetation which makes it appear more like a Sony image than a Sigma image...

Best regards,

Lin

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xpatUSA said:

Lin Evans said:

In these examples I find that SPP appears more natural. RAWTherapee seems to unnaturally boost micro-contrast and has a leveling effect on the greens in the vegetation which makes it appear more like a Sony image than a Sigma image...

Best regards,

Lin

Click to expand...

Victor, Lin,

Y'all may be missing the point, which I believe is this:

Quattro, said to be "softer" than Merrill can be made to look the same, using RT. RT has many, many different sharpening and micro-contrast options. On the other hand, SPP has just a one-size-fits-all sharpening option and no micro or local contrast options at all and can't even crop!!! If I wanted to go the other way and turn a Merrill image into a Quattroesque one, it would not be that difficult in RT and, once done, the side-car .pp3 file is, of course, saveable and re-usable.

For me, SPP remains as just a converter - to be used in as neutral a manner as possible, nothing more than that.

--
Ted

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Lin Evans said:

Hi Ted,

Is there a way to control the leveling effect on greens? The majority of green hue differentiation in these RAWTherapee examples appear to have been mitigated to the point of only small differences. It's as if someone painted a single translucent green hue over everything green.

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xpatUSA said:

Lin Evans said:

Hi Ted,

Is there a way to control the leveling effect on greens? The majority of green hue differentiation in these RAWTherapee examples appear to have been mitigated to the point of only small differences. It's as if someone painted a single translucent green hue over everything green.

Click to expand...

My yard has greens galore so I took a SD14 snap. That way I'm not working with someone else's post-processing . .

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xpatUSA said:

Lin Evans said:

Hi Ted,

Is there a way to control the leveling effect on greens? The majority of green hue differentiation in these RAWTherapee examples appear to have been mitigated to the point of only small differences. It's as if someone painted a single translucent green hue over everything green.

Click to expand...

There were many examples posted, Lin. Could you pick one pair that best represents what you mean and I'll be glad to take a look.

Forget that, my yard has green galore so I took a SD14 snap. That way I'm not working with someone else's post-processing . .

--
Ted

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Lin Evans said:

Hi Ted,

The images below seems a good one to see the differences:


Look at full size - to me the differences are immediately apparent - bottom image "flat"

Best regards,

Lin

xpatUSA said:

Lin Evans said:

Hi Ted,

Is there a way to control the leveling effect on greens? The majority of green hue differentiation in these RAWTherapee examples appear to have been mitigated to the point of only small differences. It's as if someone painted a single translucent green hue over everything green.

Click to expand...

There were many examples posted, Lin. Could you pick one pair that best represents what you mean and I'll be glad to take a look.

Forget that, my yard has green galore so I took a SD14 snap. That way I'm not working with someone else's post-processing . .

--
Ted

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

xpatUSA said:

Lin Evans said:

In these examples I find that SPP appears more natural. RAWTherapee seems to unnaturally boost micro-contrast and has a leveling effect on the greens in the vegetation which makes it appear more like a Sony image than a Sigma image...

Best regards,

Lin

Click to expand...

Victor, Lin,

Y'all may be missing the point, which I believe is this:

Quattro, said to be "softer" than Merrill can be made to look the same, using RT. RT has many, many different sharpening and micro-contrast options. On the other hand, SPP has just a one-size-fits-all sharpening option and no micro or local contrast options at all and can't even crop!!! If I wanted to go the other way and turn a Merrill image into a Quattroesque one, it would not be that difficult in RT and, once done, the side-car .pp3 file is, of course, saveable and re-usable.

For me, SPP remains as just a converter - to be used in as neutral a manner as possible, nothing more than that.

Click to expand...

DMillier said:

As fascinating as it is at a pixel peeping technical level to experiment and speculate over 1% differences in rendering of hardware and software, I can't help feeling it would be more productive to use the hardware and software to produce attractive photographs - the making of which is almost entirely divorced from this stuff.

By all means expend efforts exploring technologies that make an "effective" difference i.e. differences that materially determine the success for failure of a piece of art: but those require gross differences in output, not miniscule effects that only visible on a 20 foot bill board.

Any reasonable sized print (say 24" wide) would not be materially affected by this level of finessing. Indeed, I satisfactorily proved to myself with my recent trip, that as long as negative effects are not too gross, even camera shake and inadequate depth of field, obvious at pixel level, can be irrelevant as long as the pictures are not over enlarged.

I know there are lots of experts around here whose work does make useful contributions to the final result and a good few decent photographers to boot who would be very interested in techniques that make a significant different but I think Ted's tests kind of show that there is very little if any difference that isn't explained adequately by post processing settings.

It is wise to bear in mind that minor technical differences that are invisible in a practical image are of academic interest. Almost all photographic imaging technology flaws go away if a little restraint in the print size used is employed. However, nothing technical will ever rescue an uninteresting subject photographed in an uninteresting way. Use time productively!

(What I mean is that there are some activities related to image making that reward the effort with a fine picture and some activities which might be interesting in their own right but are substitutes for making fine pictures. Choose wisely...).

--
"...while I am tempted to bludgeon you, I would rather have you come away with an improved understanding of how these sensors work" ---- Eric Fossum
Galleries and website: http://www.whisperingcat.co.uk/
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmillier/

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Lin Evans said:

Hi Dave,

Your point is, from a photography as art perspective, correct, but it once again demonstrates a bias toward smaller prints.

If all that were important to the user of a camera were smaller prints, they would be probably equally served by a phone camera. Some who use Sigma equipment are interested in that "1 % difference" (I'm not certain that 1% is actually an accurate estimate) and this being more of a technical forum than a photographic art forum these things will continue to be matters of interest.

The question about whether or not a significant difference exists between outputs of SPP and RAWTherapee bears on workflow. For a single photo, it's of no great interest if a satisfactory image can be achieved in post with a little tweaking. On the other hand, if the photographer has multiple images to process, spending only a couple minutes more per photo can become an important issue.

For the landscape photographer who may only have a few dozen frames to deal with, the importance might be minimal. On the other hand, for a wedding photographer who perhaps must process as many as a thousand photos and averaging over six hundred, it can be a serious consideration. Now obviously most wedding photographers are not using the Q cameras but they indeed may be using the next dSLR which could have the same or very similar sensor. I myself have used my SD15 to shoot weddings where I had to deal with over eight hundred images. SPP is relatively slow but the output is, in my experience, very, very good. I know if I had to spend an extra say three minutes making post tweaks to each photo that represents forty hours or about a week of extra work.

So perhaps the small difference might be more important to some than to others. Just saying.....

Best regards,

Lin

DMillier said:

As fascinating as it is at a pixel peeping technical level to experiment and speculate over 1% differences in rendering of hardware and software, I can't help feeling it would be more productive to use the hardware and software to produce attractive photographs - the making of which is almost entirely divorced from this stuff.

By all means expend efforts exploring technologies that make an "effective" difference i.e. differences that materially determine the success for failure of a piece of art: but those require gross differences in output, not miniscule effects that only visible on a 20 foot bill board.

Any reasonable sized print (say 24" wide) would not be materially affected by this level of finessing. Indeed, I satisfactorily proved to myself with my recent trip, that as long as negative effects are not too gross, even camera shake and inadequate depth of field, obvious at pixel level, can be irrelevant as long as the pictures are not over enlarged.

I know there are lots of experts around here whose work does make useful contributions to the final result and a good few decent photographers to boot who would be very interested in techniques that make a significant different but I think Ted's tests kind of show that there is very little if any difference that isn't explained adequately by post processing settings.

It is wise to bear in mind that minor technical differences that are invisible in a practical image are of academic interest. Almost all photographic imaging technology flaws go away if a little restraint in the print size used is employed. However, nothing technical will ever rescue an uninteresting subject photographed in an uninteresting way. Use time productively!

(What I mean is that there are some activities related to image making that reward the effort with a fine picture and some activities which might be interesting in their own right but are substitutes for making fine pictures. Choose wisely...).

Click to expand...

Click to expand...